When I was growing up, I’ve always felt that my parents were not like other people’s parents. I wish I had known about and had access to books like those written by Miller, who relate the stories of people like myself. I guess they must have always been available at the library, but I had never thought to look for such books until recent years.

It’s a tremendous relief to have someone explain what I have gone through, and to come to an understanding of many of the hidden reasons behind why I was treated in the way that I was by my parents. I have just finished reading The Drama of the Gifted Child^[1]. Miller uses “gifted” here not with the usual meaning of being intellectually precocious, but to denote children who are especially emotionally sensitive.

Before embarking on the next book by Miller, I started Children of Trauma^[2] by Jane Middleton-Moz. This book was actually recommended to me by my counsellor a while back, but I haven’t looked at it until now. Like Miller, Middleton-Moz writes about children who have had traumatic childhoods. Her book follows a similar format in that it alternates between case examples of children who have experienced trauma (or adults who have experienced trauma as children), and analyses and explanations of the examples.

When I have the time, I’ll post some excerpts along with parallels from my own childhood and upbringing.

– davinci 11996

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
3. Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study

Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career.

There may be any number of reasons why traditional Chinese parents have these erroneous beliefs. China has historically had to manage a huge population, and thus the educational goals of traditional Chinese culture focus on stability and hierarchy, emphasise standardised testing, and discourage individual creativity — in other words, traditional Chinese culture is diametrically opposed to the values required to become a successful scientist. Also, immigrants who were educated elsewhere may falsely assume that their children’s experiences in school will be similar to their own.

I do not claim that these misconceptions, or the actions inspired in parents by them, are necessarily always harmful. In fact, children of parents who hold them may do quite well in high school, and possibly even in the first years of university. This seems to be supported by anecdotal evidence and by the popular stereotype of Chinese students as hard workers with good grades.

However, the pressures and restrictions imposed on their children by parents who hold these misconceptions are most certainly crippling disadvantages for any student wishing to enter graduate school in science, which is my concern. But what is far more damaging than any particular erroneous belief is the authoritarian attitude that parents simply cannot be wrong merely by virtue of their being parents. If parents are willing to abandon their erroneous beliefs when they are shown not to correspond to reality, the damage inflicted on their children will be minimal. Otherwise, they may end up doing enormous damage to their children’s careers.

The points below apply not just to traditional Chinese parents, but to authoritarian parents from any cultural background. But I am of course writing from my own personal experience, although I suspect that these experiences are shared by a large number of people who may not want to draw public attention to the deficiencies of their parents.

1. The way to succeed in school is to “study”, and to “study” means only to read text books assigned by the school and to repeatedly do the drill exercises found therein.

Wrong. While such a strategy may result in good grades in elementary or high school, the only skill it can develop is the ability to follow instructions well whether they are understood or not (which may in fact be a very useful skill in certain jobs or situations). It will leave undeveloped the far more critical skill of thinking for oneself.

In the upper years of university and in graduate school, it will no longer be advantageous to mindlessly follow instructions, leaving students who have depended upon their ability to do so for their high grades unable to remain on parity with students who have been encouraged to learn how to study for themselves all along.

I have witnessed this firsthand among my high school and undergraduate classmates who behaved exactly like how my parents want me to behave. Fortunately for me, I did not obey my parents.

2. Anything not on the school curriculum is a “waste of time”.

Wrong. I learned almost everything that I would need for graduate school outside of the classroom. I would even go so far as to say that I would have been much better prepared for graduate school if I hadn’t been forced by my parents to waste so much time on school work that I didn’t need to do.

Granted, a part of the reason that sticking to the school curriculum was such a waste of time for me was that my parents had coerced me into an undergraduate program other than the one I wanted to enter (see point #5 below). I therefore had no choice but to take courses I had neither any interest in nor any use for, while pursuing my actual interests outside of my official courses.

However, even if a student is in the undergraduate program of his or her choice, discouraging him or her from going outside of the curriculum is still a bad idea. For one thing, the contents of the curriculum may have been decided by political or economic factors such as sources of funding or the whimsical preferences and tastes of the curriculum designers, and may therefore have very little to do with the needs of any particular student. Furthermore, the nature of the curriculum design process is such that there is an inherent lag, and the curriculum will always be far behind the cutting edge in any field, and especially those in which progress is rapid.

For example, my high school computer science classes did not cover computational complexity, even though it was an established topic in the undergraduate computer science curriculum at the university level. Group theory was covered neither in any of my high school algebra classes nor in any of my undergraduate classes in engineering, even though knowledge of it is assumed by many of the courses I took in graduate school. And while I was an undergraduate, there were no courses in quantum computing, which were subsequently introduced into the curriculum after I had already started graduate school. At each stage, my parents criticised or punished me for studying topics “not on the school curriculum”, but these turned out to be exactly the topics I would need to know for my graduate studies.

Any parents who punish their children for studying topics outside of the school curriculum will most certainly damage their academic careers far more than can be made up for by any additional time they may have gained to study topics that happen to be on it.

3. Social connections are not important. The best students are socially isolated and study alone. The way to succeed in school is by sticking to others of the same ethnic background.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Being socially well-connected is very important for academic success. My personal experience as well as observations of others tell me that the best students and academics are those who have a large social network to whom they can turn whenever they need help.

When I was young, my parents continually lied to other people about how much time I spent “studying” (see point #1 above), by which they meant alone. (I could never understand their motivation for this lie. If their purpose was to impress other people, wouldn’t it have been much more impressive to exaggerate in the other direction, and tell them that I had the highest marks in the school despite not studying at all? Now that would’ve been impressive.) Having their parents lie about how much time they spent “studying” is a common experience among my relatives, friends, and acquaintances of Chinese background. There is enormous pressure to “study” alone and to dissociate from others except for those who have comparable or higher marks. The natural consequence of this, of course, is that the students with the highest marks are pressured not to have any friends whatsoever.

Again, this may result in good grades in high school and in the early years of university. But there are certain skills which can be learned or honed only through interacting with others, and by the upper years of university or graduate school the difference will become very obvious.

And finally, even if traditional Chinese parents allow their children to socialise, they nevertheless pressure them to limit their social interactions to those who share their ethnic or national background. My parents continually attacked anyone I associated with who wasn’t of Chinese background (the only exception was an undergraduate classmate who is Indian, because he had higher marks than me). Once I started graduate school, they kept suggesting that I work with professors of Chinese background and that I spend more time with Chinese graduate students, as if other people didn’t exist. My mother became obsessed with criticising me for having Iranian colleagues.

My parents’ behaviour was extremely damaging to my career because I passed up many opportunities to collaborate with people whom I knew my parents would criticise me for working with. A person who restricts the pool of his or her collaborators based on ethnic or national background will never be as successful as a person who operates without any such restriction. The reason basically boils down to the standard economic argument against racism (or any form of discrimination based on attributes other than those directly relevant to the situation).

I don’t deny that it is possible to obtain a graduate degree, and even a Ph.D., while limiting one’s interactions mostly to others of the same ethnic background. Apparently many people do. I’ve met several people who have graduated with Ph.D. degrees from Canadian universities and yet are barely able to speak English (or French). But these people are not anywhere near the top of their fields, and usually leave academia as soon as they graduate.

4. Extracurricular activities are a distraction from school (except for music lessons).

Wrong. Extracurricular activities are very important for practising and reinforcing skills taught in the classroom, as well as for learning skills not taught in the classroom altogether. Furthermore, extracurricular activities are a way of meeting people who share one’s interests whom one would not otherwise meet (see point #3 above).

And honestly, what’s up with Chinese parents’ fetish for music lessons?

5. It’s important to have a prestigious degree.

Wrong. It’s far more important to work on what one believes to be significant and relevant. The degrees and honours will come naturally later.

At the end of high school, I wanted to prepare myself for studying quantum computing by enrolling in a general science program in university and choosing my own courses. My father thought that this was not “prestigious” enough and coerced me into entering an elite engineering program instead. He insisted that after I graduated I would be “qualified” to do anything I want.

I did not return to quantum computing until my Ph.D. Some of the most important discoveries in the field were made in the meantime. I would most certainly have been in a much better position in terms of my research if I had started right away when I entered university (or even in high school), instead of waiting until I had earned “prestigious” degrees which “qualified” me to do research in the field.

When I was an undergraduate, I turned my attention to information processing and retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, because I expected the Muslim world to become much more prominent in global politics after the fall of the USSR. I also studied the Islamic religion and the history and languages of several countries in the Muslim world. My parents continually criticised me for doing this since these subjects had nothing to do with the degree for which I was studying. However, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people turned to me for my expertise, despite the fact that I had no degrees in the relevant areas. (I would later earn a Master’s degree in computer science for information retrieval, but for bioinformatics rather than languages written in the Perso-Arabic script.)

The obsession with earning degrees puts the cart before the horse. There are many people with prestigious degrees who end up not accomplishing very much. Conversely, a person who is accomplished will be recognised whether or not he or she has a degree to symbolise his or her accomplishments.

6. I know better than my child what is in his or her best interest.

Wrong. Your child has far more time than you do to think about his or her future. If he or she is adamant about what he or she needs to do to succeed in school, then he or she is most certainly right.

If your child is or has been in the gifted program, he or she is very likely to know much more about the education of children than you do. This is because the school often sends home literature on gifted children which you’re too busy to read or to pay much attention to, but which your child has devoured voraciously for lack of better things to do. Anything you do will then be compared to what the latest research in developmental psychology says a good parent ought to have done in the same situation.

It is well-known that authoritarian parenting is damaging to children and that children should never be discouraged from pursuing their interests. And yet traditional Chinese parents adhere to an authoritarian style of parenting that discourages their children from (or even punishes them for) studying anything outside of the school curriculum. This needs to stop, and children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Education vs. schooling
2. Most advice given to people with abusive parents is wrong
3. Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents

The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:

Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.

I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this. They gave us a lot of materials on how to raise gifted children, which my parents dismissed and ignored. So I read the materials myself and implemented their suggestions, not only without my parents’ support, but in direct contravention to their wishes.

About why some children are more interested in school than others, the article says:

Children thrive or struggle in school for a host of reasons apart from IQ, according to psychologist Franz Mönks of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. These include motivation and persistence, social competence, and the support of family, educators and friends.

My parents apparently believed that I would become motivated to do well in school merely because they ordered me to do so. Fortunately, I had the support of my teachers, my friends, and their parents.

The article explains the advantages and disadvantages of acceleration and enrichment for gifted children. About enrichment as an alternative to acceleration, it says:

Thus, providing opportunities for a child to study topics outside the regular curriculum can be at least as valuable as pushing him or her through the required material faster. Gifted kids might get the stimulation they require by, say, joining a chess club, a math or debate team, or another enrichment activity that engages their intellect. Another common technique is to enable a child to embark on an independent project or experiment under the guidance of a mentor.

My parents had always punished me whenever they caught me studying ahead. In addition, they derided my extracurricular activities as “worthless”, and opposed my choice of project when I participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program, subsequently dismissing my entire experience with it as “worthless”.

The article links to two others. The first, “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids”, by Carol S. Dweck, describes how a mindset that overemphasises innate intelligence or talent as opposed to effort and perseverence can cause people to underachieve because they become unmotivated to work hard.

My parents neither praised me for being intelligent nor emphasised hard work. In fact, they continually derided the efforts I put into my studies as a “waste of time”, and actively tried to prevent me from going to the university library or reading scientific papers. Fortunately, my teachers and classmates’ friends always praised me for and even helped me with my efforts.

The following sentences from this article are particularly interesting to me:

Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change — a state they called learned helplessness.

This was, I think, the state in which I found myself after I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched my topic to quantum computing. I had learned through repeated experience that my parents would punish me any time I became successful at anything, and that there was nothing I could do to avoid their punishment (except not to succeed). Thus, I had an enormous amount of difficulty motivating myself to work on my research, even though I knew that while my parents could punish me after the fact, they couldn’t actually stop me from studying what I wanted to study.

In the article, the author describes the theory she developed which categorises learners into two classes, which she dubs “helpless” and “mastery-oriented”. The “helpless” learners had what she called a “fixed mindset”, and attributed failure to a lack of ability, whereas the “mastery-oriented” ones had a “growth mindset”, and attributed failure to a lack of effort. She summarises a number of studies which showed that the latter group outperformed the former over time, because of their increased willingness to correct their mistakes and try again.

The second article linked to from the first one I discussed above, “Watching Prodigies for the Dark Side”, by Marie-Noëlle Ganry-Tardy, is about gifted children who perform poorly in school. While that description does not apply to me, I found a number of observations in the article interesting.

After describing how developmental disorders such as dyslexia may cause a gifted child to get poor grades, the article notes that a child may react by withdrawing. It then explains why punishment is so counterproductive.

As a defense, the child gradually loses interest in schoolwork and begins to isolate himself from social interaction. Punishment may only make matters worse. With their well-developed sense of right and wrong, prodigies consider punishment undeserved, and they may withdraw further.

The claim that “prodigies consider punishment undeserved” is very interesting to me. I can’t imagine any child thinking that his or her punishment is deserved — and I went to Catholic elementary and high schools! I honestly cannot recall a single instance in my life when my parents punished me and I thought afterwards that it was justified. I don’t believe that this is due to a selective memory either, because if there had ever been an instance when I thought that they were right, it would have been so shocking to me that it would surely have been etched indelibly into my mind.

The following paragraph from the same article perfectly describes a lot of the gifted children of Chinese descent whom I knew:

Child prodigies may also distort their own personalities to the point where they become unrecognizable. Psychiatrists call this the development of a false self. This problem may occur because these extraordinarily sensitive young people often feel deeply the subtle reactions of family members. As a result, they may overinterpret even the slightest sign of dissatisfaction. To please their parents, they deny their own needs and behave in a way they think matches their parents’ expectations. They all but disappear behind a mask of compliance…

Traditional Chinese parents are anything but “subtle” when it comes to expressing their disapproval. And indeed, many of the Chinese kids I knew — and not just the gifted ones — never expressed their own personalities. The paragraph continues:

To prevent this development of a false self, parents should offer a highly gifted child several varied activities and accept without judgment whatever the child chooses to pursue. It is important to encourage a child’s special interests so that she does not lose motivation or a willingness to work.

My parents could never “accept without judgment” anything that I did — they always dismissed my interests with terms such as “frivolous” and “nonsense”.

While browsing the Scientific American web site, I also came across a recent (May 19, 2009) podcast about U.S. President Obama’s message to graduating students at Arizona State University. He was quoted as saying:

“We too often let the external, the material things, serve as indicators that we’re doing well, even though something inside us tells us that we’re not doing our best…”

The podcast notes that a new study about to be published in the Journal of Research in Personality confirms that the achievement of material objectives has no influence on a person’s happiness:

Based on a survey of 147 alumni from two universities, achieving ones’ goals leads to a great deal of satisfaction. But there’s a caveat: it depends on the nature of those goals. The survey was administered twice, once a year after graduation and then 12 months later.

Their research confirmed that achieving material and image-related goals has zero impact on happiness, and can actually lead to guilt, anger and physical symptoms like headaches and stomachaches. But graduates who focused on, and achieved, a level of personal growth, close relationships, community involvement and physical health rated themselves as happier, with fewer physical problems.

My parents were always concerned that I should have a “prestigious” degree, that I should have higher grades than anyone else, and similar nonsense. On the contrary, they always attacked my social interactions and my involvement in the broader university community as a “waste of time”. And in fact, I felt very guilty about doing so well in the Engineering Science program because I had never wanted to enter the program in the first place.

The podcast continues Obama’s quote as follows:

… that in fact the elevation of appearance over substance, of celebrity over character, of short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

I’m talking about an approach to life — a quality of mind and a quality of heart; a willingness to follow your passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame; a lack of regard for all the traditional markers of status and prestige — and a commitment instead to doing what’s meaningful to you, what helps others, what makes a difference in this world.

Listen to the podcast here.

In the previous post, I described how my father suddenly suggested that I should write an article for Scientific American. One of the reasons that I found this so strange is that I am certain he had never read the magazine in his life.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Alice Miller and Children of Trauma
3. Gifted program in Mississauga

I am not including this post in the ongoing series numbering primarily because it is out of chronological order, but also because I think its theme is important enough that the post should stand on its own. There is a widespread belief that intelligence and sociability are inversely correlated; gifted children are commonly stereotyped as being socially awkward and unpopular, especially in high school. I not only think that this stereotype is untrue, I think it is perniciously harmful. It is especially harmful in the case of gifted adolescents of Asian descent, who are basically hit with the double whammy of being stereotyped as socially awkward for two different reasons.

The essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular” by Paul Graham recounts his high school experiences, which one might infer to be typical for nerds. (While he attended high school in America and I in Canada, I think the high school cultures in the two countries are similar enough that his observations apply to Canadian high schools as well.) He wrote:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Considering that the people he spoke to were all nerds, I’m surprised that either none of them pointed out the obvious logical fallacy here, or he did not deem it sufficiently important to address it: namely, the fallacy of the biased sample. Most people are not popular, by definition (as surely as half of all people have below-average intelligence — a very scary thought). His experiences in high school are typical not only for nerds, but for almost everyone.

Separate out a group of high school students by practically any characteristic — those who enjoy listening to country music, those who always dress all in black, those who are bilingual in English and French, etc. — and the chances are that the majority of them will not be popular. I don’t think that intelligent children innately have lower social skills, on average. In fact, my observations suggest just the opposite: that intelligent children actually tend to be more outgoing and expressive. And that is precisely why they are the ones who create the most voluminous, visible, notable, and memorable public declarations of their group’s unpopularity. So a strong correlation certainly exists — not between being intelligent and being unpopular, but rather between being intelligent and being articulate. There are plenty of unintelligent, unpopular high schoolers who suffer mostly in silence.

A moment’s thought will reveal why there do not appear to be many essays written by people who were both nerdy and popular in high school pointing out that there might not be a correlation between being intelligent and being unpopular. The situation is asymmetrical: while lonely people have the time to analyse their social isolation, popular people do not have the time to sit around analysing their popularity. Furthermore, people who are both intelligent and popular know that, most of the time, it’s not worth challenging the consensus on issues which are not really that important, even if the consensus is wrong.

But I am challenging the consensus on the relationship between intelligence and social awkwardness, because I think that the stereotype is very harmful to gifted children, especially those who have authoritarian parents. I think that there is a subset of gifted people whose talents are expressed primarily through interaction with other people, and that to expect them to be socially isolated is to deny them the full use of their potential. (In fact, I think that this subset is identical with the entire set — my observation is that even nerds who believe that they are socially awkward tend to underestimate how social they actually are and the role that other people have played in their academic success.)

I know this because I am one of these people, and throughout my life my parents have worked continuously to destroy my social relationships in order to force me to conform to what they consider success, doing enormous and irreparable harm to my scientific career in the process. The question naturally arises as to why they would do this, and the answer lies in the stereotype that academically successful people tend not to be very social, in addition to a “cargo cult” type of thinking. They apparently believed that I would become more academically successful if forced me to become socially isolated.

I have written previously on how parents from non-Western cultures attempt to acquire Western symbols of prestige for their children through imitation, without a true understanding either of what those symbols actually stand for or of the real process through which they are obtained, as well as on how Chinese parents re-inforce each other’s delusions about parenting when they get together. One of the things that Chinese parents like to say about their children is that they spend a lot of time doing their homework, and correspondingly, very little time socialising, based on the stereotype that intelligent people are less social. Social isolation was deemed to be a sort of virtue, and a necessity for academic success. My parents were always livid that they could not say those things about me. (I’ve noticed that while Asian parents emphasised the amount of time their child devoted to reading their school textbooks and doing homework, Westernised parents — and also the teachers — placed the emphasis on the child’s interests and activities. My teachers and my friends’ parents were always praising me for these — and hence indirectly for how little time I spent doing what my parents wanted me to do.)

In a previous post, I mentioned how my academic success in high school was actually due to my popularity, and I would like to elaborate on that here, because the belief held by my parents that socialising and academic success are incompatible is one of the most damaging dogmas of authoritarian parenting.

Authoritarian parents try to control the social lives of their children and see their children’s peers not as their friends but as their competitors. I wrote above that I don’t think gifted children innately have lower social skills, but I think that in some cases they may develop social awkwardness because of authoritarian parents who are always exerting pressure on them not to be social.

My parents insisted that going out with my friends or chatting on the phone were a “waste of time”, a belief that they held incorrigibly over my protests. I found it very insulting and irritating, but there was nothing I could do to dissuade them from badgering me to cease my social activities. They kept up this criticism throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school, despite my repeated insistence that I knew best for myself how to make use of my own time and with whom I should associate. Each instance of being harassed for socialising rather than “studying” (according to their narrow definition) was a mere irritation. But, summed up over a lifetime, the result was dozens of missed opportunities which have radically derailed the trajectory of my life and devastated my career.

By the time I entered graduate school, I constantly found myself in socially awkward situations which would otherwise not have been awkward had it not been for the actions of my parents. I always had to be on guard that my parents didn’t find out about my academic activities that they didn’t approve of, and the thoughts of the routes through which I might be found out and how they would punish me were always on my mind. This meant that I was distracted all the time and could not focus all of my attention on my research. My parents had also insulted a large number of people who would be or might have been my colleagues and collaborators, and I always felt very embarrassed around them as well as unsure of how my parents would react if they knew that I was working with them. I had to limit my public exposure in ways that might appear socially awkward to those who did not know my motivations. Over time, these habits had developed into a general sense of nervousness around people with whom I would have been extremely comfortable in high school. I will relate some of these socially awkward situations in the ongoing series on the causes of my depression. But here, I will describe my parents’ criticisms of my social life in high school, which will plant the very first seeds of my inability to socialise with my colleagues later in graduate school.

The belief of authoritarian parents that the more time a child spent socialising, the less he would have to study for school, is quite simply wrong. It depends very much on how that time is spent. Almost everything I learned in high school was learned from other people or by interacting with other people. It’s not the quantity of time spent studying that is important, but the quality — which can be greatly enhanced through social interaction.

I have already written in detail about being the founder and editor-in-chief of my high school’s literary magazine. This gave me experience with running both an organisation and the latest desktop publishing software. I have also alluded to being the captain and student coach of the school’s mathematics and computer science teams and organising study sessions and holding tutorials. Clearly, these activities were academically beneficial even though I did not receive any course credit for them, though my parents did not see it that way. I had to know the subjects pretty well in order to coach others or to hold tutorials.

Because I was involved in all of these activities, was a year or two ahead in some classes, and was very socially active, I developed a reputation that I was everywhere and could do anything. I was nicknamed “Superman”, because I supposedly resembled Dean Cain, who was playing Superman on television at the time — and I wore dorky glasses.

Regardless of how much I benefitted from my extracurricular activities with my friends, they were never welcomed in my parents’ house, unless we were working on a school project together — and even then we could do nothing but work while we were there if I wanted to avoid being criticised later. My parents never spoke to my visitors or, for the most part, even acknowledged their presence. They would never ask me any questions about my classmates except for one: what their marks were, so that mine could be compared with theirs. They would also always find something to criticise about them — people to whom they had never even spoken. If someone’s marks were too low, my parents would call him a bad influence and tell me to stop associating with him. They were always telling me that my classmates were just trying to take advantage of me because I had the highest marks in the class. My mother would especially say this about the girls, on which I will comment below.

In contrast, when I visited the homes of some of my friends and classmates, their parents would greet me by name, offer me food and drinks, and talk to me about school as well as other things. Even if I were to take my parents’ uncharitable interpretation of their actions that they were only seeking to take advantage of me, I have to ask: so what? If my classmates and their parents thought that they had something to gain by talking to me, it was because they valued my opinions. When my own parents were continually criticising my conduct and my interests, why shouldn’t I associate with people who expressed admiration for them? Who doesn’t prefer the company of people who appreciate his ideas over people who are always dismissive of them?

Everything that an authoritarian parent does results in the opposite effect of whatever was intended. The more my parents criticised me for spending too much time helping other people, the more I enjoyed being in the company of my classmates’ parents who appreciated that I was a positive influence on their child and told me so. Furthermore, the fact that my parents appeared to dislike someone in proportion to how much lower his or her marks were compared to mine gave me a reason not to put any effort into raising my marks once I was ahead by even a small margin. Finally, repeatedly telling a teenager that his friends are a bad influence on him, regardless of whether they are or not, pretty much ensures that he will seek out people who will actually be a bad influence. I think that I had a pretty good influence on my friends, as they also had on me, but I knew people who rebeled against their authoritarian parents by deliberately associating with people whom their parents did not like. Pre-emptively punishing someone for something he hasn’t done (and might not even have planned on doing) just gives him a reason to go do that very thing.

The most annoying aspect of my parents’ criticisms of my social life came from my mother, who continually complained about the fact that most of my friends were girls. Now this I really could not stand. What kind of a mother is displeased that her son is too popular with girls? But this appeared to be a common complaint amongst Chinese mothers of sons, and probably partially explains why Chinese guys are stereotyped as being too shy to talk to girls (and especially non-Chinese girls) — because they would have to put up with their mothers’ torturous complaints and interrogations afterwards, even if their mother only witnessed them having a brief conversation with a platonic female friend. It’s rather like how some police officers are reluctant to fire their weapons, because then they would have to file hundreds of pages of reports. I think this is yet another very damaging aspect of traditional Chinese culture, in terms of stunting the social development of children who are raised in it.

The majority of the phone calls I received came from girls, which was how my mother knew I had so many female friends. There are actually very good reasons why I spent so much more time with girls than with guys in high school (I mean, other than the obvious fact that I was a red-blooded heterosexual teenaged male). Girls are simply more social than guys. They spend more time on the phone; when a guy called, it was to quickly compare answers or to arrange a meeting, but when a girl called, she might keep me on the phone for hours (which no guy would ever do). They are more likely to work in groups and discuss homework problems with other people. Whenever my friends and I used to organise tutorials and study sessions, inevitably almost everyone who showed up would be a girl. Guys are generally loath to ask for help from another guy, and especially when there are girls around. This meant that I was often in situations where I was the only guy surrounded by half a dozen to a dozen girls.

Besides being, on average, more interested in school than their male counterparts, my female schoolmates were also more likely to participate in extracurricular school activities outside of sports. Other than my brother and myself, most of the members of the editorial committee for the literary magazine were girls. The editors of the yearbook were girls (though I made only a minor contribution, I spent a lot of time on the phone with one of them because she was a close friend). Most of the members of the math team in my year were also girls, but that was partially my doing, because I had asked them to join. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any girls to join our computer science programming team — but I tried.

(One of the adults who supervised the mathematics competitions — I think it was a school superintendent — noticed the unusual gender composition of our team, and asked me how our school had gotten so many girls interested in competitive mathematics when most of the other teams were all-male. I was very tempted to answer that it was due to my sex appeal, but I replied that it was probably because nobody in the other schools had bothered to ask any girls to join their math teams. I think this is true; while guys sought out competitive situations on their own, girls had to be invited to participate in them. A social stigma is attached to any girl who appeared too eager to compete, while no such hindrance existed for guys. The mathematics competitions had both individual and collaborative components, and I actually think that our team did better on the collaborative components than the all-male teams because of our composition.)

My participation in these activities guaranteed that I received a lot of phone calls, mostly from girls, on a regular basis. In addition, I had the highest marks in many of my classes, and my classmates — again, mostly the girls — would often phone me to discuss the day’s lessons or homework. So I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the stereotype that intelligent guys don’t get a lot of attention from girls in high school, because my experience had been the complete opposite. My observation is that most guys didn’t get a lot of attention from girls, and the ones who did got it because of their confidence, their personality, and their behaviour, pretty much independently of whether they did well in school or not. But on the other hand, the guys who did well in school were usually pretty confident (although for some reason their confidence always seemed to disappear when it came to girls), and girls had a ready excuse to talk to them. Girls would ask me for my number all the time, ostensibly so they could call me about schoolwork, and I would give it to them, tell them that they’re welcome to share it with their friends, and get their numbers in return. I couldn’t understand why apparently none of the other guys who had high marks thought to do this, and hypothesised that it must have been because their parents had brainwashed them into believing that girls would distract them from school and lower their grades. (It obviously couldn’t have been that they didn’t want to be surounded by girls, assuming that they were heterosexual.)

I had a reputation for being a social hub. Whenever one of my male friends expressed puzzlement over how I managed to get so many girls’ phone numbers (or, more usually, a particular girl’s phone number), I would ask him whether he had offered his number to her — and the answer would inevitably be “No”. Perhaps I have a sort of Forrest Gump-like naïveté when it came to getting girls’ phone numbers (and later, their e-mails), but I would always just ask for them and get them. I have never understood why other guys seemed to believe that this was either very difficult or impossible.

But since so many (otherwise) intelligent guys have asked me this, I’ll record my answer here for posterity. To get a girl’s phone number, wait until she talks to you, or make conversation with her. End the conversation by saying, “I’d love to continue talking about so-and-so, but I have to go.” Get out a pen and a small piece of paper, make a fold back-and-forth midway in the latter, and hand both to her. Tell her, “Write this down: five-five-five, blah-blah-blah-blah — that’s my number, call me tonight between eight and nine.” And while she’s writing on one half of the paper, point to the other side of the fold and say, “While you’re at it, why don’t you write me yours.” After she’s returned the half with her number on it, remind her, “Don’t forget to call me — what time?” I don’t ever recall an instance when this failed to get me a girl’s number, although there were probably a few times when she didn’t call. In high school, girls were giving me their numbers so frequently that I started to carry a small pen and pieces of paper already cut to size in my wallet all the time.

I honestly believe that a large part of the reason that I was so successful in high school was that I was a social hub. I really want to clear up a misconception that many parents, and especially authoritarian parents of gifted children, seem to have, and that is that having a lot of friends — and especially those of the opposite sex — is a distraction from school. The exact opposite may be the case for some people, and that was indeed the case for me.

My parents had always assumed that, because I had the highest marks in school, whenever I spoke on the phone the information flow could only be one-way — that I was giving out information but not getting anything in return. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. I would have gladly helped anyone who asked, in exchange for nothing, because I believe in the promotion of science, and I enjoyed teaching.

But the fact was that being a social hub was extraordinarily beneficial to me academically. It meant that I always knew what was going on, and it allowed me to gauge the relative difficulty of the things I had to learn based on what my classmates had trouble with, so that I could adjust my efforts and allocate my time more efficiently. A group of people is always better at picking out important information from the surrounding noise than any single member of the group, and as the hub I would always be one of the first to receive this information. People expected me to know everything, and this became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy — they would tell me things they thought I ought to know.

My parents never liked it that I spent so much time on the phone, but they would especially turn up the heat on the evenings before an assignment due date or a test, when I would be receiving the most number of phone calls. They insisted that I should tell anyone who called that “I’m busy” and not talk to them further, an order that I persistently ignored. They kept telling me that I would not do well if I didn’t stop “wasting time” talking on the phone — and I repeatedly proved them wrong.

It was, in fact, precisely on the evenings before an assignment due date or a test when being a social hub was the most advantageous. The situation was never like what my parents had imagined. What would happen was that one of my friends would call me and ask about A; and I’d tell her, “This is what I think for now, but call me later and I’ll tell you some more.” Then another friend would call and ask about B; and I’d say to her, “I’ll call you back on B, but first tell me what you think of A.” And then a third friend might call and ask about C, and then the first friend might call back, and so on. By the end of the evening, I could explain everything thoroughly from A to Z to everyone and look like a total genius! And not only was doing things this way not a lot of work, but it was actually great fun!

I truly, honestly, cannot think of very many things that would motivate a teenaged boy to do the very best that he could possibly do on an assignment or a test than to spend the entire previous evening on the phone with half a dozen girls telling him what a smart guy and incredible teacher he is, and often with the last words he hears before going to bed being “Goodnight, Superman.”

A lot of my classmates would sleep poorly on the night before a test and arrive very stressed, but I would always sleep very soundly and show up completely relaxed. Naturally, I always did much better than anyone else, and especially the Chinese kids whom I knew had spent the previous evening in social isolation (and completely miserable). And yet my parents would continue to insist that I should be more like them, and that my friends were a distraction. Clearly, there was no way I would give up such an incredibly advantageous academic resource, and obviously it was my parents rather than my friends who distracted me.

So I think that this idea that members of the opposite sex are a distraction from school is very, very wrong, and very, very damaging to children whose parents believe it. It’s even worse — much worse, in fact — than the belief that being socially isolated leads to academic success, which is wrong enough as it is. It’s not like relationships in high school between guys and girls aren’t complicated enough as they are, without adding parental disapproval into the mix. My parents were a large part of the reason I never had a girlfriend in high school, because I never met anyone whom I thought had the intestinal fortitude to put up with them, and especially with my mother.

I have noticed that the best people in many fields, and certainly in science, are those who have a lot of collaborators, and not those who work alone. The myth of the lonely genius who single-handedly comes up with brilliant ideas which have somehow eluded everyone else’s notice is exactly that — a myth. I mean really, who in history has had ideas that changed the world but were not socially well-connected? And yet the myth persists. But I was very fortunate in elementary and high school to have been surrounded by peers and teachers who were interested in learning about a broad range of subjects, and who encouraged me to do the same.

Popularity is very much like money; the more connections you have with people, the more you’re likely to make. When people believe that you’re an expert and come to you for help, you can later turn to them for help when you need it, or you can direct one person who needs help to another who can provide it. An interesting phenomenon which I have observed on numerous occasions is that when a person asked me for information which I didn’t have, and I directed him to a third party who had it, he would often later remember the information as having come from me. So I could see how a person’s reputation as an all-knowing genius could develop very quickly if he was well-connected, which was in fact what happened to me throughout high school.

But my parents started really attacking me for my social activities in high school, and they would continue to do so through university and graduate school. They would criticise my friends incessantly and, later, also my professors and colleagues, and I was repeatedly harrassed for associating with people who wanted to help me advance in my scientific career. There were many instances when I had opportunities to work with some really great people that most others would have envied, but which I didn’t take because of my parents. I felt very guilty about this, but I basically had no choice. It would have been impossible to work with certain people because I would have had to do so while being constantly attacked by my parents. And I just could not concentrate while collaborating with anyone whom I knew my parents would either insult or interrogate me about if they found out I was working with them.

My parents’ criticisms also indirectly prevented me from making a much more effective use of technology, as I have alluded to previously. If it had not been for my father’s negative comments about my writings which I had put online, I would have maintained a blog since the very early days of blogging. I have also had to avoid social networking sites for the most part, because I did not want my parents to discover my social connections. While other people were trying to increase their Google PageRank, I was trying to minimize my Internet exposure to better hide my activities from my parents. So, ironically, despite the fact that I had been writing since high school about how communications technologies would change the way science is conducted, when the technologies finally became widespread, I did not make use of them myself because of my parents’ dogmatic beliefs about what one had to do to become successful.

(I imagine that the next generation of Chinese parents will be pressuring their children to write blogs and join social networking sites, because they will have noticed that these activities are popular among members of this generation; but by then these technologies will be passé, and they will be discouraging or preventing their children from using the next generation of communications technology.)

In Paul Graham’s essay, he observed that “smart people’s lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen”, because in that age range life “revolves far more around popularity than before or after”. I’m a pretty smart guy and those were some of the best years of my life, and in large part because I was so popular. But I suppose that I’m an exceptional case, because those years coincided largely with when my abusive parents were absent from my life. When I was fifteen years old, I was at the top of the world. Everything only started to go downhill after my parents arrived in Canada and decreed that they knew better than I did what was best for me and began to interfere with my social and academic decisions.

My parents have done an enormous amount of damage to my scientific career by continually trying to destroy my social life. The primary reasons I did so well in high school was that I interacted with a lot of people: my schoolmates, their parents, my teachers, university professors, university students, and people I met outside of school. When my parents forced me into an undergraduate program in which I had nothing in common with my classmates, I compensated by finding people who shared my interests and supported me. The situation was not ideal — of course I would have preferred to be in an academic environment which was also socially conducive to what I had wanted to study, rather than leading a double life. But it got me into graduate school in control systems engineering, where, because there were so many Iranians, my schooling and my interests became somewhat re-integrated once again. But of course, my parents would continue to try to disrupt this harmony — and eventually, they would succeed.

I have always learned the most by interacting with a lot of people. I do not know any other way. My parents, in poisoning my interactions with my colleagues by continually criticising and insulting them, were undermining the very basis of my academic success. But nothing that I did or said could convince them that they were wrong, and I have tried everything. One of the major causes of my depression is my social isolation, the feeling that I am an outcast, or a ghost, among my colleagues. I can’t imagine that any of them got to be where they are today other than by studying what they wanted to study, whereas I was not only specifically forbidden to do so, but my parents actually made an active effort to prevent me from doing so. Who else has had to cope with parents with such a visceral hatred of science?

Now, one might raise the objection that it is not science to which they have an aversion, but my disobedience and defiance of their orders. But what is science if not the freedom to question authority, the formulation of hypotheses and the drawing of conclusions based on observation rather than the blind submission to tradition or authority, the courage to think for oneself and to act on those thoughts? Or, one might object that hatred is the wrong word to describe their antagonism towards science, but what else except for the hatred of a thing could possibly cause a parent to disown his or her child for being associated with it?

My parents did everything possible to ensure that I would have nothing in common with my colleagues in academia, firstly by taking away the training and background that I would have shared with them if I had the freedom to carry out my own plans, and secondly by doing everything they could to remove me from their social circles. I have had the experience both of being at the centre of the social network of my academic peers and of drifting along on the outer fringes, and believe me when I say that being socially active and well-connected is important to academic success.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. How I managed to be so successful in high school
2. The causes of my depression, part 6: how Mrs. Mallo saved my academic career
3. The causes of my depression, part 15: the most important thing I did in undergrad

My parents had mostly ignored my writings in elementary school, but I think this was because they had assumed that everything I wrote was “for school”. My father would occasionally pick up something I had written; he would frown or glare at me, or make some negative remarks, but at that time he did not order or pressure me to stop. I think his comments at the time were mostly directed at the school system for what he perceived to be a waste of my time for requiring me to write essays on topics he considered unimportant — or, even worse, fictional stories. I have never witnessed my father reading anything but newspapers and technical books, nor my mother anything but recipes, and to my knowledge neither has ever read any novels or other forms of fiction outside of what they were required to study when they were in school.

I wrote whatever was “in demand” — I received requests from friends, classmates, and teachers for my thoughts and opinions on various subjects, and if some topic or idea was especially popular, I wrote about it. Homework assignments I treated as a kind of “top priority” request, because they had externally imposed hard deadlines. But I was so far ahead in my writing assignments that many were near completion by the time they were assigned, ready to be handed in after putting in some finishing touches. A large part of the reason for that was because I had a lot of friends who were one or two years older than I was. When we got together, they would occasionally discuss their homework assignments, and so I got a glimpse into what was required of me in school a year or two ahead. The open secret with high school homework assignments is that they don’t change very much from year to year.

So I used to write a lot — and I mean a lot — about everything, most of which had absolutely nothing “to do with school”. I wrote poems, short stories, long stories, book reviews, essays on science and technology and politics and religion — I wrote down my thoughts on pretty much everything and anything. I think this was the one aspect of the gifted program in elementary school that had really stuck with me through high school.

In high school, my parents began to really attack me for my writings. Actually, they attacked me for a lot of things, including reading, holding tutorials and organising study sessions for my classmates, founding the school’s literary magazine, being the captain of the school’s mathematics and computer science teams, and going out and socialising. But since I am writing now about my writer’s block, I will restrict myself to their attacks on my writings.

There were two topics that I wrote about in particular which especially earned my parents’ ire, namely, science and religion. My science teachers recognised how far ahead I was of my classmates, and so they encouraged me to begin studying at a level more appropriate to university students. They recommended books (both popular books and textbooks), magazines, journals, and articles to me, which I would read and discuss with them. I also started visiting the University of Toronto’s Erindale (Mississauga) campus and spending a lot of them there, meeting with and talking to people. So I had a pretty good idea at the time of what sorts of ideas were being discussed at the university level when it came to computer science and physics, which were my primary scientific interests.

My interest in science, and the actions that I undertook to learn about various scientific topics and to promote interest in them (as well as in science in general), eventually led to my parents locking me out of the house and threatening to disown me if I continued with my studies. I will tell the full story of how my parents persecuted me for my interest in science later. But I think that the main cause of my writer’s block, as it pertains to my current inability to write anything related to science, and especially to quantum computing, is the fact that my father did everything he could to prevent me from writing my first scientific papers when I was in high school — papers on the very same topics that I am now required to write about to complete a Ph.D. degree.

My father insisted when I was in high school that I cease to write about the physics of computation, on the grounds that I was wasting my time and diminishing my chances of getting into university and graduate school. When I refused to stop despite his harassment, he first began to scream at me whenever he caught me writing scientific papers at home, and then he began to hit me. I continued writing, but elsewhere — at the high school, at the university, at a friend’s home. He then forbid me from visiting the university or my friends, so I just snuck out at night or when I knew he would not be home. This culminated in my being locked out of the house after going to the university library late one night — I came home to find the door locked and the handle of the screen door tied to the door frame with twine. But even this did not deter me — I only made sure not to get caught again. I only finally conceded defeat after my parents threatened not only to disown me, but to disallow my younger brother from attending university, if I did not do as they demanded.

Because of the punishments and threats from my parents, I stopped writing about the physics of computation at the end of high school. And now that I am in the Ph.D. program in computer science — which my father insisted I would never get into if I continued to write about the physics of computation — I am supposed to write a research proposal on the physics of computation.

I just couldn’t do it. All I could think about, every time I sat down to write, was how I could have completed this more than a decade ago, if only I had run away from home as a teenager. To make things worse, after I entered the Ph.D. program, my father kept nagging me for being too “slow” in starting to write my thesis — the very same thesis that I would have been working on over a decade ago if he hadn’t beaten me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing. The way I see it is this: he can either beat me and lock me out of the house for writing what would have been my Ph.D. thesis, or he can pressure me to finish it faster — but he cannot do both. He is the very cause of the problem for which he placed the blame on me.

And this was a very common occurrence throughout my life — my parents would blame me, or people associated with me, for the very things for which they themselves were entirely and exclusively responsible. This will become very apparent as I continue my story.

It might seem like the above would be the main source of my writer’s block and my depression, but that is only a small part of it. Despite being unable to write about science, I continued to write about other subjects — and my parents continued to punish me for writing.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief
3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 2: elementary school, ESL, and fiction

My parents’ rationale for attacking me for spending time studying subjects not on the school curriculum was, according to them, so that I would be more “focused in school”. This is just so wrong on so many levels. First of all, as a matter of elementary logic, it is never possible to get somebody to become more focused on something by continually accusing them of being distracted — because the very accusations themselves are more distracting than anything else could possibly be. Secondly, they have never justified why restricting one’s attention to only what was on the school curriculum was a worthy goal. Indeed, I don’t think that the thought had even crossed their minds that this needed any justification whatsoever. But why should my judgment of the importance of any subject be based on what some committee has decided on a school board? (I have nothing against school boards, and in fact I actually appreciate the difficulty of their work; but the point is that their mandate is to create a curriculum for the average student who is not likely to ever use the material again, and not for the bright student who is actually interested in pursuing a career in science.)

But even if we allow that the goal is to learn the materials on the school curriculum, nothing could be more counterproductive than their behaviour. I cannot even count the number of instances where the topics that they had dismissed as worthless on account of their not being on the school curriculum would either be encountered in a later year, or would be added to the curriculum soon afterwards. The latter situation would occur especially often with topics related to computer science, which in the 1990s saw enormous changes because of the spreading prevalence of the personal computer. (And as everybody knows, computer science classes in high school are a joke, because most of the students knew a lot more about computers than the teachers.) By continually harassing me for studying subjects which were not on the school curriculum — that is, the current school curriculum for that specific school year — they were effectively punishing me for being very far ahead of everybody else. This had a very detrimental effect on my concentration, because when the time finally came that the topics which they had attacked me for studying actually appeared on the school curriculum, all I could think about was how my parents had called those very topics “worthless” and had punished me for studying them just years earlier. To make matters even worse, they would then attack me further for not being focused on studying the very subjects that they had earlier dismissed as worthless.

To give a specific example that perhaps other people can identify with, I played around a lot with cryptography in high school. At the time, there was a certain popular commercial software security suite, which I won’t name, one function of which was to encrypt and decrypt files. I spent a couple of days studying it, and finally figured out how to decrypt files that had been encrypted on the lowest security setting without having to know the password. (I guess I should acknowledge that I had probably violated the software’s EULA in my actions, but in my defense I was wearing a white hat the whole time.) I was very excited about this, and so I gave a demonstration to my father. His response: “So what? Stop wasting time and go do your homework.” Years later, when I actually had to study cryptography for a course in university, I just could not concentrate on it at all, even though I already knew the material because I had learned it all on my own in high school. And this experience has been repeated a large number of times in classes during my undergraduate years as well as in numerous situations in graduate school. Ironically, some of my poorer grades in university have been in subjects that I had been studying years earlier in high school, well ahead of any of my classmates, because my parents had punished me so harshly for studying those subjects at the time.

How many successful computer security experts got their start by experimenting with weaknesses in commercial security software, as opposed to reading about cryptography from textbooks? More generally, how many scientists became leaders in their fields by performing experiments on their own rather than waiting to be taught from a curriculum designed by someone else? For that matter, I don’t think it’s possible to become successful in any intellectual field by not pursuing one’s own interests and waiting to be told what to do and what to study by someone else.

Because of my interest in the physics of computation, I was very far ahead of my classmates in the technical subjects, especially mathematics and physics. I had been going to the library and reading college and university level books on science since elementary school, at the suggestion of my teachers. It’s just common sense that if you study ahead you’ll get good grades. I will return to my interest in the physics of computation, and my parents’ opposition to it, in later posts. But here, I want to especially emphasise that it was my interest in topics that apparently have nothing to do with science that allowed me to do so well in high school.

In those days, I used to drag everyone else into things that I was interested in. I had acquired the habit because my elementary school teachers in the gifted program had encouraged me to do so. So I made the mistake of telling my parents about my belief that there would be a shift in global politics in the near future and that religion would re-emerge as a significant geopolitical force. This was in the late 1980s, at the end of elementary school. My parents ridiculed the idea at the time, but I held on to it. When they saw that I continued to pursue the idea in high school, they began to criticise me for “wasting time” on a “worthless” subject. They kept insisting that my pursuit of the idea distracted me from school and lowered my grades, and persisted in applying pressure to prevent me from continuing to study the subject.

One of the most annoying things that my father did whenever I told him anything was that he would ask, rhetorically, “Who says that?” And then he would answer himself with “I’ve never heard anybody say that.” In a way, it’s a very minor thing, but I think it illustrates something very deep about the authoritarian mentality. It was always about the who and never about the why. He never once asked me, “Why do you think that?” or “What made you come to that conclusion?” In any case, whenever I did give him an answer, he would always come back with “I’ve never heard of him.” (People whom he had never heard of prior to my mentioning their names to him include Samuel Huntington, V. S. Naipaul, Kurt Gödel, and Stephen Hawking.)

I want to state for the record that the reason I did so well in high school was precisely because of my interest in religion and its re-emergence as a major force in global politics. Furthermore, it was because of this interest that I had the opportunity to do many of the things that I did in university and in graduate school, which I will talk about later. It may appear at first that religion has nothing to do with most of the subjects taught in high school, but actually, a person who really studies religion — by which I mean he is reading serious academic sources rather than apologetics — will touch upon almost every facet of the high school curriculum.

There is, first of all, the enormous advantage of knowing different languages. I had attempted to learn Latin and Greek in elementary school, and while I was not successful, I had acquired a lot of vocabulary and had become familiar with the Greek alphabet. Many of the terms used in biology and chemistry were Greek to the other students, but they were perfectly sensible to me. My knowledge of Latin was also extremely helpful in French (which appeared to me to be a sort of corrupted Latin — although I would advise not repeating this opinion within earshot of any Francophone). And finally, while other students struggled with Shakespeare, I had read the King James Bible cover-to-cover and selections of Milton, so Shakespeare was child’s play. (Incidentally, you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.)

Next, there is the inescapable fact that religion has shaped many of the important historical events in the West. As I went to a Catholic school, the histories of Europe and of Christianity were naturally already part of the core curriculum, but even then, there are many things you can learn about those subjects that they will not teach you in the classroom. (The indiscretions and shenanigans of some of the previous Popes comes to mind.) But my interest in the impact of religion on the world led quite naturally to a pretty thorough study of world history: the Silk Road, the expansion of the Arab Empire, the various Caliphates, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and so on. It was also because of this interest that I studied modern utopian political movements such as Nazism and Communism.

In addition to the linguistic advantage in biology, I was already familiar with the theory of evolution because I had been observing the attempts by fundamentalist Christian creationists to subvert science in the Unite States. About the only non-technical subject in which I owed my success to something other than my interest in religion was art, and that was because I read a lot of comic books, yet another activity of which my parents disapproved.

My point is not that one should study religion to get ahead in high school — so don’t go packing your kids away to Bible school. Nor am I saying that one can just ignore the school curriculum, or that one can cover the entire curriculum even if one spends most of one’s time studying something else. In fact, my study of the re-emergence of religion as a politic force left very large gaps in my coverage of the curriculum. But it never hurts to have additional knowledge, and I want to stress this point, because my parents were always dismissing anything that they did not immediately see a use for as “worthless” and “frivolous”. I suspect that the same is true of other authoritarian parents, and my experience is that not only are they absolutely wrong, but their imposition of this misguided belief on their children is extremely harmful. I repeat: it never hurts to have additional knowledge. There is no such thing as worthless knowledge, only dullards who lack the creativity to put it to use.

To give an example of what I mean, we had to learn about the two World Wars in history class. The way the class was structured was that there was a core set of topics which had to be covered, and which focused mainly on the European powers, the United States, and Canada. But some fraction of the time was allotted to a set of topics that the teacher had some flexibility in choosing between, depending on the directions taken by class discussions and so on. At the beginning of the course, my knowledge of the core materials was probably about as much as that of any other student who retained what they had learned from Remembrance Day. But I knew a lot about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the repartitioning of the Middle East, the establishment of modern Israel, and the independence of India and Pakistan from the British Empire. So what I could do that other students could not was to introduce these topics into the class by hanging them off the main topics. And this ensured that a part of the course was taken up with topics which I already knew, which in turn saved me the trouble of having to study. (I’m lazy that way. I was always on the lookout for ways to become extremely efficient so that I could reduce my workload.) And on top of everything else, my contributions to classroom discussions pleased my history teacher greatly.

There were of course students (mainly Asian) who studied the way that my parents kept pressuring me to do. I don’t deny that they often had good grades in technical courses such as mathematics, but this was usually offset by average or even low grades in other areas. I had high marks across the board, and in fact I had the highest marks in all of the mathematics and most of the science classes, and also in many non-technical classes as well. Furthermore, I was a year ahead in mathematics. So clearly I had far better study habits than my classmates who obeyed their authoritarian parents, and if my parents’ goal had been to ensure that I obtained high marks, there was absolutely nothing for them to complain about. Instead, they would harass me or scream at me when they found me reading books that were not “for school”, yank them out of my hands while I’m reading, and on occasion even hit me with them.

But the worst part was that they kept pressuring me to alter my study habits to be more like that of the other Chinese students. My parents would describe my classmates as “hardworking” and “obedient”, and tell me that if I didn’t stop “wasting time” on “frivolous” subjects then they would overtake me. This made no sense whatsoever. I had much better grades than they did, so if I adjusted my behaviour to become more like them, the only outcome that I could foresee was a lowering of my grades. And to make matters even worse, these very same classmates would ask me at school about my study habits so that they could become more like me. So I would come home from school, having just spoken to a guy who had asked for my help with his homework and who wanted to know the secret to my success, and my parents would nag and scold me because I wasn’t more like that guy. I don’t think anybody who hasn’t experienced that situation firsthand can understand the comedy and the tragedy of it.

I really, really believe that children, once they have reached the age where they are motivated to learn things on their own, should be allowed to study whatever they want to study. In fact, their interests should be encouraged, whatever they may be. And I also think that parents should never tell a child to stop studying a subject or to stop doing something unless they themselves are capable of having an informed discussion about the subject or activity, in which case they should present their argument for why the child should stop.

There is no quicker way for parents to lose their child’s respect than to disallow discussion when the child knows that they are blatantly wrong. My parents never gave any reason for why they believed that the shift in the role of religion in global politics that I had predicted would not happen, or why it was not an important topic. Instead, they would just call it “worthless”, “frivolous”, “nonsense”, and so on. Not long afterwards, Samuel Huntington published an influential essay that was universally lauded positing that future global conflicts would be between the world’s major civilisations and would arise because of cultural differences. Now, what I had come up with was more focused on the role of religion, and was restricted to the frictions between the West and the Islamic world. But his essay basically agreed with my ideas in broad strokes. So on the one hand, my parents kept calling my ideas “worthless”, and on the other hand, I knew that ideas very similar to my own were being discussed in really high places by really smart people. So how do you think that made my parents look in my eyes?

In the literature on gifted children, parents are often advised to look out for unorthodox ways in which their children may be learning. I learned a lot of what I knew about various topics in applied computer science — programming, graphics, operating systems, and even networking — from reverse-engineering computer games. Whenever my father saw me studying computer science, he would tell me to “stop playing games and do your homework”. So he was disrupting my studies and at the same time accusing me of not studying. After years of being accused of playing computer games when I was actually learning about computer science, I finally gave up and started just playing computer games without dissecting them. This is yet another illustration of how authoritarian parenting is always counterproductive.

In my experience, in every single instance where my parents have managed to get me to stop doing something that I had been doing, it has been to my detriment. I really believe that I would be a lot better off today if my parents did not prevent me from doing a lot of the things that they labeled “a waste of time”. This will become clear in subsequent posts when I relate my experiences in university and graduate school, where all these “worthless” and “frivolous” things would turn out to be vitally important.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. How I managed to be so successful in high school
3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview

There were three interweaving strands in my high school life: academics, school-related extracurricular activities, and interests altogether outside of school. I was very active, both academically and socially, during this period, and I can truly say that I was successful in high school in every sense of the word. Some people do well in school at the expense of their social lives, and others are popular but don’t get good grades. I was not only at the top of the class, I was also one of the most popular people in the entire school. (Of course this statement is very subjective, but I will cite as evidence in its favour the fact that I was the only person with perfect attendance at every social event at which I was present.) As everyone knows, in high school there are social cliques which, while not technically mutually exclusive (and thus are not real cliques according to the computer science usage of the term), have only a minimal degree of overlap. I was one of the few people who moved freely in and out of different cliques, and I always had more invitations to social events than I had time. I was also quite well known in other schools.

I think that people, and especially parents, who believe that academic success is incompatible with social popularity and extracurricular interests are not only wrong, but have it entirely backwards. I wasn’t just successful and popular, I was so successful precisely because I was so popular. The fact that I participated in a lot of activities and interacted with a lot of people both in and outside of school not only did not hinder my schooling, but was the very reason why I had such high grades to begin with. And this fact was something that my parents simply refused to accept. They began to attack me for this during high school, and they would keep up their attacks throughout my undergraduate years and even into graduate school. They just would not stop, despite being repeatedly shown to be wrong. I have accomplished a lot of amazing things in my life, and as I tell my story it will become crystal clear that I would have never had the chance to do any of those things if I had obeyed my parents. I have been successful precisely to the extent that I have been able to get away with doing what they forbade me from and even punished me for doing; and where I have failed, it has never been for any reason other than their interference.

People kept asking me in high school what was the secret to my success, and my answer was always the same: just do whatever you’re interested in doing. Of course, this can be very difficult with authoritarian parents who insist on controlling what can and cannot be studied at home. But what I found especially tragic was that I observed a lot of people who did not have authoritarian parents, and who essentially had the freedom to choose whatever they wanted to study, would nevertheless impose restrictions on themselves by choosing their courses based on what they think would please their parents or teachers, what credits they think universities expected them to have, and so on. My own experience has been that by studying what I found interesting, I always covered what I needed to learn for school as a side effect. In fact, I often ended up in positions where I had already finished doing something that I was then subsequently asked to do. Of course, I would then present the finished product in zero time and look like an absolute miracle worker.

I cannot emphasise enough just how wrong authoritarian parents are when they insist that spending time on interests outside of school results in lower grades, or that having an active social life is necessarily a distraction from school. In the next several posts, I will relate my own experiences of how these were actually the keys to my academic success.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief
2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
3. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future

There are several things holding me back from posting what I have written, the primary one being that I suffer from a pathological perfectionism — I cannot bear to let anyone else know about a project that I’m working on until after it has been completed, for fear that someone would deliberately act to sabotage and derail my efforts. I was not always like this; in fact, once upon a time, I used to drag everyone I knew, and even many people whom I didn’t, into anything that I was involved with. The reason for this drastic change in my behaviour will become crystal clear as I tell my story. The gist of it is that I was punished so severely by my parents for being talented and popular that I no longer wished for my talents to be known in public. And this of course has been very damaging both to my professional life as well as to my personal life.

I have a lot to say about gifted children and bad parenting, and what it is like to grow up as a gifted child with abusive parents. I think that I have some very important insights into why some people who were supreme overachievers in their youth end up being mediocre or even underachievers as adults. There must be many, many people like me, people who were gifted children and who as adults have been prevented from achieving the fullness of their potentials by the selfish actions of the people around them — and who are suffering in silence because the steps that are necessary to recover from their situation are too painful to take. I can certainly speak to this myself.

Besides having to fight the irrational fear that other people are working against me to prevent me from accomplishing my goals — it is irrational because the only people who have ever opposed me have been my parents, and in fact everyone else have always been very supportive of me — there is also the concern for privacy and the apprehension about being judged. There is simply no way that I can talk or write about my current situation without telling my life story, and no way to tell my life story without revealing private details about not only my life, but those of the people around me. And because those are some of the very people whom I specifically do not want to inform about this project while it is still under way, I cannot really ask for their permission, nor is that something I would want to do. I will give whatever private details are necessary for the telling of my story. If some people are upset by this, then too bad for them.

It is much more difficult to overcome the apprehension about being judged. The people who are the most prone to being in the kind of situation in which I find myself are precisely those who come from authoritarian cultural backgrounds, where the taboos against defying authority — and especially the imperative to honour one’s parents and to uphold the family name — are the strongest. Growing up in Hong Kong, these ideas and values were repeatedly drilled into our heads. It was certainly nowhere as stereotypical as in some Western representations of Asian culture, such as found in some movies, television shows, and comic books, where you had to duel to the death to defend your family honour. But there was a very strong sense in which there were certain things you must do, or must not do, because it would tarnish the reputation of your relatives. And many of these imperatives and prohibitions are in direct conflict with modern Western values. Of course, the very idea that anyone should have to bear the consequences of an individual’s actions other than that one individual in and of itself goes against the principle of individual liberty.

I think I must have had it worse than most other people of a similar background. On the one hand, I am the firstborn and a son, as is my biological father; my paternal grandfather had one elder sister, but he is essentially also a firstborn son. So I am supposed to carry on the family name and be responsible for behaving in a certain expected manner. On the other hand, I was recognised as a gifted child in elementary school, at a time when I was living away from my parents, and my teachers always encouraged me to explore my creativity and give freely of the outputs of my talents to the world. My grandparents, with whom I was living at the time, basically allowed me to do more or less what I wanted to do, which was to live up to my teachers’ expectations to the best of my abilities. They really didn’t have a choice, as their English was limited and thus they could interpret what was happening at school only through my and my brother’s explanations. Once my parents re-entered my life, however, they began to insist that everything my teachers had taught me was wrong, and that I should not do what my teachers had specifically encouraged me to do. I found this especially heinous and hypocritical, because they would at the same time brag to others about how their children were enrolled in the gifted program.

The chief cardinal virtue of Confucianist Chinese culture is filial piety, and many of the things I shall write will viciously violate this so-called virtue. I am not supposed to criticise my parents, and especially not in public. This is considered to be a very shameful thing to do. The way I see it is that it is their own actions in and of themselves which are shameful, not the fact that I am publicising them. But I think that this apprehension about being judged to be unfilial keeps a lot of people in my situation from doing what is necessary to recover from it. I am really ashamed of my biological parents, and this is something that I have to live with every single day of my life. This fact will not change whether it is kept private or made public.

For me, a larger part of my apprehension about being judged comes from the worry that I may sound very immodest in some of the things I write in relating my personal experiences. I cannot help this. In elementary and high school, everyone routinely called me a “child prodigy” and a “genius”. Even during my undergraduate days, I met plenty of people who told me that I was the smartest and most talented person they had ever met. I have always thought, whenever anyone said that to me, that that person must not know very many people. If it helps to give a little balance, things like that haven’t happened very often for a number of years, and I feel that I haven’t accomplished very much with my life given the potential that everyone except for my biological parents attributed to me as a child. I consider my biological parents to be the sole and exclusive reason for my lack of success relative to the high expectations that everyone else had of me, and I believe that if they had died while I was in high school, I would be spectacularly successful today. If that is immodest and unfilial — so be it.

My parents are by far the most selfish and despicable people I know. At the same time, they are probably not all that atypical for parents from authoritarian cultural backgrounds. This may sound contradictory, but the fact is that how other people raise or abuse their children has no effect on me. Furthermore, I suspect that most other people who have parents like mine end up acquiescing to their demands and expectations; probably very few have fought for as long and as hard as I have, and thus faced the reactions that I did. Even so, I wish that I had defied them much more than I had actually done — in retrospect, I gave in to them far more often than I should have. My single biggest regret in life is that I did not run away from home as a teenager in high school.

Now that I have openly written about the things that I was the most apprehensive about making public, the rest are just details. Of course, some of these details will be difficult to write about; some will transform internal conflicts into external ones, which may bring me a lot of trouble, but I will deal with those as they arise.

I had originally wanted to write my autobiography in chronological order, but there are certain themes which thread through time, and in some cases it turned out to be better put those in their own dedicated posts. But I am going to try to keep things in more or less chronological order as much as possible.

Even though I am going to post the pieces of my autobiography in public as I finish them, I may not reply to, or even look at, the comments right away. I apologise in advance for this. As I explained in the beginning, I don’t want to be derailed, and so I don’t want to be exposed to anything that might change my mind about what I intend to write or have already written. But I do want to know what opinions other people have of my predicament, so please do leave comments, and I will read and reply to them when I feel that the time is appropriate. I would especially like to hear about the experiences of other people who may have had a similar upbringing. There are probably many such people out there, who may feel that they are alone and that no one else can relate to their experiences. This is something that I have often felt myself.

Before I continue, I would like to thank Mina for her love, support, and encouragement. Without her, I would not have overcome the initial hurdle of telling another person — anyone at all — about many of the things that I have written and will be writing about. And that was a very important first step in my decision to write this autobiography. I would also like to thank Dr. Neil Gibson at UW Counselling Services for his assistance. And finally, I would like to thank everyone who has helped me throughout my life. There are many people to whom I feel I owe an explanation and even an apology for my decisions and my actions. Many of you may be wondering why, when I had been blessed with such good opportunities to accomplish great things, I let so many of them slip by. In every single instance, it was because my parents had forced me to do so. Nevertheless, I feel responsible for what I have done and for what I have failed to do, and I will feel a little bit redeemed when I am finished telling my story.

– davinci

No related posts.

I had actually been reading the Bible in English since my arrival in Canada. My grandparents were given a copy when they were sworn in as citizens. Since they couldn’t read it, they said I could have it, and I used to read it every day. In grade five, the Gideons came to our public school — in fact, into our classroom with the teacher’s permission — and gave each of the students a pocket edition of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, with a red leathery cover. I used to carry it everywhere and read it whenever I had the chance. Nowadays that sort of blatant proselytism of immigrants and children would probably not be allowed inside a public institution. But I don’t think that I was ever harmed by it — in fact, quite the opposite. By studying the Bibles, I not only learned about Protestantism and other sects of Christianity, but also vastly improved my vocabulary, became familiar with archaic and other literary forms of English, and began to think about problems of translation between languages. So I don’t think the Bible should be kept out of public classrooms, as some people do — it is one of the most important documents in Western civilisation, regardless of one’s beliefs about it, and one can learn a lot from it.

Since I was at a Catholic school, I tried to memorise the Vulgate in Latin and read the New Testament in Greek, but I wasn’t successful. Nevertheless, my exposure to these classical languages would prove very useful later in high school science. Also, I developed the ability to memorise lengthy texts in languages I didn’t completely understand, which would become very useful later as well. After I devoured the books on Roman history and Catholicism, I expanded my interests to history and religion in general. I spent a lot of time visiting libraries and bookstores. In fact, I spent most of my time on extracurricular activities but very little on schoolwork, but I did really well because I was already so far ahead, and I was continuing to study ahead. My parents hadn’t yet caught on to the fact that I wasn’t “studying” according to their definition of studying, but my academic freedom would soon come to an end.

At the end of each school term, there would be a parent-teacher meeting where the parents would come in and discuss their child’s grades and whatnot with their teachers. When I was in Whitby, I would serve as my grandparents’ translator because they didn’t speak English. So I knew what sorts of things were being said about me: “tell David that it’s great that he’s reading all these books, encourage him to explore this-and-that, etc.” They also gave us pamphlets on how to raise gifted children, which I read because my grandparents couldn’t. But when my parents returned from the parent-teacher meetings, they would say things such as “Your teachers say that you’re always distracted by things other than your schoolwork. Stop running around doing all these extracurricular activities.” I am certain that that’s not what they said — but it’s what my parents heard. They always turned a positive into a negative.

When my parents arrived in Canada, my brother and I were at the top of almost every subject — so we must have been doing something right. There were other students who were also ahead in math, but they weren’t very good at art, or they were excellent writers but didn’t know about history, or whatever. But we were good at almost everything, and we got that way by doing all the things my parents didn’t want us to do. As the saying goes: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But my parents insisted on interfering with everything.

We had to hide our comic book collection, because if my father saw it he would scold us for wasting our time and money — but we were doing so well in art class because we were inspired by comic books! So we were allowed to read a textbook on art if it was assigned by the school for a class, but we were discouraged from looking at or producing actual art. And whenever my father saw me on the computer, doing something he didn’t understand, he would tell me to “stop playing games”, even though what I was actually doing was learning about programming, operating systems, and so on. I was in elementary school at the time, and most of my peers would even not learn about these things until university. So my father basically prevented me from getting even further ahead than I already was.

On the other hand, he had some books on computer science from when he went to university or from work, and he would allow me to read those. But they were limited to certain subjects only, basically: programming, databases, and graphics. (He also had some manuals on things like word processors and operating systems, but they only told you how to use them, not how to build them.) Outside of that, my father discouraged me from reading. For example, I couldn’t read books on game theory at home because he thought they were about computer games, which of course were “a waste of time”. But what really angered my parents were the extracurricular books on subjects which they didn’t understand, which my teachers had encouraged me to read because I was ahead of the class.

One of the most common things that you hear everywhere about raising children is “encourage your children to read”. But my parents were just the opposite. They continually discouraged me from reading. Whenever my father saw me with a book, he would ask, “Is that for schoolwork?” Even the asking of the question bothered me. What was wrong with reading books which were not on the school curriculum? The teachers in the gifted program had specifically advised parents to encourage their children to read outside of school! If I answered “yes”, he would leave me alone. But most of the time I would answer “no”, because I had a distaste for textbooks assigned by the school. In the gifted program, even the teachers often ignored the official curricular texts. I would always find interesting books on my own, and bring them in to discuss with my teachers — I found that I learned a lot more that way. But my father would say, “Stop reading and go to your room and study!” Now, in Chinese, the verb “to study” literally consists of the characters for “to read” and “book” — I always found it ironically amusing that he would tell me to stop reading, followed by an order to go to my room and read.

So all the time, my parents were going against what the literature on parenting and gifted children said to do. They received advice and literature on gifted children from my teachers, but they ignored the advice, and I am certain they never read the literature, which said to encourage reading, pay attention to and praise your child’s interests, look for unconventional ways to stimulate and challenge them, etc. These are common sense things that apply not only to gifted children, but I think really to all children. I think the only reason they wanted us in the gifted program was so they could brag about it to our relatives.

I continued to read despite my parents’ discouragement. Whenever they saw me reading, they would try to get me to stop, but I ignored them. My father would raise his voice, and sometimes he would shove me, but I would just leave and go read somewhere else. Both of them would disparage my interests — there are some Cantonese expressions, which don’t really translate into English, but which basically mean “frivolous”, “nonsensical”, “worthless”, “impractical”, and so on. They would nag at me using these expressions: “You’re always reading nonsense”, “Stop wasting time reading about worthless things,” etc.

But the most annoying thing wasn’t that they kept disrupting my studies — it was the fact that they took credit for everything I did while doing so. They would scream and yell at me at home for doing whatever, and then when a teacher or another parent mentioned how great it was that I was doing that exact thing, they would take credit for it, without the slightest trace of a recognition of the incongruity. They were always praising themselves for what excellent parents they were and criticising everyone else’s parenting.

I am very fortunate that I always had excellent teachers. My teacher in grade six, Mr. Watters, taught the class what I now consider to be the most important subject I have ever studied: logical reasoning and the formal and informal fallacies. I was dimly aware of certain patterns of erroneous reasoning that I had encountered over and over (especially in the religious literature I had read). And now I had names for them! To determine the truth of anything, it is necessary to understand and apply logical reasoning correctly and properly. So this was a tremendous boost to my ability to understand a lot of other things. I think this topic should be introduced into the regular school curriculum, because there really is a lot of hucksterism in politics and religion and generally just out there in society, and logic is a really effective defense against being fooled. Another amazing thing that Mr. Watters did was to allow me to do my math homework in hexadecimal. I mean, how cool is that?

There was a shelf in one of the classrooms with books that we could just pick up and read. I was introduced to quantum mechanics at around this time, by a book that was there called “In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat”. From that I learned a lot of the names of big physicists, and went to the library and looked them up, and so on. So I read a lot of physics books, and I learned a lot of things that would later show up in high school. Before this I had wanted to be a mathematician, because I was good at mathematics, but in those years I became more and more interested in both computer science and physics. And I became especially interested in Richard Feynman, because he was a physicist who also directed his attention to computation, and because his books were fun to read. He really impressed on me that the life of a scientist can be very fun and exciting. My parents’ attitude had always been that “fun” and “work” are two separate things.

I thought a great deal at the time about what made a great scientist. I realized that the scientists whom I admired the most were those who dedicated their time and energy towards the betterment of society. All were people who not only made important contributions to their fields, but also did other notable things. Some made science accessible to the public, such as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman. Others shaped important historical events, such as Alan Turing, and of course numerous scientists during World War II and the Cold War. I said to myself, “Well, there’s obviously no such thing as ‘the number 1 scientist in the world’ — but being a number 1 scientist means promoting science and using science to improve the world.” So by the time I began high school, that was what I had already decided to do.

So near the end of elementary school, I asked myself the question: “what are going to be the main defining geopolitical issues of my generation by the time I became an adult?” I considered overpopulation and climate change and other big issues that were often discussed in the news. But I wanted to find an issue that I could contribute to as a part of my continuing studies into computer science and physics, and one which other people had not yet started paying attention to but would become very important in the future. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the USSR was about to collapse and the Internet was just getting popular.

I realized that the one topic which tied together almost all of my interests was the resurgence of religion in international politics. This may seem completely outlandish, but it made a lot of sense to me. In the United States, Christianity was becoming more intertwined with government — this process had been accelerating since after World War II, when “godless Communism” became the primary ideological enemy. Fundamentalist Christians were trying to inject creationism into science class. Perhaps biologists are best equipped to refute many of their erroneous arguments, but computer science also deals with complex, evolving, and self-replicating systems, and I could see the errors in the creationists’ claims very clearly.

But I thought that it would be the encounter between the West and the re-awakening Muslim world that would have the most impact in the international arena at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I had studied the Crusades, and knew that the conflict between Christianity and Islam was not resolved and was only dormant, and thought that Islam would soon re-assert itself on the international stage. The reasons are too complex to go into here; and besides, these things are now common knowledge. But very briefly: many non-Arab Muslim-majority countries had undergone a process of Islamisation in the 1970s, a decade with two oil crises and which ended with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The 1980s saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War, the first of which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the second of which led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, both in the early 1990s. The Internet was also becoming popular at this time. Through it and other mass media technologies — you don’t have to be able to read to listen to the radio or a cassette, or watch a videotape — Western (and in particular, American) culture penetrated into formerly isolated Muslim societies, some segments of which held what are essentially medieval views of the world. And what they saw wasn’t necessarily the best parts of Western culture either!

All of this was very interesting to me. The West took hundreds of years to evolve into societies with certain ideas of individual rights, freedoms, and liberties — with a considerable amount of blood spilled in the process. Concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion (and perhaps more importantly, freedom from religion) developed alongside communications technologies which made the wide dissemination of heretical ideas possible. The Industrial Revolution and the mechanisation of manual labour meant that men moved from farmland into cities, women joined men in the workplace, children could enjoy childhoods relatively free to engage in their own pursuits, and so on. Many predominantly Muslim countries absorbed all of these modern technologies and immediately had to deal with their social consequences, without having gone through all the intermediary stages that Western societies had gone through. And of course the traditional authorities, the religious leaders and so on, didn’t like this and had to contain it. But they couldn’t shut out the technologies, and so what they did instead was to produce their own cassettes and videotapes, put up their own websites, and so on, promoting their views about the world. They had to pro-actively attack Western ideas and Western values, because the best defense is a good offense. So what you had, basically, were men with medieval ideas about the world armed with modern communications technology (and modern weaponry), who weren’t too thrilled about the West.

I realised that information and communication were going to be very important to this encounter between the West and the Muslim world. In the latter were these societies that were closed to the outside world before, where their religious leaders could tell their followers, “this-and-that group of people aren’t true Muslims”, “all non-Muslims are infidels and are our enemies”, etc. And they had a captive audience, because the people didn’t have access to any other information. And then here come these channels through which these people could learn that, just maybe, the outside world isn’t like what their leaders had taught them, that other people have different beliefs — beliefs totally contrary to theirs — not because they are obstinate, not because they are ignorant or haven’t been exposed to “true Islam” or whatever; but there are people who have actually studied and thought a lot about religion and have come to completely different conclusions, for whatever reason. So one of two things could happen. Muslims could learn from the last four hundred and fifty years or so of European Christian history that sectarian violence is a very bad thing, that theocracies tend towards tyranny, that different beliefs should be allowed to compete in the free marketplace of ideas, and so on; or they could ignore all that and learn it the hard way — by repeating the mistakes for themselves, perhaps at the cost of tremendous bloodshed. And the difference between the two was the communication of information, and that was something I could study as a part of computer science. Thus, I began to learn Arabic.

And that was how I ended elementary school: with the intent to study computer science and physics, and a belief that religion, and in particular Islam and the Muslim world, would become very important topics by the time I became an adult — a belief that motivated me to learn more about history and politics and religion and linguistics and many, many other things. And the entire time that I was getting books from the library and studying these things, my parents dismissed my interests as worthless.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
2. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program

The first thing that had an impact on my academic attitude that I can remember happened when I was just beginning school. In Hong Kong, report cards came not only with grades, but with a rank. Initially, I thought that the higher the number, the better — that’s just obvious, isn’t it? I wanted to see how high the number would go, so I studied really hard and, to my complete bafflement, my rank began to drop. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was somewhere between 1 and 10. So I asked my paternal grandmother what I should do to get to number 10. I thought that 10 was a really impressive number — because it had two digits! She laughed and explained that the best number is “number 1″. So I told her, “okay, from now on, I’m going to be number 1.” And I was! This is the first instance that I can remember of being really motivated to do something. I did it because of the reward — making my grandmother happy. I have always tried to keep my promise to my grandmother to be the best that I can be at what I do.

I begin with this story because authoritarian parents, such as my own, believe that children can be impelled by the threat of punishment. I have never observed this to work in my entire life, and I do not believe it is possible. My parents were very strict, and my father used to beat us when he felt that we had misbehaved. For example, once my maternal grandmother gave my brother and me some money, and we spent it on a comic book and a set of jigsaw puzzles. When my father came home, he screamed at us that we were wasting money and beat us with the back end of a feather duster. Even then, I understood that this was unjust. It was our money, and we could have spent it on far worse things. But it was always like this — whenever we crossed some boundary we weren’t supposed to cross, he would beat us, and we never had any prior warning.

I was born in Hong Kong two decades before its handover to the Communist government of mainland China (incidentally, on the birthday of Alonzo Church). Like many Hong Kongers, my family wanted to immigrate to the West. My paternal grandparents came to Canada before us, and settled in Whitby, which was a small town at the time. I visited them when I was two — my first trip abroad. When I was eight years old, my younger brother and I left for Canada to live with them while my parents remained in Hong Kong.

Of course, as immigrants, the first thing we had to do was adjust to the new environment. Fortunately, English was the official language of Hong Kong at the time, and we had learned it in school. Unfortunately, it was the Queen’s English, and I learned very quickly through embarrassment that the words “rubber” and “toilet” had different meanings than what I was used to! My parents had tried to control our television viewing in Hong Kong, but I had sneakily watched some American television while they weren’t around: “The Amazing Spider-Man”, “The Incredible Hulk”, and a few others. If my parents had known, I’m sure my father would have beat me. But here’s why punishment doesn’t work: I was motivated to watch television because I wanted to improve my English, so that I would be “number 1″ in my English class and to impress my grandmother in Canada, where I knew English was spoken. My disincentive was that I would be punished if I was caught. But this didn’t deter me — it only meant that I was careful not to get caught!

When my brother and I used to play in Hong Kong, he always insisted on being “the good guy”, and I accommodated him. It turned out that this actually worked to my advantage upon our arrival in Canada. “The Transformers” was all the rage among our Canadian classmates, and everyone else had the toy of Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots. Naturally, my brother wanted one as well, but it was sold out everywhere. On the other hand, I asked for and received the toy of Megatron, the leader of the opposing faction, the Decepticons, as a Christmas present. Now, Megatron transformed between a gun and a robot with a giant cannon mounted on his arm that is powered by a black hole — and of course his toy is the most awesomest toy ever made.

Incidentally, I also went to the library and got everything I could get my hands on about black holes. I had heard of the “theory of relativity” before from television or wherever, but I didn’t know what it was other than that it was some big important scientific concept. From then on I became interested in astrophysics and cosmology, and I started reading books on popular astronomy. I was eight years old at the time.

Anyways, in those days the laws on toy guns were quite lax, so I would bring Megatron to school every day. (Never mind the law — nowadays the school would get locked down and you will get arrested or maybe even shot!) It was an enormous hit and made me very very popular, because the twenty Optimus Primes on the schoolyard had no one to fight against. So I was always in demand. When my teacher told me to “put the toy gun away” after recess, my classmates immediately came to my defense: “Miss, that’s not any toy gun — it’s Megatron!”, “yeah, that’s right”, “it’s really cool”, etc. Even the girls! So of course I gave the teacher a demonstration of the transformation, and she agreed: “That is absolutely incredible!”

Now, normally, you don’t find something that pleases everybody. If kids liked something, it was a mystery to adults; and if adults thought something was cool, it was immediately uncool to the kids. And typically girls weren’t interested in “boy toys” like guns or transforming robots, but for some reason a gun that transforms into a robot really got their attention. (Make of that what you will — I’m sure Mr. Freud would have something to say about it.) So I learned that it actually pays to be different. You could be cool by doing what everyone else was doing — or you could be even cooler by doing what nobody else has done! This idea made a huge impact on me, and I think I was extremely fortunate for that epiphany. One of the traits which is commonly associated with gifted people is social awkwardness, and I never had it as a child, because I have never associated being different with rejection by my peers.

Actually, there were a few incidents where other kids tried to bully us, some racist taunts and so forth. But I think it was mostly the fact that we were new to the school. If we had been fat or had a lisp or whatever, the bullies would probably have made fun of that instead. So we got into a few fights, but we tried to avoid that whenever possible. Now, one time these two kids were following us during recess and calling us names. I think we were in grades three and two at the time, and they were in grade five or six, and in that age range there is a considerable difference in size. But these kids just would not leave us alone. So finally my brother and I jumped them and pummeled them into the ground. I mean that quite literally — it had been raining and the ground was soft and muddy, and after the fight the shapes of our opponents were imprinted into the ground, like in a cartoon. We were both pretty injured ourselves and got into trouble, and I broke my glasses, which got me a lot of flack at home, but the teachers understood that we were being bullied and were only defending ourselves. After that we had everyone’s respect in the schoolyard — we were heroes! And I also learned that bullies were really cowards, because once the fight started they wailed like babies, and I was never afraid of bullies after that.

Since we were away from our parents, my brother and I could watch television and read comic books. As new immigrants, we had to attend ESL classes. Most language textbooks are very poorly written: “this here is a verb, this is its past participle, yadi yadi yada”. I thought, “well, this is certainly a really stupid way to learn a language!” How we really learned English was by watching television and reading comic books, and talking about them with our friends. We were also really lucky to have had an enthusiastic ESL teacher, Ms. Graham, who read Robert Munsch to us. I realized then that most textbooks were useless — they were written for people who had no interest in a subject but were forced to learn it. But I wanted to advance my English. From then on, whenever there was a better way to learn something, I’d ditch my textbooks — and I soon found myself outpacing the rest of my class in every subject.

And I had an enormous head start in mathematics already. When I left Hong Kong, we had just learned multiplication, and I had deduced division based on the analogy with addition and subtraction. One day, my teacher asked the class to collect those little tabs that you get when you buy a bagged loaf of bread. She told us that we were going to learn some exciting mathematics in a few days. I really looked forward to it, and when the day came — we were going to learn how to count! This was in grade three. So the Hong Kong school curriculum was much more advanced in terms of mathematics. I also caught the attention of a teacher, Mr. Twilleger who was an amateur mathematician, and given additional personal tutelage.

Another thing that really helped us was that we had a personal computer in the house, which belonged to our uncle. This was a big thing back then — it was an IBM XT. He would allow us to use it when he was at work. I learned about telecommunications from spending a lot of time on BBSes, and a lot about programming by reverse engineering games with a debugger and assembler, and of course Boolean logic and binary hexadecimal numbers and so on. So I was already learning a lot about computer science even before computer science was commonly taught in schools.

Because my brother and I were so far ahead of our classmates, we were tested and diagnosed as gifted. I was transferred to another school, where coincidentally Mr. Twilleger had become principal. But it didn’t last very long, because our parents arrived shortly afterwards in Canada, and we moved to Mississauga to join them.

– davinci

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