The only way for me to return to work was to complete my Research Proposal. I couldn’t write it, because every time I sat down to write all I could think about was how my father had beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing about essentially the same thing back in high school. I felt that the only way forward was to write my proposal (or at least its first draft) in a way that reflected my high school interest in quantum information and quantum computation, despite the fact that obviously a lot has happened in the field since then.

I discussed my writer’s block with my counsellor, and learned several things which have somewhat clarified the situation for me. The first was that I was deathly anxious about being judged or asked questions on my research. After I had finished writing my Research Proposal, the next step would have been to give an oral presentation on it to my thesis Advisory Committee, at the end of which they were to question me on it. Even the thought of this made me ill.

The cause is fairly obvious. When I was studying quantum computing in high school, my father had interrogated me on what I was studying. He listened to my answer only long enough to determine that it was not “for school”, immediately dismissed it as “worthless” as soon as he did so, and ordered me not to study it again. When I continued in spite of his prohibition, he screamed at me or beat me whenever he caught me with any papers or books on the subject. And when I continued visiting the university library against his wishes, he locked me out of the house. And lastly, when all of that had failed to stop me, he threatened to deprive my brother of a university education and to disown me unless I complied with his wishes. When I resumed studying quantum computing after my brother had graduated from university, he finally disowned me. And during this entire time, my mother continually attacked my friends and colleagues who supported my interests and helped me, and did everything she could to make it unpleasant for me to spend any time around them. The severe punishments I had received at the hands of my parents, which ended with their disowning me, all began with my father’s questions about my research into quantum computing. Naturally, the oral examination that was to accompany my Research Proposal caused me an extreme amount of stress.

My reaction is obviously as irrational as it is uncontrollable. The members of my Advisory Committee had no reason to punish me for my research, nor was it within their power to do so. And they most certainly were not going to dismiss it as “worthless”, especially considering that it is within their research areas as well. But my body reacted just as stressfully as if I was about to be interrogated on my research by my father. There was no way out of this. I simply couldn’t face the prospect of an oral examination. And I couldn’t explain this to the members of my Committee without also telling them about how I grew up with abusive parents (and especially a father who beat me for studying the subjects upon which their scientific careers had been based), which was something that I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to be treated any differently on account of my personal history, and I thought that if the Committee members knew about my situation then they might hold back from making legitimate criticisms or asking tough questions.

Of course, I was getting ahead of myself. I couldn’t even write a first draft of my Research Proposal, and for essentially the same reason. The idea was stuck in my mind that I had to write it the way I would have written it in high school, which would have made absolutely no sense to anyone else. I most certainly would have been asked to revise it, which was to be expected in any case, but there were certain elements that I felt had to be included which I would not have been able to defend without explaining my personal history. And so, every time I sat down to write my Research Proposal, my thoughts turned instead to how I could explain my personal history to others, which led naturally to my writing of this autobiography.

Another thing that came out of counselling was that I had developed a pathological form of perfectionism. Besides the reason given above, I was unable to produce a first draft of my Research Proposal also because I didn’t want anyone else to see it before it was done. I was not always this way — in high school, I used to show rough drafts of my essays and stories to my friends all the time, and repeatedly made revisions based on their feedback. But whenever my parents caught me working on a project before it was finished, their interference would inevitably bring it to a premature end. And so I had learned to keep secret anything that I really needed to get done. But I suppose that I should have known that it would be impossible to complete a Ph.D. degree before my parents realised what I was studying.

(As an aside, I had managed to obtain two Master’s degrees under similar conditions. But things were not as stressful with them. During the course of the research for my two Master’s theses, I had made use of skills that I had acquired by doing things which my parents had punished me for doing, but I was never directly studying something which they had forbidden me from and threatened to disown me for studying.)

Since I couldn’t work, and had effectively dropped out of school as I was unable to either physically go to any of my workplaces or even maintain virtual (i.e., electronic) contact with my colleagues, I decided that I needed a change of environment — and so I travelled to the Middle East.

I had been saying and writing since high school that it was very important for scientists from different countries to work together, especially if their respective governments are ideological or political opponents. My parents had always criticised me for this. I had stopped making a big deal out of this belief since I entered university, because I didn’t want to give my parents yet another excuse to attack me. But this appeasement did not stop my mother from continually accusing me of promoting collaboration between scientists from the West and from Iran anyway, presumably because it was the sort of thing that I would have done if I had been free to act without worrying about my parents’ harassment. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this activity, and in fact I think it should be commended — it was just that this wasn’t something that I was actually doing. But this provides yet another example of why authoritarian parenting is so counterproductive. If my parents had already punished me for something that I hadn’t done, then I might as well just go ahead and do it. My parents had in fact forced me to do many of the things that I had done in my life which have upset them, but they’re simply incapable of recognising their own culpability in the consequences of any of their actions.

Promoting scientific co-operation between scientists from different countries, however, was something that I had always wanted to do, but had held back from doing because of my parents. Since I was now free of their control, if not of their influence, I could travel to Iran and participate in the International Iran Summer School on Quantum Information, which took place in September 2008. And this was how I ended up writing and posting the first entries in this blog from Iran. So everything has come full circle.

Before I conclude this autobiographical series, I wanted to write a little bit about my thoughts on why my parents choose to behave in the way that they do. I could see that it was partially due to the fact that they had bad parents themselves, but far from exonerating them, this actually makes them much more culpable in my eyes. When I was in elementary and high school, I could not understand my father’s anger towards me, because I was everything that all the other parents wanted their children to be.

My parents continually punished me for doing well in school and for being popular, while I could see for myself that some of my schoolmates’ parents expended a considerable amount of energy, effort, and money, often in vain, in attempts to convey these same advantages on their children. For the life of me, I could not understand why my parents were so upset when they were getting for free what some other parents were apparently willing to pay any price to obtain. (Incidentally, another thing I could not understand was how some of my schoolmates’ parents could fail to see that lavishing money on their child’s associates was a sure way to guarantee that he or she had no genuine friends.) In retrospect, I think the fact that my parents didn’t actually have to make any effort at all to obtain the results that other parents wanted was precisely the problem.

They couldn’t help but interfere, because otherwise their claims that they were responsible for my achievements would not be credible. I had learned how to do so well in school during their absence from my life, and they really couldn’t say that they had anything to do with it. (Unfortunately for them, the other thing I had learned was to never give in to bullies.) By continually disrupting my studies, they could claim that it was their “discipline”^[1] that was responsible for whatever I managed to achieve in spite of their interference. This theory also has the advantage of explaining why my parents continually attacked anyone who helped or supported me — they didn’t want to share the credit for my accomplishments with anyone else.

In addition to his selfishness, I think that another reason my father has always attacked me for my scientific and other intellectual pursuits was his towering insecurity. He has an incorrigible inability to admit his ignorance and his errors, but expects everyone to respect him and to treat him as an authority anyway. What else could explain the numerous egregiously stupid statements which have spewed forth from his mouth over the years, such as that theoretical computer science is not computer science, or that he had never heard of a practical use for quantum mechanics (but insisted that I get a degree in electrical engineering)? His attacks on my books and papers on science were, I think, an effort to remove from his presence anything which might have exposed his embarrassingly appalling ignorance and lack of education (as opposed to schooling). This was, of course, a self-defeating enterprise. In contrast, for example, according to Richard Feynman’s autobiographical accounts, although his father was not a highly educated man, he had always encouraged him to study science and to think for himself. I think that it’s actually worse to have a parent who has a Ph.D. degree which he believes entitles him to speak with authority on subjects he knows nothing about than to have parents who are uneducated but humble.

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, I discussed my reasons for writing this autobiographical account and making it public. I have wasted far more time, energy, and money on managing my parents’ abusive behaviour than I have on any other activity in my life. Along the way, I have made decisions which in hindsight were very obviously mistakes, such as allowing my parents to bully me into minimising my public presence. I hope that other people will benefit from reading about my experiences growing up as a gifted child with abusive authoritarian parents, whether they are in a similar situation themselves or are just interested in different aspects of the education of gifted children.

And now, finally, I will begin writing again about science.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life

One of the activities that I undertook to cheer myself up was a hiking trip to the Bruce Peninsula with several people, including Mina, who became my girlfriend over that summer. My parents had thoroughly destroyed my ability even just to be in the presence of my academic colleagues by continually attacking them and their research throughout my life, but despite their persistent efforts they had not managed to eradicate my social life entirely, and I still had friends who supported me.

In the meantime, I applied to have my surname legally changed to “Yonge-Mallo”, after my friends’ mother who had saved my academic career from my parents’ efforts to destroy it in high school. I was determined that, no matter what happened, my father would never again be able to take credit for anything that I did, nor to prevent me from doing whatever I wanted to do. I also started going to counselling.

My parents tried to contact me, but I blocked their telephone number and set up filters to send their e-mail messages directly to the trash (or “/dev/null” in geekspeak), where they belonged. However, my father used different e-mail aliases and a few messages did get through. Every time this happened, I would send the message to the trash without opening it. But merely seeing their invasion of my inbox even for an instant caused me a tremendous amount of pain, and I would not be able to check my e-mail for several days or sometimes weeks afterwards. Naturally, this caused me enormous problems — being in regular e-mail contact is a necessity of modern academic life, and so I essentially could not function. I tried to cope with this by changing my e-mail address several times, but I had to set up e-mail forwarding from my old accounts, and despite the multiple layers of filters the occasional attack from my parents would get through. I became very stressed whenever I checked my e-mail, regardless of whether I had actually received anything from them. So, even after I tried to cut off all contact from my parents, they still managed to completely disrupt my ability to work, just as they had done for so many years before.

At some point, my grandfather visited me with my mother — my father had come with them, but had waited in the parking lot because he was too much of a coward to show his face. My grandfather said that I was bringing shame to the family and that if I did not obey my father, then people would say that I was “ignorant”^[1] even if I had a Ph.D. This was, of course, complete nonsense. And it was yet another example of how authoritarian parents (or grandparent, in this case) focus on negatives rather than positives and use shame rather than encouragement to motivate behaviour. Contrary to his claim, I could see for myself that if other people only knew how my father behaved towards me and what his opinions (if one could even affix such a label to his angrily incoherent rants) were on various scientific and political matters, they would undoubtedly say that he was a complete and utter moron.

What kind of a man, upon hearing from his son’s elementary school teachers that his son was uniquely gifted and that he should encourage his interests, upon learning that university professors wanted to involve his son in scientific research while he was still in high school, upon coming home to find his son with a stack of scientific papers and university textbooks, upon discovering that his son’s skills which he had previously denounced as “worthless” were in fact considered very important by a great many people, would not only fail to demonstrate any gratitude whatsoever for his undeserved good fortune, but react instead by visiting a furious rage upon his son, by using violence and intimidation to prevent his son from making the most of his talents and abilities? If the label “ignorant” is not applied to such a man, then the term has no meaning.

But to a traditional Chinese mentality, it is simply impossible to even entertain the idea that complete submission and obedience to authority is not the highest virtue or an indispensible sign of erudition and culture. In comparison, no one with any familiarity with the Western canon can fail to see its emphasis on individuality and personal autonomy. When one contrasts the foundational literature of the European and Chinese cultures, it is easy to see why modern science originated in Europe rather than in China.

My mother told me that my father had been saying that I was merely “throwing a temper tantrum”^[2]. My father — the crybaby — accusing me of throwing a temper tantrum! It’s comedy gold. It’s almost as absurdly funny as my mother’s threat in our last telephone conversation that my father would never forgive me if I did not obey him and allow them to completely wipe out what I had managed to save of my scientific career from their persistent efforts to destroy it. I had already sacrificed my career numerous times throughout my life to appease my crybaby of a father whenever he threw one of his frequent temper tantrums, and I have never received so much as a word of thanks or even acknowledgement for all that I have had to relinquish because of his wants and needs. What exactly have I ever done to require his forgiveness? Did I need him to forgive me because I had allowed him to get away for so many years with taking credit for my accomplishments which were the direct outcome of my activities that he had opposed? Or was it because I had managed to do so well in school despite the fact that I had to endure his beatings just to study? Besides placing the blame for the situation entirely on me, and minimising the pain and suffering I have had to endure on account of them — two actions which, by the way, are very typical of abusive parents — my mother’s only other concern was that my housemate did not find out about my fight with my parents. I listened to my grandfather and my mother rant at me for hours without saying very much in response until they became exhausted and finally left.

My grandfather called me a few times afterwards, but I could not tolerate being told that I should be ashamed for having disobeyed my father, and cut off contact with him as well. I didn’t really want to do this, because unlike my father, my grandfather had always been kind to me, but our values are simply too incompatible for me to maintain any contact with him.

I came back to school in late 2007, and explained the gist of my situation to Dr. Cleve, but I didn’t give him a lot of details. He gave me a lot of encouragement, and I know he wanted to help me, but I guess he didn’t know how to do so. We worked on a quantum algorithm for evaluating Min-Max trees, which was a very neat extension of the algorithm for And-Or trees, with his former graduate student Dr. Dmitry Gavinsky. I presented this algorithm in January 2008 at TQC^[3], under my new name.

Incidentally, at that time, Pakistan was constantly in the news because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the country’s upcoming general election. When I was studying Pakistani history and politics in the early to mid-1990s, my father had said that “Nobody will care about Pakistan in ten years.” The fact that I was being constantly reminded of what a moron my father is wherever I went was somewhat depressing, but while I was working I could put this out of my mind.

Over the next several months, I worked with Dr. Cleve on the discretisation of continuous-time quantum algorithms. One outcome of this research was a poster^[4] I presented at the Quantum Computing and Quantum Algorithms Program Review, in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, in August of 2008.

But more importantly, it was there that Dr. Cleve personally introduced me to Dr. John Preskill. I began to tell Dr. Preskill how it was his papers that had inspired me to become interested in quantum information when I had read them in high school — and then I didn’t know how to continue the story. What was I supposed to tell him? That I had to hide his papers from my parents like they were contraband because my father thought that cosmology was nonsense and insisted that quantum mechanics had nothing to do with computer science, became enraged whenever he saw any papers on quantum information, and had banned Dr. Preskill’s papers from his house? I should have told him that. I actually think that my father’s insanely inappropriate reaction to physics papers is outrageously funny. But I thought that Dr. Preskill might have reacted with horror, and so I couldn’t the story. This was yet another example of how my parents had put me into a socially awkward situation which would otherwise not have been awkward.

When I thought about the meeting afterwards, I became very depressed. A “normal” person would have followed up “your papers inspired me when I read them in high school” with a story of how he went to university to study the subjects which would enable him to understand deeply the ideas presented in those papers, and then built a scientific career starting from the foundation of exploring those ideas. I felt that for my story to have continued in any other way was to have let Dr. Preskill down. But I had no control over my parents’ behaviour, and I had managed them as best as I could.

Another thing that was very depressing to me at the time was the U.S. presidential primaries. When the candidates were asked what they believed would be the most challenging foreign policy issue the elected President would have to face, they were nearly unanimous in answering Pakistan or Iran. Newspapers and magazines carried articles and commentary on America’s previous dealings with and current policies towards those countries. I couldn’t go anywhere where newspapers, magazines, or books were sold without seeing something about Pakistan or Iran. I couldn’t even read any news web sites online. It was already bad enough that I couldn’t spend any time around scientists without them continually telling me that my father was a moron, but now this sentiment was being echoed by everyone else. I just couldn’t go anywhere or do anything at all without becoming very depressed.

This contributed to a writer’s block that I had already been developing for many years, because when I had been writing about the exact same topics in high school, my father had kept pressuring me to stop and had told me that I was “wasting [my] time” and that “nobody will care about” the things that I wrote. But evidently, a lot of people are interested in them now. The fact that I had spent so much effort on something only to have that effort dismissed as a “waste of time” and the product of that effort disparaged as “worthless”, and then to have been coerced into giving it up only to witness so many people coming to realise its importance, was extremely painful to me. And this had happened not once but twice — first with my interest in the physics of computation, and then with my interest in the social changes happening in the Muslim world. And it was on the verge of happening for a third time before I finally put a stop to it.

I was supposed to be writing my Research Proposal. But every time I sat down to write, all I could think about were all the things my parents had done to hold me back and to prevent me from becoming successful. Despite having cut off contact from my parents, I still behaved as though my father was watching me over my shoulder. I simply could not write.

For the most part, I could not work either. I was still doing research with Dr. Cleve on discretising continuous-time quantum algorithms, along with several other colleagues. But I felt very depressed whenever we had a meeting at the Perimeter Institute, or even in the Institute for Quantum Computing building, where I still could not do any work in my office because of my mother’s previous attacks on my colleagues.

Because checking my e-mail made me very stressed, as I have described above, I could not really participate effectively in research with my collaborators. I was very involved with the research in the beginning, but as things progressed, I fell further and further behind, until I couldn’t catch up. Much of the collaboration was carried out through e-mail, and by the time I had downloaded a draft of the paper and read through it — the content made me depressed as well — several other drafts had already passed through my inbox with numerous changes. My inability to focus made me very depressed, which of course only further eroded my concentration, leading to a vicious circle. When I continued to receive e-mails from my parents, I became unable to touch my e-mail inbox at all, which meant that I basically stopped participating in research altogether. The paper^[5] was eventually posted to the arXiv, but by that time I hadn’t had anything to do with it for several months.

Besides the difficulty I personally had with checking e-mail, and the fact that my role in the collaboration was not as large as I felt it should have been, another aspect of the collaborative process that depressed me was that it reminded me of my writings in high school about how technology would change the way scientific research was conducted and communicated. The fact that papers were being written through e-mail and were posted to publicly accessible archives was interesting, but these practices had already existed when I was in high school, although they had become more widespread since then. I thought that much more could be done with recent technologies, but it would require a change in the culture of scientific collaboration. However, the person or people who led this change would have to be already well-established, and thus be in a position to convince others to join them — and that person wasn’t me.

Other than joint paper-writing, another collaborative task that I thought would benefit from more recent technologies than e-mail was group discussions. The graduate students at IQC, or at least some segments thereof, would often engage in scientific discussions through e-mails with long lists of recipients. I also knew that some of the researchers at the Perimeter Institute engaged in a similar practice. Clearly, e-mail was not the best medium for group discussions, for various reasons. For one, there was no common archive that everyone could refer to later. Anyone who joined a conversation after it had already begun would have to be forwarded all of the previous messages. Furthermore, some of the questions that people from different fields asked one another were probably quite common, and I think it would benefit the quantum computing community to have an archive of these along with their answers. There had been attempts to use other technologies for group discussions, such as mailing lists, newsgroups, and bulletin board systems, but none of these seemed to have caught on. Of course, all of these technologies have actually been around for a long time, but a modern bulletin board system solves one problem (in addition to a shared archive) that I have always found made scientific discussions through e-mail very difficult: the ability to write and display properly formatted equations.

Since I couldn’t work on any research related to quantum computing, the places where I worked — the University of Waterloo, the Institute for Quantum Computing, and the Perimeter Institute — all made me very depressed. I also didn’t want to be around anyone, because I didn’t want to have to explain to people why I had changed my surname or what my situation was, or why I couldn’t focus on my work. The fact that I could neither check my e-mail nor come to work created a feedback loop — I would be out of contact for days, and then I didn’t want to come back because then I would have to explain to people where I had been. I tried to work by myself at home, but this was basically impossible.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research

I had actually discussed in high school with some friends my intention to run away from home, but I was talked out of it. It wasn’t that they had given me reasons not to run away; they were the reasons not to run away. Having a very supportive social network in high school went a long way towards helping me to avoid the fate of some of my peers who likewise had abusive authoritarian parents.

In elementary and high school, I had several schoolmates who were suicidal or exhibited self-injurious behaviours. When I probed into their backgrounds, the cause was inevitably social isolation. Either they had abusive parents but no peers in whom they felt they could confide, or they were bullied at school but did not have parents who helped them deal adequately with the problem. Often they faced both problems at once. I was very fortunate that, when I first arrived in Canada and had to face bullies at school, my parents were away in Hong Kong. Otherwise I am certain that I would have been punished for getting into fights at school, which would of course have hobbled my ability to defend myself. Instead, my teachers were very sympathetic and understood that I was acting in self-defence.

By the time my parents had joined me in Canada, I had learned how to avoid getting into fights (I found that my words can be far more intimidating than my already impressive physique). But there was one incident in high school which gave me a glimpse of how my father might have reacted. For gym class, we would occasionally play flag football. One day, the regular teacher was away, and the substitute was either clueless or indifferent. The class voted to play “real” (i.e., tackle) football instead. I had carried the ball for a touchdown while two or three guys were hanging on to me. My gym clothes were completely shredded in the process. When I came home, my father saw my ripped and bloodied clothes and screamed at me about them for the rest of the evening. He demanded that I ask the people who had ripped them to pay for them. (How much more stupid about the social rules of high school could a person possibly get? If I had done that, he would have been seeing many more ripped shirts from me in the future.) He expressed no concern whatsoever that I might have been injured. I have no doubt that if I had been involved in a fight, he would have reacted in the same way.

I could see for myself why some of my schoolmates were suicidal or self-injurious. They had parents very much like mine, and they were picked on at school just as I had been. The difference was that they couldn’t defend themselves, because they would have been punished at home for doing so. The only recourse then was to allow the bullying to continue. But other kids will not generally make friends with a kid who’s being bullied, and so an unwillingness to fight back against a bully is essentially a social death sentence. Self-harm was really just a way of getting desperately needed attention from the adults in authority.

My popularity in high school helped to stave off the depression which should have resulted from my parents’ treatment of me. But the fact that they continually criticised my friends — the very same people who urged me to be patient with them and to forgive them — only served to highlight how despicable and ungrateful they were. As I have written previously, my parents would continually try to destroy my social connections and isolate me throughout high school and university. They kept insisting that my friends were “distracting” me, when in fact my friends were helping me to manage the continual distractions from my parents. If it hadn’t been for my friends, I might have cut off contact with my parents much earlier.

Another reason I did not run away from home was that I didn’t think most people would have believed me if I had told them how abusive my parents were. I had the highest marks in most of my classes, the highest average in the entire school, participated in numerous extracurricular activities, and was one of the most popular people in the school. I think that people who don’t have abusive parents typically imagine that abusive parents beat their children for not doing well in school. Mine, on the other hand, were continually attacking me for doing so well that I was practically already in university. My classmates’ parents were always expressing to me what a wonderful job they believed my parents must have done, and they kept asking me what enrichment activities my parents had engaged me in. I was too embarrassed to tell them that not only did my parents dismiss all such activities as “worthless” and a “waste of time”, but would have screamed at me or beat me if they ever found out that I was doing them. My classmates and their parents kept assuming, because I was always doing creative and interesting things when I was around them, that I must have been doing those things at my parents’ encouragement. But the reason that I did so many interesting things when I was visiting other people was that my parents had forbidden me from doing those things at home, and I saw my friends’ homes as places where I could circumvent their prohibition.

I suppose that if I had run away from home, it wouldn’t have really mattered even if no one believed me when I explained to them that it was because my parents had been abusive towards me. Probably very few people would have even asked. But I always felt as if I had to provide satisfactory explanations to everybody, and I think this is the outcome of having been constantly interrogated by my parents throughout my life.

I didn’t seek professional help, even though I saw my high school guidance counsellors somewhat regularly for other reasons, because I didn’t think they would have believed me either. In retrospect, they probably would have, because they’re trained for this kind of thing. In any case, my story has only gotten more preposterous over the years. Who would believe that a Ph.D. student was researching a topic that his parents had threatened to disown him for studying when he was in high school?

Another major factor in my decision not to seek help was that my mother kept pressuring me not to discuss my father’s threats against me with other people. Now that I think about, this was very selfish of her. It meant that she knew that my father’s behaviour was wrong, but chose to silence me rather than to protect me. Even in my last telephone conversation with her, she was far more concerned that my housemate hadn’t overheard my father’s ranting and threats than she was about my well-being. And it had always been this way. After every single time my father had blown up at me throughout my life, my mother would come in afterwards and beg me not to tell anyone.

One might think that the reason I didn’t seek help was because I had internalised her shame at my father’s lack of self-control, but that wasn’t it at all. I felt that the situation was shameful, but I never felt that the shame should fall on me. I’ve always thought that it was my father who should have been ashamed of his behaviour, and if shame had anything at all to do with my decision not to seek outside help, it was because I had wanted to spare him the humiliation of having his shameful behaviour made public. On the other hand, when I came to Waterloo, I was ashamed of my biological connection to my father, because he had insulted so many of the people whom I would be working with or around.

There are actually more rational reasons why I did not run away from home. I thought about the consequences, and, while there were mostly positive ones for myself, there were a number of negative ones for any children I have in the future.

It is difficult enough to maintain certain aspects of one’s culture as an immigrant even with the support of family, but without them it is likely impossible. I would like, for example, for my children to be able to speak Cantonese, to read and write some Chinese, and to have firsthand culinary experience with Chinese cuisine. My cousins who were always surrounded by Cantonese-speaking adults could mostly understand what was being spoken, but could barely speak a word themselves. Nor could they write anything in Chinese but a crude imitation of their names, and reading was entirely beyond them. Without any Cantonese-speaking grandparents and extended family, it is certain that my children would not be able to manage even that. My parents had deprived me of enough, and I did not wish to deprive my own children of anything. Also, I think that the chance that my parents would be as abusive towards my children as they had been towards me was not that great. My observations tell me that, for whatever reason, people are often much kinder to their grandchildren than they had been to their children. But now that I have been through the experience of having my interests continually dismissed as “worthless” by my parents, I would never want to expose my children to the possibility of being told that by their grandparents even once.

Another reason I did not run away from home to go to university was that I did not know what my parents would have done to my brother. My father’s rage had always been focused primarily on me, and there was a possibility that it would have been transferred to him if I had left. Now that he is an adult with his own life, this is no longer a concern.

In some sense, the way that things have transpired is actually the worst of all possible worlds for me. If I had run away from home in high school, I would have been free to be a pioneer in quantum computing, when the field was just beginning to get busy. (Of course, even if I had been studying quantum computing at that time, there was no guarantee that I would have been successful at it.) The price would have been the lost of my family. But I have had to pay that price anyway, after my parents had already deprived me of numerous career opportunities with their interference.

I think that coping with abusive parents is very much like negotiating with political terrorists: they treated every concession as a vindication of their methodology and only pressed for me to comply with their further demands. Once they began to use the threat of disowning me while I was in high school to coerce me into doing what they wanted, there could only have been one of two possible outcomes: either they destroyed my life so thoroughly that I was no longer able to function, or I reached a point where being disowned was actually better than the alternative. My biggest regret is that I hadn’t realised this in high school and run away from home before my parents could cause all the damage that they did.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned

Now these were countries that I had wanted to visit for personal reasons — Iran because I believed in promoting scientific exchange between that country and the West, and because it would have given me an opportunity to practise my rusting Persian, and India because it is the birthplace of Buddhism (although, technically, the birthplace of the Buddha according to tradition, Lumbini, is within the borders of present-day Nepal). Graduate students are often inspired to work to complete a paper for a conference because they wish to visit the place where it is held, which is why conference organisers are always trying to choose interesting venues. If it had not been for my parents, I would have had two reasons to be inspired to make significant progress in my research. Instead, they had turned these into disincentives, because I knew that if I had attended either of these conferences, they had ready denunciations to hurl at me.

If I had gone to Iran, my mother would most certainly have cited this as evidence that I had lied to her. And if I had gone to India, I would not have done so without making the “Buddhist circuit”, and my parents would have criticised this as a waste of time and money. This is yet another example of how counterproductive authoritarian parenting is. My parents were persistently ordering me to make progress in my Ph.D. degree, but were continually removing the natural incentives I had to do so and replacing them with disincentives instead. I dreaded the idea of being asked to go to these conferences, because it would again have put me into a position where my motivations are in conflict with what other people expect them to be.

For the next several months, I tried to work but couldn’t really concentrate. I thought it was amazing that Dr. Cleve had intuited the importance of the Nand tree evaluation problem for the development of quantum algorithms. (Why Nand trees and not some other data structure? I guess I had some understanding of this, but it was not enough.) I was disappointed that I didn’t make any progress on the question he had assigned me before it was solved by someone else. I suppose that this is not an unusual experience in graduate school. But it is very tough to go through that experience while being already depressed for other reasons. It is a privilege to work with the top people in a field, but there is also the danger of succumbing to the thought that “I would never be this good” when one is always in close proximity to the best.

My parents escalated their attacks on me. I have already written about my mother’s accusations that I was lying to her in a previous post. My father started yelling at me on the phone for my lack of progress, and insisted that I should be writing my thesis, while insulting my supervisor for what he perceived to be the insufficient application of pressure on me. My father was always playing armchair professor, and I’ve often wondered if resentment and jealousy of the fact that I was already working on research with university professors in high school were major factors in his animosity towards my interest in science. (He has a Ph.D., and was a lecturer in Hong Kong, but has not held any university posts since coming to Canada.)

I don’t quite know how to describe the feeling that arises from being attacked for not doing something by the same person who had forbidden and actively tried to prevent me from doing that very thing. My father is the man who had dismissed my interest in the physics of computation as “worthless” and a “waste of time”, screamed at me, beat me, and threatened me for refusing to abandon my interest in it, knocked my books off the table, thrown them at me, and hit me with them while I was trying to read, ripped up papers that I was reading, locked me out of the house for going to the university library to study, forbid me from attending university and blackmailed me by threatening the same of my brother unless I complied with his wishes, and told me that he would disown me if I ever studied the subject again. This is the same man who was now criticising me for not writing a Ph.D. thesis on the subject he had threatened to disown me for studying.

I suppose that, to be fair to him, the impossibility of simultaneously fulfilling all of his demands was not quite his fault. If I had stuck to electrical or computer engineering, chosen a “conventional” topic for my research which has already been studied to death (and especially if by researchers of Chinese descent), worked with a supervisor of Chinese descent in a research group with graduate students who were also only (or at least mostly) of Chinese descent, and gave boring and completely uninspiring lectures to my students, then I would have satisfied all of my parents’ demands, and they might not find anything to criticise. But there are already plenty of people who behave in the way my parents demanded of me, and the world will not miss one more; and if they were so desperate to have a child who was like this, they should just go and adopt one of them. And anyway, I have always known that even if I had done everything that they demanded of me, they would have criticised me anyway, and I would still have been depressed and unproductive.

Nevertheless, I will admit that it is entirely my fault that I had put myself into a situation where my parents’ demands had actually become impossible to satisfy simultaneously, when I switched into quantum computing. This was an act of mental jujitsu, of using the energy of their own attacks against them. They were simply too persistent for me to hold them back forever. By pitting their demands against one another, I became paralysed, but I guaranteed that I would not retrogress.

This state of affairs could not last forever. In May of 2007, I planned to give a seminar which was a part of my Ph.D. degree requirement. I had to let my parents know about it ahead of time, because it was required to be publicly announced anyway. They called to interrogate me about its contents, as well as who I was working with, but I refused to tell them. At first I deflected their questions with self-referential answers: “things I’m working on”, “people I’m working with”, etc. When this failed to satisfy them, I responded with silence. (To use an American expression, I pleaded the Fifth Amendment.) My father screamed at me and demanded answers, and I listened patiently but did not say a single word in response.

He hung up on me.

I called my parents back and my mother answered the phone. She told me that my father had threatened to no longer acknowledge me as his son, if I did not provide detailed answers to his questions. She also demanded that I cut off all contact with my colleagues, and said that if I did not do as they had ordered, then he would never forgive me. And she also urged me not to let anyone else know about their threats. (My father had been screaming so loudly on the phone that I think she was concerned my housemate would overhear.) I refused to comply with their demands, told her that I no longer wished to speak with them, and ended the conversation.

I felt very, very sick. But I also felt very liberated and relieved. I have had this axe hanging over my head ever since I came to Waterloo to study quantum computing, and it had finally fallen. My parents had resumed their threats to disown me for my academic interests. I have regretted ever since the end of high school that I had not run away from home when my parents had threatened to disown me then for the same reason. As far as I am concerned, I am not their son, and I haven’t been ever since I was very young. No parent should behave towards their child the way my parents have behaved towards me. Anyone who does does not deserved to be called a “parent” — “sperm donor” and “egg-and-womb contributor”, maybe, but certainly not “father” or “mother”.

My counsellor asked me why I had called my parents back. I didn’t have an answer then, and I still don’t have an answer now. But I guess nobody can accuse me of not having given my parents every possible opportunity to apologise to me for all the abuse they have heaped on me over the years.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out

In the previous posts, I have described the damage caused by my parents’ anti-intellectualism and their hatred of science to my scientific career. They have been persecuting me for my interest in science, and more broadly for my intellectual interests in general, ever since they came to Canada. They kept up their attacks on my scientific research throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school. By the time I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched into quantum computing as my research area — which my parents had forbidden me to study under pain of being disowned — the regular day-to-day activities of a scientific researcher, such as reading papers or having discussions with colleagues, would cause me to experience physical pain.

Obviously, this prevented me from focusing on my work or making any progress in my research. A question that naturally arises is, “Why would you put so much effort into doing something that is so painful to you?” Or, equivalently, “Why not be doing something else?” I am not a masochist, and like most people I prefer to avoid pain whenever possible. And, with a “prestigious” engineering degree, I could have been making a lot of money, which was one of the main reasons my parents had forced me to enter the Engineering Science program in the first place. But no matter where I went or what I did there would have been no escape from the pain they had caused me.

I have seen for myself what happened to some of my elementary and high school peers who were diagnosed as gifted and who have authoritarian parents who suppressed their talents and creativity and forced them into careers that they did not enjoy. Today, they may have high-paying jobs or what appear to be successful careers, although it’s obvious that they’re not happy and resent their parents. But they are unable to express this, because they’re constantly bombarded, primarily by their parents, but also by their relatives and community, with the message that they owed their every success to their parents and ought to be eternally grateful to them.

This was a point that I understood clearly in high school, and had vaguely intuited even in elementary school. Even if I became very depressed as a result of being prevented by my parents from achieving my own goals, I would still be no worse off than if I had allowed them to bully me into submitting to their wishes and then became depressed anyway. Or, to quote the words of my allusion to Gandhi in the previous post:

The way I saw it was this: if the British were going to maintain a tax on salt that was so heavy it would eventually bankrupt you and lead to your arrest for the non-payment of taxes, then you might as well make salt illegally and be arrested for doing that instead.

And so, in spite of the crippling disadvantage of being continually attacked by my parents for my academic interests, I continued my struggle to succeed in academia. I could have been doing something else entirely, but I think that I would have suffered from about the same level of depression and about the same degree of pain anyway. Nevertheless, I did occasionally falter, as I wrote about in the previous post.

Dr. Cleve and I began to work on developing quantum algorithms. At the same time, I tried to find a way to justify my studies to my parents, or at the very least to disguise it from them. They had never retracted their threat to disown me for studying the physics of computation, and obviously my research fell within its scope.

I tried to tie my research in quantum computing to an “acceptable” topic. My first presentation in quantum computing was titled “Quantum Programming Languages”, but I didn’t really follow up on that. While many graduate students are eager for opportunities to give presentations and publish papers, and generally to “get their names out”, I had to be very careful about what my name was associated with whenever it appeared in public.

My father had actually been displeased when my name appeared in my last year of high school as a co-author on a paper in the Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the outcome of my participation in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program. He had insisted during the entire course of the project that it was a “waste of time”, because according to him I would never encounter astrophysics again in my career. Even though Dr. Percy wrote the text of the paper, I contributed to the analysis and generated some of the graphs, and so it was my first “real” scientific publication, intended for an audience larger than just my teachers and classmates. A good parent would have praised it as an accomplishment, but my father took it as an affront: it was a symbol that I had ignored his opinion that the entire project was “worthless”.

I did not have any scientific publications during my undergraduate years, partly because I was so busy, but mostly because I had been criticised and punished so heavily for science writing in high school. But I did write and publish some articles on subjects other than science, and when my father found them, he again criticised me for “wasting [my] time”. From the perspective of advancing my career, I suppose it’s true that it would have been a better use of my time to have been writing scientific papers instead. But he was the one who had turned me away from doing this with his attacks on my science writing in high school. In graduate school, I got one paper out of each of my Master’s theses, which is basically the bare minimum.

When I joined the Institute for Quantum Computing, I was asked to provide a short biography. I kept it very plain, because I knew that my father would find it. By that time, it had become clear that he was actually searching the Internet for my name on a regular basis. He e-mailed me shortly after the profile appeared to criticise it, and to tell me what he thought should have been on it. It was too “plain” — but of course, the entire reason it was so plain was because I had written it that way so he would not have anything to criticise. All the interesting things that I have done in my life were things that upset or angered him.

I wrote in a previous post that, shortly after I came to Waterloo, my father suddenly suggested to me that I should write an article for Scientific American. The reason it was so puzzling to me was that he had always attacked me for writing about science before. (And if I had acted on his suggestion and actually managed to publish an article in Scientific American, it would not have surprised me if he criticised me for it afterwards.)

It’s extremely difficult for me to understand how some people can be such bad parents. Is it not simply common sense that continually attacking someone for doing something would cause him or her to lose interest in doing it? When I started my Ph.D. program, my parents criticised me for not having enough publications and presentations on my résumé, but they had been attacking me for writing about science and giving presentations since I was in high school.

It may not seem that way to anyone else, but I took a big risk in giving a presentation on “Quantum Programming Languages” and in allowing my name to appear on the Institute for Quantum Computing’s web site (although I didn’t really have a choice about the latter — I couldn’t very well have asked to be removed from their members list). I was fortunate that my father only criticised me and did not resume his threats to disown me — that would come later.

I actually tried very hard to connect my research to control systems, or at least to engineering. This was important to me, and was about much more than just connecting my research to a topic acceptable to my parents. I had disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering who had expended a lot of time and effort to teach me skills that they believed I would be putting to use. I felt that I was letting them down by not doing this. I tried to cheer myself up with the thought that quantum control would become an important field once it became clear which technologies are the most suitable for building scalable quantum computers, and that I would be in a better position to evaluate these technologies than researchers with a background in only computer science (and especially theorists).

The most sensible way to make use of my engineering background would have been to learn about some of the experiments which were being carried out at IQC, and to summarise them for my computer scientist colleagues. But I could not do this, because my mother kept insisting that I should not work with any Iranians. Many of the Iranians at IQC are engineers, and since I refused to discriminate on the basis of nationality, the only way to satisfy my mother’s demand was to avoid all engineers at IQC altogether. This was, in fact, what I did, much to my regret, as I have already written about.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life

I have already written a lot about my experiences in elementary and high school, and in particular about how, unlike most of my classmates with authoritarian parents (many of whom were of Chinese descent), I had refused to allow my parents’ wishes to dictate what I should or should not do. I saw with my own eyes that those kids who had allowed themselves to become nothing more than a mere puppet to their parents’ will, at the expense of the denial of their own individuality, were absolutely miserable. They may have had slightly better grades on average than their classmates, but at the cost of being essentially pariahs except among themselves. Other people looked down on them, but I knew it wasn’t their fault, and I felt a great deal of empathy for their situation. On the other hand, I did not ever want to be like them.

The one aspect of their situation that I could not empathise with at the time was their complaisant willingness to completely obey their parents without putting up so much as a fight, even when it was crystal clear that their parents were totally wrong. For example, their parents had put pressure on them to limit their social interactions and discounted the value of their doing anything but homework, in the belief that this would improve their grades. But they could see for themselves that my existence disproved their parents’ assertions, and they often expressed admiration for the fact that I socialised with everyone and participated in so many extracurricular activities.

And yet, they were unwilling to oppose their parents’ wishes however much harm it caused them. Not only that, but their acquiescence did absolutely nothing to lessen their parents’ harassment. Even though they were getting slightly better grades now, there would eventually come a point when their parents’ behaviour would cause them to fare poorly in school. The way I saw it was this: if the British were going to maintain a tax on salt that was so heavy it would eventually bankrupt you and lead to your arrest for the non-payment of taxes, then you might as well make salt illegally and be arrested for doing that instead. I couldn’t see why anyone would obey their parents when the treatment they received at their hands wasn’t any better than if they hadn’t, and on top of that they had to forego all of the advantages of being a free agent.

I think I have a better sense of this now. Throughout the years, my parents have tried various strategies to coerce me into submission. Beatings only made me more defiant. Threats only made me more uncooperative. They could not force me to stop doing what they didn’t want me to do (this administration does not negotiate with terrorists), but they discovered that they could cause me so much pain that I simply couldn’t continue. My mother began to constantly tell me that I was killing my father by making him angry. I held myself back from doing a lot of things because they might have angered him, and I kept a low profile. This meant that I could not, for example, apply for scholarships (which starts a vicious cycle of being unable to apply for further scholarships), or post my CV or résumé online (which had in any case diverged considerably from my interests and skills since high school).

My mother simply would not stop attacking me, no matter how much of my career I sacrificed for my parents. When I was nominated for and won a TA award in the summer of 2005 (due to circumstances entirely beyond my control), my mother resumed nagging me about spending too much time and effort helping other people. She continually interrogated me about whether I had followed her horrendous advice to withhold information from my students. Most parents would have been pleased to learn that their child had won an award, but not mine. I lost any remaining interest in teaching after this, and my TA duties made me very depressed from then on. I had been a famous lecturer in high school — on occasion even students from other schools had come to attend my presentations — and I should have continued this and built on it in university. I felt that, if it hadn’t been for my father attacking me for my research and my mother attacking me for my teaching, I would have been a professor a long time ago. I thought that if I didn’t teach, then I would not be attacked for it, and I could then try to focus on my research.

However, on top of attacking me for my teaching, my mother also continually criticised my colleagues and my association with them, ostensibly on behalf of my father. Whenever my mother prefaced a statement with “Your father says”, I didn’t know whether it was because she thought it would lend more weight to it, or because my father was too much of a coward (as all bullies are) to say it to my face — but it didn’t really matter because I knew that they were always in accord. She denigrated my physicist colleagues, telling me that I “didn’t have to” work with them, as if someone had been forcing me to do so. I presume that this was due to my father having told her that their research was “worthless” and “frivolous”.

But what my mother was really obsessed about was her belief that I was working with Iranians. I wasn’t — even though I had, in fact, several very good reasons for interacting with my co-workers who happened to be Iranian.

First of all, one of the main purposes for IQC‘s move into its current location on Wes Graham Way was to gather all of its research groups together under one roof, in order to encourage collaborations among them. Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary area of research, bringing together computer scientists, physicists, and engineers, as well as both theorists and experimenters. Unfortunately, these different groups often did not speak to one another at all, because of linguistic and cultural differences between them. The administrators had chosen to mix all of the graduate students up together within two large offices, instead of separating them by field or research group, specifically to encourage them to commingle. Therefore, I was supposed to talk to all of my colleagues, including those originally from Iran.

Second, most of the Iranians at IQC were engineers, and conversely, a sizeable fraction of the engineers were Iranians. I have previously noted the large number of Iranian engineers in universities in the West, a phenomenon which I had also observed at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hamed Majedi of the Integrated Quantum Optoelectronics Lab is Iranian, as are many of the lab’s members. Given that my own background is in control systems engineering, and I speak Persian (and in fact, I had learned Persian by listening to conversations between Iranian engineers), there was no reason why I should not interact with them. I was quite bitter about the fact that my parents had deprived me of the opportunity to be a bridge between the computer science and physics communities. I could have alleviated this somewhat by connecting the computer science and engineering communities instead, but there was no way to do this without interacting with the Iranians among the engineers.

Third, whether as the result of random chance or because I had been selected to be the butt of a cruel joke played by the universe, I was assigned a cubicle in the corner of one of the graduate student offices, and my only two immediate neighbours were both Iranians. It would have been impossible for me to work in my office without a high probability of interacting with an Iranian, if to do nothing more than to say “Hello”^[1]. (In fact, as a part of the joke, I think one of the Iranian graduate students at IQC lived just a few doors away from me, because I saw him passing by in front of my residence all the time.)

And finally, I had been saying and writing since high school that, as scientists are in principle dedicated to the discovery of facts about the world regardless of the ideologies of their respective countries’ governments or their personal religious beliefs or political views, science serves as an important point of contact between civilisations, and scientists are in a unique position to disproportionately influence how civilisations interact. I have never made a secret of my belief that every scientist has an obligation to at least think about this, and I am certainly not alone in this belief. It is also a fact that, from the time I started my Ph.D. program up to the present, there had been a lot of sabre-rattling between Iran and the United States. A natural consequence of my belief and this fact is that I hold that it is very important for scientists from both sides to interact and communicate with each other. But I have never made a big deal out of this.

But all of this was completely irrelevant to my mother. She insisted that I should not work with any Iranians because it would “upset” my father. And she would not let this go. She interrogated me about whether I had spent any time with Iranians every single time she called me on the telephone for a period of over two years, despite my repeatedly answering in the negative.

I was telling the truth. Ever since I gave up on the idea of studying information retrieval in Persian because of my parents’ disapproval, I have not had any academic interactions with Iranians. I still socialised with my Iranian friends — my parents were not going to take that away from me. But I did not need my mother to remind me every single time she called that my parents had once again deprived me of the career opportunities I would have had if it were not for them.

All I wanted was for her to shut up. But she simply would not drop the subject, and she refused to accept my answers and more or less accused me of lying. If she was so convinced that she already knew the “correct” answers to her questions, then why did she bother to ask me anything?

To my shame, I succumbed to her pressure not to associate with my Iranian co-workers. Nevertheless, I refused to discriminate on the basis of country of origin, and if my parents did not want me to speak with my officemates who happened to be Iranian engineers, then I would simply not speak with any engineers at IQC whatsoever. I avoided social events organised by IQC which were intended to introduce people, and especially graduate students, to one another. I even started to avoid my office, and eventually the entire IQC building. I became very depressed whenever I had to go there for some reason, because I was worried about whom I might run into. My mother had hounded me out of my own workplace.

I tried to find other places to work, but I couldn’t concentrate at the Perimeter Institute for reasons I have already written about. And incidentally, Dr. Clarke had taken on two Iranian graduate students since I left the Programming Languages Lab, and they had their offices there, and so I couldn’t work in my former lab either (but if I had, it would have looked mighty strange). I ended up working for several months in the psychology lounge, and also for some time in the environmental studies building, because I didn’t know anyone in those places. Needless to say, my physical absence at IQC was very damaging to my career.

Despite the drastic measures I took to avoid any Iranians, my mother continued to accuse me of lying. I have never lied to my parents. This may sound unbelievable, but as far as I know, it is true. I have occasionally refused to answer their questions, and I have sometimes given them ambiguous answers, or allowed them to draw their own erroneous conclusions without correcting them, but I did not ever lie to them, even when it would have been very convenient to do so. Whenever my father asked me in high school if a book I was reading was “for school”, I would answer “No” if it wasn’t, even if it meant that he would harass me for reading it, but would have left me alone otherwise. I have already written about how my need to create a “school-related” reason for my extracurricular writings motivated me to found my high school’s literary magazine.

This was not the first time my parents had refused to believe me in spite of my telling the truth. When I started making regular trips to the university library in high school, on a number of occasions my father had asked me where I had been, and why I had not come home right away after school. I answered him honestly. After this happened a few times, my father forbid me from visiting the university library again. I assumed that this was because he thought I was lying (although I suppose that other explanations are possible, such as that he simply did not want me to become educated). I was getting rides to and from the university library from my friend’s father, Mr. Mallo, and so I invited Mr. and Mrs. Mallo over to explain this to my father. After they left, he accused them of lying, which made no sense to me whatsoever. I could understand why he might have thought that I was lying (and had gone to, say, parties instead of the library), but what could he have possibly thought was their motivation to cover for me? In any case, I discovered that once my parents were convinced that I was lying to them, nothing could convince them otherwise.

So why didn’t I lie to them? It would have solved a lot of immediate problems, but ultimately I think that it would have been self-defeating. I was heavily influenced in my thoughts on this by the writings of Henry David Thoreau and M. K. Gandhi, and I was committed to what the latter had termed “Satyagraha”. I told my parents the truth, even if they punished me for doing so. I believed that this made my struggle to do what I wanted to do despite their prohibitions a just cause. If that sounds sanctimonious, I will state that as a practical matter, the belief that my cause was a just one motivated me to continue to fight and enabled me to endure their abuse without breaking for a lot longer than I would have otherwise. If I had lied, it would have sapped my will to continue. And I also took a small amount of pleasure from the fact that it infuriated my father to no end that I did not tell him what he wanted to hear.

However, after a decade and a half, my mother had finally worn me out. Every time she called, her accusations that I was lying to her hurt me so much that I wouldn’t be able to work for days afterwards. Since my parents called me once every several weeks, this was highly disruptive to my studies. I just wanted her to stop interrogating me and accusing me of doing things I had never done, and I was so desperate for her to stop that I was even willing to actually do what she wanted and cut off contact with my Iranian co-workers.

To me, what she wanted was a non-issue. Neither my supervisor nor the people he usually worked with were Iranians (although many of them were physicists, which was another group of people my parents didn’t want me to work with, as I have discussed above). Most of the computer science researchers at IQC did not interact very much with the engineers anyway, although I had the advantage that it would have been easier for me to do so given my own engineering background. But this was an advantage I was perfectly willing to relinquish if it meant that my parents would at long last allow me to have the peace that I needed to concentrate on my research. But they just would not let me have it, even if I did everything that they wanted. The problem, I suppose, was that I had defied them for so long that they just could not believe that I would actually obey them, and kept attacking me as if I wasn’t. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do about it.

But I could finally empathise with my high school classmates who continually acquiesced to the wishes of their authoritarian parents. I could not understand before why they had listened to their parents when, for example, their parents had discouraged or forbid them from associating with classmates who were not from the same ethnic background (or who were from some particular different ethnic background). Now I know from experience that there is a limit to how much harassment a person can tolerate, and that after this limit has been reached, it is simply easier to comply with than to resist an oppressor’s demands. Some people have a higher breaking point than others, but everyone has a breaking point — although some, like Gandhi, were almost superhuman in the strength of their will. My limit is considerably lower than Gandhi’s, and my parents had exceeded it.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
2. The causes of my depression, part 7: my mother’s selfishness
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice

Another person I met through Dr. Cleve was Dr. Michael Nielsen, the co-author with Dr. Isaac Chuang of the standard textbook on quantum computing. Dr. Nielsen is writing a book on the future of science and is interested in the effects of modern communications technologies on scientific research and collaboration, a topic which I had been thinking and writing about since high school. But when I met him, I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with him.

I have already written about this kind of self-sabotage, of holding myself back, previously. Dr. Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computing, and I shared not one but two academic interests with him, and I should have spoken to him about them. But I had been punished in high school for both of these interests, which my father had dismissed as “worthless”, and this fact and the associated pain were always on my mind. This is a prime example of how, even when my parents were not actively attacking me, they still nevertheless managed to disrupt my studies and deprive me of numerous career opportunities. I was always apprehensive about discussing my academic interests with others because it might lead to a situation where I had no control over the public exposure my work might receive, and also because I did not want to put myself into any situations where I would have to disappoint other people when my parents put a stop to my collaborations with them, as had often happened before. It is easy to see how devastating the restrictions imposed on me by my parents’ behaviour are to a career in science, where researchers typically broadcast their interests and their work as publicly and as widely as possible.

Someone else who shares an interest in both quantum computing and open access scientific publication is Dr. Scott Aaronson, who was previously at IQC and is now at MIT, and who is an editor for the open access journal Theory of Computing. When I started writing my autobiography, one of the main reasons behind my decision to make it public was that there was nobody to whom I could point when I was in high school and say to my parents that this person proves that everything they think they know about how to succeed in academia is wrong. But Dr. Aaronson is exactly such a person.

If my father’s beliefs are correct, Scott Aaronson should not exist. His research explores the connections between computational complexity theory (my father had claimed that theoretical computer science is not computer science) and physics (which my father had insisted had “nothing to do with” computer science). And yet Dr. Aaronson is a computer scientist, and a rather accomplished one. Furthermore, he works at MIT, which my father had assured me I would never get into if I continued to “waste [my] time” studying the physics of computation.

Consider the following sentence from Dr. Aaronson’s Research Statement:

To me, Shor’s algorithm represented a promise: that from now on, the study of the feasibly computable was going to be inextricably linked to the central conceptual problems in physics.

My argument with my father about the intimate relationship between physics and computation had started before the publication of Shor’s factoring algorithm, but I had defended the necessity of my studying theoretical physics in preparation for computer science research using almost exactly the same language. The above quote is the sort of sentence that would send my father into a screaming rage.

Or, consider the following story from Dr. Aaronson’s Teaching Statement. While a second-year graduate student, he had designed a course called “Physics, Philosophy, Pizza”, in which the students would discuss “Gödel’s theorem, P versus NP, quantum computing, special relativity, the Turing test, or other topics depending on student interest”. My father had refused to believe me when I told him in high school that Gödel’s theorem and the P vs. NP problem were among some of the most important ideas in computer science, because he had never heard of them. When I participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program to study astrophysics, including the theory of relativity, he kept dismissing it as a “waste of time”. Every single one of the topics listed by Dr. Aaronson was something I had studied in high school outside of the classroom while my parents attacked me for doing so. And I have already written about how, when I used to organise study sessions very much like Dr. Aaronson’s description of his course, my mother would continually nag me to stop.

I had visited Dr. Aaronson’s apartment a few times while he was in Waterloo, and his shelves were full of the kinds of books that my parents kept pressuring me not to read. Like me, he had books on Middle Eastern history, religion, and several fields of science outside of his research. In fact, he owned several books by authors whose writings I had specifically been punished for reading in high school.

Dr. Aaronson had also written an article for Scientific American. I mention this because of my father’s odd attitude towards popular science magazines, and Scientific American in particular. He had always attacked me for “wasting money” on such magazines (primarily Scientific American and Wired) while I was in high school. Shortly after I came to Waterloo, however, he said to me, out of the blue, “You should write an article for Scientific American.” And he suggested this a few times before he dropped it. I didn’t quite know what to make of it — maybe one of his colleague’s children had an article published there, or he believed that this was the sort of thing one “should” do as a graduate student. But a typical person can’t just suddenly decide that he wants to write an article for Scientific American and have it published, and the kind of people the editors ask to contribute articles are very likely not to have parents who refer to their magazine as a “waste of money”.

In the fall of 2006, Dr. Aaronson taught a course called “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” at IQC. (Note the course code: PHYS771.) I sat in on the first lecture, but I became so depressed that I couldn’t continue. The contents of the course were exactly the topics that my father had dismissed as “worthless” and threatened and beat me for studying in high school. I did, however, read the course notes afterwards, when they became available.

The “textbook” for the course was Dr. Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind”, a book my father had prevented me from completing in high school. (After my father forbid me from reading books on science at home, this drastically cut down on the amount of time I had to read the books that I wanted to read.) Dr. Aaronson actually disagreed with the book’s central premise, but chose it anyway it because it covered many of the ideas he wanted to discuss in the course. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that my father would have derided the contents of the entire book as “nonsense” (but for a completely different reason than Dr. Aaronson’s disagreement with it), this was something that my father would most certainly have criticised. To a traditional Chinese mentality, the thought of an instructor choosing a textbook that he disagreed with, and especially if he made a big deal in class out of what he believed to be its errors, is unthinkable.

Even the title of the course was something that my father would have ridiculed. I had studied a number of ancient philosophers, and my father had always insisted that this was something I should hold off doing until “after [my] retirement”, because their ideas had “nothing to do with” my studies. But this isn’t true. I had studied the Indian Buddhist logicians, and my familiarity with their ideas was a part of the reason that I had done so well when I took a graduate course in mathematical logic. For the second lecture of Dr. Aaronson’s course, he had asked Dr. Rahul Jain, a postdoc from India, to give a brief presentation on atomist ideas from Jainism. If I had been in the course and had access to my books on Indian logic, which had been stored away in my parents’ house, I would certainly have contributed to the discussion.

I have discussed previously how my parents would continually pressure me to remove books that they believed I did not need from my residence to their house. When I was in Toronto, I had a reputation as a library — friends and acquaintances would borrow books from me. The fact is that you can never predict when a book will come in handy, and having books around on “irrelevant” subjects is often very advantageous. My parents claimed that books on subjects unrelated to my research distracted me, but I was more often distracted by not having ready access to a book that I owned when I wanted to refer to it. As another example, when Dr. Seth Lloyd visited the Perimeter Institute, I wanted to ask him about Dr. Elaine Pagels, the wife of his late academic advisor Dr. Heinz Pagels and the author of several books on the early Christian church. Dr. Lloyd had written about being influenced by her writings on Gnosticism, and I had wanted to discuss these with him (if for no reason other than that every other student asked him about quantum computing). But I didn’t have her books with me, and so I never spoke with him about her ideas.

In Dr. Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe”, he described his education as follows:

My undergraduate curriculum at Harvard went by the name “General Education.” In practice, this seemed to mean that if I could talk my way into a course, then it was part of my curriculum. Accordingly, with the blessing — or, at any rate, the signature — of my advisor, the Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, I designed my undergraduate physics curriculum around Robert Fitzgerald’s courses on prosody and on Homer, Virgil, and Dante, supported by Leon Kirchner’s course on chamber music performance and I. Bernard Cohen’s graduate seminar on the Influences of the Physical Sciences on the Social. Glashow also insisted that I take some physics.

The more people I met, the more data points I accumulated to support the theory that no one who behaved in the way my parents wanted me to behave could ever be successful as a quantum computing researcher, or more generally, a computer scientist or any other kind of scientist. But my behaviour since my arrival in Waterloo had, in fact, been largely dictated by the restrictions imposed on me by my parents, and this made me very depressed.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice

The very situation itself was depressing to me, which is in some ways quite irrational. I had told my father when I was in high school that there would be a close collaboration between computer scientists and physicists to study the physics of computation, and now I was a part of this. But in many ways I felt very out of place.

My background was in electrical engineering, while most of my colleagues were either computer scientists or physicists. Despite having a Master’s degree in computer science, I think that not having gone through an undergraduate program in it put me at a severe disadvantage. My father had insisted that there was nothing I could do with an undergraduate degree in computer science or physics that I could not have also done after graduating with a “prestigious” degree from the Engineering Science program. I suppose that this might be true from the perspective of anyone who viewed a résumé as nothing more than a checklist of qualifications. But the fact is that people who have gone through an undergraduate program in the same subject, even at different universities, share a common culture that requires a certain amount of effort by an outsider to penetrate. There are certain things that one is just expected to know, and which cannot be learned in their entirety by any means except through frequent association with members of that culture: the situations in which a particular proof technique is appropriate, the consequences of a theorem which are the most important in a given context, multiple equivalent ways of defining a technical term, and so on. And some skills simply take four or more years of practice to master.

When I was in high school, I was often — in fact, almost always — at the centre of collaborative efforts. But I was now on the periphery, and had to learn the language and culture of my colleagues, and this made me very bitter. It would have been a different matter entirely if I had wanted to enter an engineering program in university, and had become interested in quantum computing only after I had graduated. But I had set out deliberately in high school to become someone who could communicate with both computer scientists and physicists, and my father had specifically deprived me of the opportunities to acquire this ability by forcing me into engineering. He had insisted that it would “never happen” that such a skill would ever be useful.

I was reminded of this every time I attended a lecture at the Perimeter Institute (PI) where both computer scientists and physicists were present. Whenever a member of one community gave a talk, it was almost inevitable that someone would ask him or her to rephrase something in terms that the other community would understand, or to explain a concept that was considered elementary by the other community. And the audience was comprised of some very smart people, often including, for example, Nobel Prize winners. Every time this happened, I felt like I was being told that my father is a moron. Even now, more than a decade after I had predicted the need for scientists who could serve as a bridge between the computer science and physics communities, the niche has not really been filled.

My supervisor, Dr. Richard Cleve, worked at the Perimeter Institute on certain days of the week, and while I didn’t have an official position there, I began to work there regularly. I felt very strange about this. When I had participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program in high school to study astronomy and astrophysics, my father had opposed it on the grounds that it had “nothing to do” with computer science or my future career, and I had told him that one day I would be studying computer science in “a building full of astrophysicists”. And that was, indeed, exactly what I was doing.

I mentioned that I was working at the Perimeter Institute to my mother on the phone, and she told my father. The next time they came to visit, he sneered, “Why do you have to work at that place?” My parents referred to the Perimeter Institute as “that place” and to the people who worked there as “those people”. My father was dismissive of the fact that I was studying computer science among theoretical physicists, but at least he didn’t scream at me or forbid me to continue. His attitude reminded me of the mindset of religious fundamentalists: he was certain that computer science had nothing to do with theoretical physics, and since I was studying computer science, then it must be the case that I didn’t really need to collaborate with physicists. He often alluded to the fact that other graduate students in computer science (by which I presumed he meant those of Chinese descent) did not need to work with physicists to complete their degrees, as if that should have any bearing on me.

I had very mixed feelings when I went to the Perimeter Institute. On the one hand, I was exhilarated just to be in the presence of Nobel Prize winners and the like. It didn’t matter that I didn’t interact with them very much — just walking down the hallways and looking at the nameplates on the doors was very exciting. On the other hand, it was also somewhat depressing for me. I think that most parents would be very excited about their child working at a place like the Perimeter Institute — at least, I know that many of my high school classmates’ parents would have been. My parents didn’t care all that much about it, but to the extent that they did, they acted as if it was a bad thing.

Considering what a “prestigious” place the Perimeter Institute is, this might seem somewhat surprising. But my parents operate with a definition of prestige peculiar to Chinese parents: something is prestigious if and only if it is considered prestigious by all the other Chinese parents. Thus, a degree from an elite engineering program is prestigious; working with a bunch of white people who are too silly to stick to practical matters in an establishment founded for the purpose of studying frivolous nonsense is not prestigious. My parents kept pressuring me, for example, to work with Ming Li, who is a big name in bioinformatics, the unstated principle being that I should choose my colleagues and research on the basis of my colleagues’ ethnic backgrounds.

(Incidentally, scientific institutes dedicated to pure science research must be the “whitest” — or at least the “most non-Chinese” — places to work in the academic world. There are actually a few people of Chinese descent among the Perimeter Institute’s scientific staff, but almost all of them are from mainland China or possibly Taiwan. The only scientist there with a Hong Kong or Cantonese background that I can think of is Debbie Leung, although I think Hoi-Kwong Lo had spent some time there previously. In comparison, consider the lists of faculty members of the Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto. I once entered the Perimeter Institute building carrying a camera, and I was asked by a staff member to leave because she thought that I was a tourist.)

One thing that came out of my counselling sessions was that I felt “unworthy” of working at the Perimeter Institute and also at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), a word that I never would have come up with myself. I imagined that most of my colleagues at these institutes had specialised in one subject for their entire lives, whether it was physics or mathematics or computer science. I, on the other hand, had been forced by my parents to jump from one subject to another just to be able to stay in school, and I felt that this meant I was not as dedicated as they were. But more importantly, I felt that I had somehow betrayed or let down my colleagues in science by not having adequately defended them whenever my parents dismissed their fields of research as “nonsense” or called into question the intelligence or wisdom of people who were interested in the topics they studied. I had fought openly with my parents to defend science up until the end of high school, but afterwards I changed my strategy to one of subterfuge. The only alternative would have been to run away from home, an option that I had rejected to my subsequent regret. Whenever I was in the company of other scientists, which was essentially most of the time, I felt really ashamed of my association with my parents.

Besides getting to work at the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing, many other things happened to me as a result of my switch into quantum computing that would have made me very happy when I was in high school, but which as a result of my parents’ actions since that time made me very depressed instead. My parents had poisoned everything, and it took a great deal out of me to fight against their poison.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 7: my mother’s selfishness, re-visited
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research

It was quite fortuitous that Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were members of the Programming Languages Group, to which I was thus assigned, along with other graduate students who were researching information retrieval. Programming languages was a topic to which my parents had no objection, presumably because my father had taken courses in it while he was in university. Some years afterwards, the Information Retrieval Group would be split off from the Programming Languages Group. But while I was there, I allowed my parents to draw their own conclusions about what I was studying based on my affiliation and the location of my office.

Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were involved in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), a yearly meeting co-sponsored by NIST to present and discuss research related to problems of information retrieval from large collections of data. The conference is subdivided into several “tracks”, each of which is focused on some particular information retrieval task. There had been an Arabic cross-language track in 2002, but it was not continued in 2003, although there were a number of other venues where I could have presented my results had I chosen to pursue the topic of information retrieval in Arabic or Persian. But I decided not to do this, because of my parents’ reaction to the idea.

Instead, I felt that I had to choose a topic that was both conventional and uncontroversial. Evidently, it was not enough for my parents that I studied only applied subjects, because information retrieval in Arabic or Persian was clearly an application of computer science which had very little to do with theory, and yet they still refused to allow me to study it. After considering several possibilities, I decided to work on information retrieval for bioinformatics applications, because it fit those criteria.

I could not imagine what my parents could possibly find to criticise about this topic. The Human Genome Project was often in the news, so they could not claim that information retrieval for bioinformatics was obscure or useless. If my father ever said to me, “Nobody is interested in that”, or phrased it as a rhetorical question as he often did, by asking “Who’s interested in that?”, I could easily point him to any number of popular articles demonstrating the interest in the topic coming from numerous quarters. It was conventional — it dealt with regular computers, and regular data, although large amounts of it. It was uncontroversial — it had nothing to do with international politics or terrorism, or anything which was very likely to upset my father. It was well-funded. And, I had something of a head start, because I was already familiar with the basics of information retrieval.

The next term, I took a course on Structural Bioinformatics from Dr. Forbes Burkowski while working on my research and thesis. I attended TREC with Dr. Cormack, Dr. Clarke, and their graduate students who were working on information retrieval, and I met some of the big names in the field. I began to study bioinformatics in earnest and finished my thesis, and hence my second Master’s degree, very quickly, having taken just four terms in total for the degree.

I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in computer science right away, but I was very torn about what I was going to study. A large number of people wanted me to continue in information retrieval or bioinformatics, and I felt very badly about disappointing them, just as I had done earlier with my professors in engineering. A number of other people wanted me to consider a career in intelligence, security, or espionage, because of my abilities in linguistics, computer science, and engineering.

Ironically, the fact that my parents had forced me to hide my interest in the Muslim world meant that I was actually better suited for certain careers than I would have been otherwise. I had the knowledge and skills of someone who had a degree in religious studies specialising in Islam, but there was not a hint of this on my university transcripts. I was also an expert in living a double life, thanks again to them, not to mention that my repeated interactions with them had inured me to psychological torture.

But I ultimately decided against this career path, because it would have placed me in direct confrontation with my parents, and left me with no time or energy for anything else. Furthermore, as I had already been forced to suppress my opinions for most of my life, I had no desire to put myself into a position where this would continue for the rest of it. I was determined that, whatever I had to say or write about religion or politics or any other controversial subject, I would say or write on the public record — as soon as I found a way around the hurdle of being attacked and prevented from working by my parents whenever I did so.

My rejection of this career path at that time meant that I would probably not be returning to it. The average undergraduate degree was three to four years, and after 9/11, many people had entered degree programs in various subjects related to Islam and the Muslim world. These people would soon be graduating, thus nullifying the advantage of my head start.

But what I really wanted to do was to return to quantum computing. How I did so, and the consequences that followed, will be described in the next several posts.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath

One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands. It is a dictum of traditional Chinese culture that children should obey their parents without question. My parents have never explained to me why I should have been punished so harshly for my interest in science, and I was left to infer this from what they punished me for doing, as well as from their criticisms.

I was punished in high school by my parents for reading books and journals, writing papers, attending scientific lectures, meeting with people who shared my interests, and giving presentations — exactly the things that constitute the academic life of a scientist. At the same time, my parents insisted that they supported my education, and bragged about this to everyone they knew. I had no guarantee that altering my behaviour would have reduced their interference with my studies, and doing so would certainly have compromised my ability to succeed academically. I really had no idea what I was doing that was so upsetting to them, especially since my teachers and my classmates’ parents showered praises upon me for my activities.

When it came to my parents’ criticisms, there were really just two major ones. The first was that I was doing things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, which is to say things that other Chinese students at around my age were not doing, such as making regular trips to the university library or meeting with professors. But this criticism was absurd, because the people that my parents expected me to imitate would not be going on to careers in science. Many of them might have ended up in university, but in applied areas such as accounting or engineering, and even then, their purpose was to “get a degree” to qualify for a job or to please their parents, and not to prepare themselves to do graduate research. And besides, some of them had personally told me that they wished that they were more like me. And yet my parents kept telling me that I should be more like them. So my parents were basically pressuring me to be more like people who expressed admiration for the fact that I had the courage to defy them, and who resented their own parents for forcing them to do things that they didn’t want to do. I found the situation darkly comical. As the saying goes, one should be careful what one wishes for.

The second major criticism was that the subjects I was intent on studying were useless or impractical^[1]. I don’t know if this is more of a linguistic or a cultural issue, but my parents would invariably interpret “theoretical” to mean “worthless” or “frivolous”. My father would say things such as, “If you want to study theory, wait until after you’re retired”, which of course makes no sense whatsoever. This misinterpretation was not restricted to just my parents, but was quite common among my Cantonese-speaking classmates, who had presumably acquired it from their parents. I suppose that this partially explains the abundance of students from a Cantonese background in engineering and their paucity in the pure sciences.

I have already written much about my interest in religion as a geopolitical force, and about how I had turned my attention to Islam and the Muslim world after my parents had forbidden me from studying the physics of computation in high school. While I had been interested in these subjects since elementary school, I returned to them at the end of high school because I knew that information retrieval in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu would become important within a few years — and I turned out to be right.

Information retrieval was most certainly a topic within applied computer science, and — at a time when Google was becoming a common verb in the English language — its practicality could not be denied. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this was especially true for information retrieval in languages written using the Perso-Arabic script. I began my Master’s degree in computer science less than a year and a half after 9/11, and information retrieval in Arabic was a very hot topic. For obvious reasons, numerous companies, think tanks, governmental agencies, and private organisations were very interested in it.

I had planned to research information retrieval in Persian as the topic of my Master’s thesis while I worked on quantum computing on the side. Splitting my attention like this was less than ideal, but it was better than being prevented from studying what I wanted to study entirely. I was even prepared to research information retrieval in Arabic, even though I was less familiar with that language than with Persian, because it was in higher demand. (The two languages are not related, despite the borrowing of a large amount of vocabulary from Arabic into Persian. Arabic is a Semitic language, whereas Persian is Indo-European.) I thought that the relative lack of interest for research into information retrieval in Persian was rather shortsighted, because the invasion of Iraq by America and its allies had just begun. It was inevitable that Iraq would fall, and almost as certain that Iran would become a major regional power with the demise of its archnemesis.

If my parents’ reason for dismissing quantum computing as “worthless” was that it had not led to any practical applications, they should have had no objections to information retrieval in either Arabic or Persian. Instead, it was now these topics which would send my father into a screaming rage. When I casually mentioned that I was studying Persian while having dinner at my parents’ house, my father immediately became very angry and yelled at me that he forbid me from continuing. After I had gone home, my mother telephoned me to tell me how upset my father was and begged me not to upset him any more. And she would remind me of this every time she called me thereafter.

What could I possibly do? My entire purpose behind studying information retrieval in Persian was so that I could use it to deflect my parents’ criticism that my research interests were “not practical” while studying quantum computing which my father had repeatedly declared to be “worthless”. And now I was basically not allowed to study information retrieval in Persian, despite the fact that it was eminently practical, without being given any reason. (I suppose that my mother had given me the reason that the topic “upset [my] father”, but since apparently everything upset him, this essentially conveyed no information.)

I had no choice but to change my academic plans once again on account of my parents. Many parents sacrifice their careers for the sake of their children; but in my family, I was always the one who had to sacrifice my career to appease my parents, and especially my father, who was continually throwing temper tantrums like a two-year-old child. (In the literature on developmental psychology, this phenomenon is called “(parent-child) role reversal”.)

In my efforts to thwart my parents’ continual attempts to destroy my scientific career, I had been operating under the assumption that they were acting under a consistent if incorrect set of beliefs. They had repeatedly told me that my interest in quantum computing was “not practical”, and I actually took them at their word. But when I turned to a topic that no sane person could possibly deny was practical, they attacked me for it anyway, for essentially no reason whatsoever.

In retrospect, I had given them far too much credit in terms of their motivation. Now I think that their intention was simply to punish me for demonstrating creativity and initiative, values which are necessary for science but which are completely antithetical to traditional Chinese culture. They would have punished me no matter what I was interested in, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with quantum computing per se, but rather with the fact that I was not a mindless automaton like they believed my Chinese high school classmates to be. They punished me because they could not legitimately lay claim to credit for the accomplishments that I had achieved by behaving in a manner completely contrary to their wishes. The only way to escape their punishment was to obey them completely and submissively, with no will of my own.

I suppose that this possibility was always on the back of my mind, but I had to act as if it wasn’t true. I had to believe that there was some way I could complete a graduate degree in computer science without their interference causing my failure. And so, in spite of the frustration and pain it caused me, I changed my research topic once again.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life