About the keyboard:

• The app is a keyboard. Please do not say that “it doesn’t work” because “I see only squares”. A keyboard does not help you to render fonts or shape glyphs. This software is meant only for people who can already display Persian on their phones, but have no means of input. With that being said, I understand that many people who are looking for an input method for Persian are also looking for a way to display it. Just don’t confuse the two functionalities. (For information on how to display Persian, read on to the next section below.)
• There is nothing sinister about the warning that the software may see sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. It can see anything you type when it is the active keyboard — and so can every other soft keyboard. It does not do anything with this information except to use it to guess what you’re typing. If you don’t want your password or credit card number to be read by the app, just switch to the default Android keyboard when you need to type something secret. (Unless, of course, your password is actually in Persian.)
• On most devices, you have to enable an input method after it’s installed by going into Settings, and to switch input methods you hold the trackball or long-tap with your finger in a text input field. These depend on the operating system, and are not things that I can change.

On installing a font and rooting your phone:

• To display Persian on Android, it is not sufficient just to install a font. You also need to get the system to join the glyphs and to display them in right-to-left order.
• To install a font, you will need to root your phone. Instructions can be found by using a search engine.
• If you are unable to follow the instructions yourself, or cannot find someone who is physically present to take you through the steps, it is unlikely that anyone can help you online. It’s not a trivial task in most cases, and nobody wants to be responsible for accidentally bricking your phone. I will try to help, but please understand that your request is non-trivial. Furthermore, please see the remark above about it not being sufficient just to install a font. Even after a font is installed, there is still a lot of work to do to display Persian on Android. If you do not understand how to root a phone yourself, you will very likely not understand how to go through the rest of the process either.

About displaying Persian on your phone:

• FarsiTel has just announced a Persianised version of Android. If you have a newer Android (2.1 and up) and want a completely Persian ROM, start your investigations there. Note that this solution includes a keyboard also (and it is a different one from mine).
• You can also try Arabic Android for displaying Persian. Yes, it’s designed for Arabic, but it works for Persian also. You may have to pay to obtain right-to-left functionality. Look for the “Arabic Android” app in the market once you have the appropriate image from the site installed.
• There is an app on the Android Market called “Persian Browser” that will enable font-shaping in the web browser only. If your browser displays Perso-Arabic glyphs but don’t join them or display them right-to-left, you can download this app to fix the problem.
• To use these ROMs/apps, you may need to root your phone and/or install fonts. See the section above.
• Disclaimer: I am not involved with these projects, and (to my knowledge) neither is my employer.

And, finally, I cannot make any comments about the state of official support for Persian on Android due to the terms of my employment. This is my personal web site, and is unaffiliated with my employer. Anything I write here about Persian support on Android reflects my personal opinion only.

The original post (from Nov. 16, 2009) follows.

I recently got a new smart phone — an Android-powered HTC Dream. As I wrote in a previous post, one of the first applications that I always look for is a multilingual dictionary, or at the very least a way to enter input in languages other than English.

It took me almost no time to write up a Persian Soft Keyboard, which I have put on the Android Market. (If you’re viewing this page on an Android device, you can download the application directly by clicking this link.)

Because Android is open source, it was remarkably easy to learn how to use the SDK. Unfortunately, despite this, there are a number of design decisions which make it difficult to enable Android devices for the Persian language (or many other languages). For one thing, it is impossible for the average user to install a new font, and the default fonts that ship with most Android phones don’t cover character sets outside of the Latin-based alphabets. For another, built-in support for complex text layout is very incomplete, and that includes the bidirectional text display and glyph-shaping which are essential for properly rendering Persian text.

I can understand the decision to leave these features out, since space is limited on most Android devices. However, this means that users who use languages other than English end up having to go to a lot of trouble to get these languages to work, such as downloading versions of applications capable of handling their specific language. It would have been much simpler if the base Android system had been packaged with a font that covered the Unicode characters for the most common languages in the world and applications that were aware of how to lay out their writing systems.

As things are, even with a Persian font installed, most applications still don’t display Persian text properly because of directionality and glyph-shaping problems. I’ve included an option for the Persian Soft Keyboard to output Unicode presentation forms, i.e., glyphs which are already shaped and joined. Even though this option does not comply with the Unicode standard, it allows readable Persian text to be entered into and sent through the default SMS application, for example. (Whether the recipient will be able to read the message at the other end is another issue.)

Currently, I’m bundling a simple note pad and a translator application with the Persian Soft Keyboard package. At the moment, the available note pad applications can’t handle right-to-left text, and the available translators don’t do glyph-shaping correctly. I hope that more Android software authors make their applications aware of languages other than English, because I don’t really want to support or maintain applications which are redundant.

– davinci 11843

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian

I’ve always considered Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1935 decree requesting that the country formerly known as Persia be referred to as “Iran” by foreign governments with which it had diplomatic relations to be a mistake. Naturally, once governments began to refer to the country as Iran, their citizens followed suit. This change at once led to a severing in the Western consciousness of Iran from the Persian culture of classical antiquity, and also created a situation in which the name of the country can easily become confounded with that of its neighbour and recurrent rival, Iraq, a name which entered the mainstream vocabulary of Western languages only in 1932 with the founding of the Kingdom of Iraq in that year.

Actually, in Arabic and Persian, the names Iraq and Iran sound quite different, and they are not very similar to each other when written in the Perso-Arabic script: عراق vs. ايران (note especially that they begin with two distinct vowels). But when written in English, they differ by only one letter at the end, and to an Anglophone ear, they sound almost the same (especially after they have been absolutely butchered by certain supposed speakers of English).

I believe that, had Iran retained its traditional exonym of “Persia” in English and its analogue in other Western languages, it would have been much more difficult for policy makers in the West to manipulate public opinion about the country. Imagine Western leaders trying to vilify a country named “Greece” (“Wait a minute — you mean the Greece of Socrates?”) as opposed to one named “Hellas” (“You wanna know where those Hell-asians can go?”).

The United States, for example, has backed both Iran and Iraq at different times against the other, switching sides whenever it was convenient to do so, and hardly anyone even noticed. This would have been just slightly more difficult if the two countries had noticeably different names. Considering the way these two countries flipped between being allies and enemies of the United States, they might as well have been named Eurasia and Eastasia.

The names of the two countries in Chinese are just transliterations of their names in their respective native languages into Chinese characters based on pronunciation in the Mandarin dialect. As can be seen from the photo above, Iran is transliterated as 「伊朗」 (yī​ lǎng​), while Iraq is given the transliteration 「伊拉克」 (yī ​lā ​kè​). They both begin with the same character 「伊」 (yī), which can lead to confusion, since the first character of a country’s name often serves as an abbreviation for that country in Chinese once context has been established. For example, 「伊軍」 can mean either “Iranian army” or “Iraqi army”, depending on the context. Of course, if these two armies are fighting one another, a Chinese writer or speaker will by necessity have to refer to the combatants as 「伊朗軍」 and 「伊拉克軍」. Incidentally, Israel is transliterated 「以色列」 (yǐ ​sè ​liè​), with a different first character, sparing anyone reading about the recent history of the Middle East in Chinese from even more confusion.

Another interesting confusion related to the name of Persia/Iran is the old Chinese name for the country, 「波斯」 (bō​ sī​), which was originally a transliteration of “Parsa”. Because what is considered the standard dialect for the purposes of communication changes with the political tides as well as with geographic location, and Chinese dialects may differ in their pronunciations of the same character, and the pronunciations of the dialects themselves have shifted over time, the name as it is pronounced today bears only a slight resemblance to “Parsa”. (Complicating matters further is the fact that “Parsa” itself has undergone a change in pronunciation in Persian. In fact, the Iranian province that is situated in historic Parsa is today called “Fars”, due to the fact that the Arabic-speaking conquerors of Iran in the 7th century CE did not have the phoneme “p” in their language, for which they substituted “f” instead).

Coincidentally, however, the current transliteration of Bosnia into Chinese, 「波斯尼亚」 (bō ​sī ​ní ​yà​), begins with the characters for the old Chinese name for Persia. I have encountered more than a few Chinese who thought that today’s Bosnians are (or are related to or descended from) the Persians described in Chinese history. To add to the confusion, the appellation “Persian” was applied not just to what we would today call “Iranians”, but also to the inhabitants of Greater Iran, i.e., Persians, Medes, Parthians, Sogdians, Bactrians, and so forth. “Persians” are one of the more common non-Han ethnicities encountered in the wuxia genre of literature, where they are portrayed as followers of a religion which mixes together elements from Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam, and in which a sacred fire figures prominently. The fact that “Persians” are vaguely misremembered as Muslims (when, through large spans of history, Persians in China would have been Zoroastrians, Manichaens, or even Buddhists) and Bosnians are thought to be a mostly Muslim people further cements this misidentification.

As an example of this mix-up, these two reviews in English of the classic wuxia television series 「天蠶變」 both make repeated references to “Bosnia” and “Bosnians”, when in fact a part of the story takes place in Central Asia or Greater Iran, and the characters are intended to be the natives of these regions.

Another example of the anachronistic association of Persians with Islam in Chinese culture is the English title given to the movie「武林聖火令」, namely, “Moslem Sacred Fire Decree”. Neither “Muslim” nor indeed anything related to Islam appear in the original Chinese title of the movie, or (to my knowledge) in the movie itself. The word “Moslem” in this case seems to have been a shorthand for “pertaining to a religion originating from Persia (or thereabouts) which we’re too lazy to properly name or research”. Clearly, any Persians tending to a sacred fire would most likely have been Zoroastrians, and were certainly not Muslims.

Dr. Ehsan Yarshater, in a communication published in Iranian Studies (vol. 22, no. 1, 1989, pp. 62-65), argues for the use of the name “Persia” for the country when writing or speaking in English. (The text of his originally untitled communication may also be found here, where it has been given the title “Persia or Iran, Persian or Farsi”. Strangely, this copy of it seems to have been typed up by someone else from the original, as it introduces a number of typos, and also replaces “Rumi” with “Molana”.) He notes that the words “Persia” and “Persian” have positive connotations in English, which the words “Iran” and “Iranian” lack:

The adoption of the name Iran no doubt undermined the country’s cultural reputation and dealt a severe blow to its long-term interests. To educated people everywhere the name Persia is associated with a number of pleasing notions that in the main emphasize the country’s cultural heritage. One speaks of Persian art, Persian literature, Persian carpets, Persian miniatures, Persian mosques, and Persian gardens, all of which attest to a general refinement of taste and culture. It is true that Persia also brings to the Western mind the Persian wars with Greece, and the home of an absolute monarchy that is often contrasted to Greek democracy; but even then Persia does not evoke the image of a weak or backward country, but rather of a robust and mighty empire. Its biblical associations are particularly favorable because of Cyrus freeing the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and his assistance in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.

To his list can also be added “Persian cats” and “Persian food”. He writes in a similar vein about the use of “Farsi” for the name of the language instead of “Persian”:

An egregious consequence of continuing use of the name “Iran” and its disassociation with “Persia” is the recent currency in English of “Farsi” instead of “Persian.” Soon we should probably witness, as a result, the severance of the connection between “Persian,” in phrases such as “Persian poetry” and “Persian literature,” and Farsi or, for that matter, with Iran. Days would not be far away, if we persist in using “Farsi” for Persian, when people would think that Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Hafez wrote in a dead language called “Persian,” hardly anyone realizing that “Farsi” is the same language in which one of the most exquisite literatures of the world is written.

The Society for Iranian Linguistics maintains a page with some links to opinions by several Iranian (uh, I mean Persian) linguists on this topic. Iranian.com also preserves a thread on this topic from Adabiyat, a scholarly discussion list for Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, and related literatures, in which some strong opinions are expressed. (At the present time, Persian.com redirects to a dating site.)

I agree with Dr. Yarshater that the name for the country in English should be “Persia”, and that its language should be called “Persian”. To repeat two arguments that many others have already made, we don’t say “Deutschland” for Germany or “Zhongguo” for China when speaking in English, and furthermore, it is in fact an honour for a country to be called a name in a foreign language that bears little resemblance to its name in its native language, an honour earned through a long history of interaction and cultural exchange.

The situation for the name of Iran in Chinese, however, is a little more complex. Currently, there is a possibility of some confusion with the name of Iraq. But if it reverts back to the old transliteration of “Parsa”, the country will most certainly become confused with Bosnia in Chinese language media, or at the very least a much stronger association between the two countries than actually exists will be drawn in the minds of Chinese speakers, in the short term. In the long term, however, I believe that this will actually clear up the confusion.

The same type of relationship occurs between the names of India and Indonesia in the Chinese language, that is, the Chinese name for India, 「印度」 (yìn​ dù​), begins the Chinese name for Indonesia, 「印度尼西亞」 (yìn​ dù​ ní​ xī​ yà​). But in this case, the name of Indonesia actually does derive from the name of India, whereas no such etymological relationship exists between the names of Persia and Bosnia. Nevertheless, speakers of Chinese never mistake “India” for a shortened, corrupted, or archaic form of “Indonesia”, and the reason is that “India” is still being used for the name of a country.

The government of Iran/Persia should really have protested when the modern Chinese transliteration of Bosnia first appeared, but since nothing was done at the time, Bosnia has inadvertently usurped the cultural associations connected with Persia in the Chinese imagination. The only way to repair the damage would be for the government of Iran/Persia to vigorously insist that it is the country formerly known as 「波斯」 in Chinese history and literature, whatever its current name is now.

Persia is Iran, Iran is Persia, Iran is not Iraq, Persia is not Bosnia.
波斯是伊朗，伊朗是波斯，伊朗不是伊拉克，波斯不是波斯尼亞．

– davinci 11779

Update (Sept. 14, 2009): I added a link to Dr. Yarshater’s original communication in Iranian Studies, and also edited the quotations to reflect the original text. I also added the Standard Mandarin pronunciation in pinyin after each of the country names.

No related posts.

I actually have the CD version of Colloquial Persian, even though the box says it’s the cassette version. When I ordered the book and CD package, they were out of stock, so they shipped me the cassette version instead, along with the CD (which can be purchased independently). I guess nobody was buying the cassette version any more, and they were overstocked.

– davinci 11776

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian
2. Persian Soft Keyboard and Applications for Android

I often end up using a program called Yudit, a Unicode editor written by Gáspár Sinai, even on a system that has native integrated support for multiple input methods, because it’s available on a wide range of systems and I’m familiar with the input methods bundled with it. For example, even though the same input method is supposedly available on both Microsoft Windows and through SCIM, there may be slight differences in the keyboard layouts that can result in typos if one is not careful.

It seems that the majority of wireless handheld devices ship with only one input method. Yudit does not appear to run on any of the major mobile operating systems, but it would be overkill anyway, since people aren’t likely to want to edit entire Unicode documents on their cell phones. On the other hand, it would be useful to be able to switch input methods, even if only to type a few words into an e-mail, or to look something up in an online dictionary.

In adapting input methods designed for personal computers to cellphones, one immediately runs into the problem that what would have been a single keystroke on a full-sized keyboard becomes a key combination or a series of taps on a keypad. With the predictive text systems used on some cellphones, one also runs into the problem of textonyms.

I wanted to see if I could port some of Yudit’s input methods to a mobile environment, so I ignored these problems for the moment and assumed, for the sake of simplicity, that the device had a full-sized keyboard. I also decided to write a Java MIDlet, because these can be run on a number of different mobile platforms. (Yudit itself is written in C++.)

Even this simplified version of the problem turned out not to be so easy. I tried using the TextField and TextBox classes in the javax.microedition.lcdui package, and while I was able to capture the user’s input and replace it with the appropriate Unicode, neither class handled bidirectional text very well.

I tried mixing the Chinese-CJ (Cangjie), Devanagari, and Farsi input methods (used for entering Chinese, Hindi, and Persian text, respectively), and the result was that my little program became very confused. On some emulated devices, the left and right arrow keys would move the cursor left and right, respectively, while within the Persian text; but on others, the effects of these keys were reversed, as were the effects of the backspace and delete keys.

It would probably take a lot more work to get any of these input methods working properly, but this was only a first attempt, which I wanted to document in case anyone else wanted to try something similar. Also, it’s possible that I would have been more successful if I had used UI libraries specific to a company or manufacturer, such as RIM’s net.rim.device.api.ui package, rather than the generic (and hence not as powerful) javax.microedition.lcdui package.

I’ve included several screenshots of what my little experiment looks like when run on Sun’s Java ME SDK mobile emulator with a generic device, as well as on RIM’s BlackBerry emulator with two different devices. The Devanagari did not render at all on the emulated BlackBerry devices. There were also some small layout problems, which I didn’t fix since this was only supposed to be a quick experiment.

Screenshots of experiment on Sun’s generic emulated mobile phone:

Screenshots of experiment on RIM’s emulated BlackBerry Curve 8300:

Screenshots of experiment on RIM’s emulated BlackBerry Tour 9630:

Considering the size of the mobile device markets in China, India, and the Middle East, getting different input methods to work in a mobile environment is an important (and potentially financially rewarding) problem to tackle.

– davinci

No related posts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– davinci

Related posts:

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

I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China. This was, of course, complete nonsense. I don’t recall many students from a mainland Chinese background who didn’t drop out by second year. The majority of them had formed a clique, and worked and socialised only with each other. As soon as a few of them started dropping out, most of them dropped out because they no longer had their support group. The only ones who made it past second year were those who did not restrict their coalitions to classmates from a similar background — in other words, those who adapted to become more like their Canadian and Westernised classmates. I had only one classmate of Chinese descent who had comparably high marks, and he was fairly Westernised (and I think he might have been born in Canada or the United States).

In any case, my father held what he imagined to be the typical student from mainland China to be the epitome of the university student: someone who had no goals aside from maximising his grade point average and spent all his time on only that and nothing else. Never mind the fact that I could clearly see for myself that those of my classmates who actually had his kind of mentality were all struggling to even pass, and failing — he insisted that I should behave more like them. Furthermore, he declared that, while I did not believe him now, I would soon find out in graduate school how right he was.

I had actually thought a lot about the demographics of my future colleagues while I was in high school, but at that time I had wanted to study what would now be called quantum computing, and had no intention of entering into engineering. I believed that my future colleagues would be mostly white, largely secular, and with a somewhat disproportionately high number coming from Jewish backgrounds — these were the typical demographics in many cutting-edge fields of science. On the other hand, those of Chinese descent would be underrepresented, especially in comparison with their general overrepresentation in more established areas of science and engineering. The reason for this is the Chinese cultural preference for staying away from anything deemed novel or risky, and sticking with things which are seen to be traditional or safe. My father was the perfect exemplar of this attitude. He refused to accept the rationale I offered for my interest in theoretical physics, namely that there is a deep connection between quantum mechanics and computer science which was largely unexplored, on the grounds that he “had never heard anyone say that”. (The implication that I was not anyone did not go unnoticed, either.) Clearly, if I wanted to do cutting-edge scientific research in certain areas, very few of my colleagues would be from a Chinese background, except for those who were highly Westernised. And yet my parents kept pressuring me to restrict my social circle to those of Chinese background only.

I could see for myself, both in high school and as an undergraduate in university, that every single one of my classmates who behaved according to my parents’ ideal did very poorly in school. I had no reason to believe that it would be any different in graduate school, whether it was in computer science or in engineering.

The top students in Engineering Science in my year came from a variety of backgrounds, but those of Chinese descent were underrepresented, while Iranians and Jews were overrepresented. In fact, the two students with the highest averages were a pair of Iranian guys who were cousins. The highest average in the class that was two years ahead of mine also belonged to an Iranian. This overrepresentation of Iranians among the best students in one of the top engineering programs in the West did not surprise me; it reminded me of the preponderance of German-American physicists during World War II, or of Russian-American scientists and mathematicians during the Cold War.

As I have written about previously, I chose to focus on control systems because this allowed me to study several subjects that I wanted to learn more about in a context that was acceptable to my parents. The demographics of my graduate school labmates was a bonus, because it meant that I could also learn Persian within the same environment. My Master’s thesis was based on previous work carried out by an Iranian former member of the lab, and I received a lot of help on my research from my Iranian labmates. Incidentally, my supervisor, Dr. Raymond Kwong, has a similar background to my parents. I had thought that, because of this, they would not criticise him — but they did anyway.

I had been studying information retrieval in languages written using variants of the Arabic script on my own, but my focus had moved away from Urdu because I was no longer in touch with Mrs. Mallo. Because of my labmates, I redirected my focus towards Persian. As I have mentioned previously, I added a section on the Persian language to my web site, but took it down just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks at my father’s insistence.

Despite the fact that my web site was unavailable, I continued to receive e-mails about some of the projects on it. Apparently, it continued to show up as one of the top results on text processing in the Perso-Arabic script in several search engines, and naturally there was now a lot of interest in this topic. After I restored the site (but without the non-English sections), I put up a page on processing various languages in LaTeX because it was one of my most popular requests.

Many people remarked to me at the time how marketable my skills had become, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was told that I would be the perfect candidate for many career paths and job openings which had suddenly become available. It reminded me of what people said to me in high school about my suitability for studying the physics of computation. But I had no formal qualifications in information retrieval or Islamic studies, though I did have some attributes which people with only book learning did not have: I had first-hand experience of fasting through Ramadan, and I had spent the past four years counselling students from Muslim backgrounds who were trying to reconcile their inherited beliefs with what they learned in university. Furthermore, my background was neither European nor Middle Eastern, and I was not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The fact that the historical conflict between Christianity and Islam and the current turmoil in the Muslim world were “none of [my] business” was seen by everyone as something that worked in my favour.

I knew that there would only be a small window of time to take advantage of the opportunities which had become available to me. Others would soon act to fill the niches which had been opened, but I had a head start. Furthermore, I was studying Persian, rather than the too-obvious Arabic, which would buy me some time. After 9/11, I predicted that Iraq would fall and that Iran’s regional status, which had been kept in check by its archnemesis, would be elevated as a result, and that therefore knowledge of the Persian language would be in demand in a few years — a prediction that turned out to be correct. However, my actions were also constrained by the crippling restriction that whatever I did, it would have to be a part of “school”. Furthermore, I was in the middle of my degree, and I wanted to finish it first. But I planned my switch into computer science — which I had wanted to study in university in the first place — around my skills in information retrieval in Persian.

In graduate school, I started becoming a social hub again. Besides hanging out with Iranians while they spoke Persian to each other, I also went to see Bollywood movies in Little India with labmates and friends from South Asia. I had actually started watching Bollywood movies in high school to learn Urdu, and since I had studied Sanskrit (and hence Devanagiri) in university, it meant that I could also read Hindi. (If the previous sentence was confusing to you, see here.) My interest in Sanskrit was shared by Dr. W. Murray Wonham, Professor Emeritus, who remained quite active in the lab in spite of his official retirement.

I socialised with everyone without regard for cultural or linguistic barriers. Many graduate students seemed to socialise mostly with those from their own cultural backgrounds, not necessarily out of any prejudice towards anyone else, but mainly out of convenience and laziness. But because I wasn’t inhibited by either of these factors, I knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew me. I had an international reputation: whenever there was a visitor from Iran or India, I was someone they “had to meet”.

Now, one might argue that being able to recite Persian poetry and knowing a bit of Bollywood trivia are the wrong reasons for being famous in graduate school — but this didn’t matter. (For all I know, maybe Richard Feynman became such a famous physicist because he played the bongo drums.) The point is that I had opportunities to meet and potentially work with people which I never would have had if I had obeyed my parents and acted like a student from mainland China. The only reason that I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities was because I knew that my parents would simultaneously criticise me for associating with my colleagues while taking credit for any work I did with them. I suppose that this was a form of self-sabotage, and this kind of thing would become increasingly common throughout my career. (Having a harsh inner critic and acting in a self-injurious manner are traits common to people with abusive parents.) Meanwhile, my labmates who actually came from mainland China would express to me that they wished they were more social and had more connections, but lacked the proficiency in English and the confidence to make themselves noticed.

My busy social life in graduate school did not escape the notice of my parents, who once again began to attack me for being too popular. Considering that they had been attacking me throughout my undergraduate years for socialising primarily not with my classmates but rather with people who had nothing to do with my schooling, one would think that they would be happy that my social and academic lives had become re-integrated in graduate school.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life in that I kept encountering people who, for whatever reason, decided that I was extremely talented and volunteered to do whatever they could to help me make the most of my abilities. In the long term, I think that my parents’ continual efforts to separate me from these people have been far more damaging to my scientific career than their depriving me of any specific career opportunity. In elementary and high school, they always criticised my teachers, my friends, and my friends’ parents who supported and praised my interests, while demanding that I behaved like my Chinese classmates who had submissively allowed their imaginations to be suppressed and destroyed by their own parents. They accused Dr. Percy of diverting my attention to astrophysics which had “nothing to do with” computer science, when in fact he gave me an enormous head start with my scientific research. They continually blamed Mrs. Mallo for distracting me, when she was the one who enabled me to continue my studies after they had made it impossible to do any work around them. When I entered university, it was my affiliation with people who shared my interest in religion that allowed me to acquire the skills I would later need in graduate school, but my parents insisted that they were wasting my time. And in graduate school in engineering, it would be my Iranian friends who prepared me for my return to computer science by teaching me Persian. Ironically, it was my parents who had put me into an environment with so many Iranians to begin with when they forced me into an engineering program, but this didn’t stop them from criticising me for making the best use of this fact.

When I completed my Master’s degree, both Dr. Kwong and Dr. Wonham asked me to stay for the Ph.D. program. I felt very guilty about turning down the offer, but I had never intended to be an engineer in the first place, and I wanted to return to computer science as soon as possible. My parents had insisted that I obtained a postgraduate degree in engineering, and I had hoped that they would leave me alone to pursue my own interests once I had earned one — but I guess I knew that this would not be the case. My decision to leave was made easier by the fact that my father had started to really dislike my supervisor for no discernible reason (but my guess would be jealousy), and began to insult him and criticise my association with him. I knew that even if I had wanted to pursue a Ph.D. degree in engineering, there was no way I could do so while sustaining a continuous barrage of insults against my supervisor by my father. But I disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering.

I searched for a way to switch into computer science and to do research into both information retrieval and quantum information theory. My parents had always accused me of being distracted and of dividing my attention, but this was my defense mechanism against being prevented by them from studying what I wanted to study. I knew that, at any moment and for no reason whatsoever, they could put an end to my research by forbidding me from continuing, and if I refused, then by continually criticising and threatening me until I was no longer able to continue. They had done this to me in high school, and I had compensated for my inability to continue studying theoretical computer science and physics by turning my attention to informational retrieval and religious studies. Every time my parents prevented me from being able to focus my attention on one subject, I would turn to another. This was how I survived their continual attempts to destroy my scientific career.

Incredibly, one university was a leader in both information retrieval and quantum information theory, and it was in Canada to boot: the University of Waterloo. Even more incredibly, the city of Waterloo was also home to two research institutes devoted to the topics that I cared most about. The first, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), was established by Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), to be a world class research facility devoted to theoretical physics. It fit the description of “a building full of astrophysicists” that I had predicted to my father I would one day be studying computer science in. The second, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), was founded by Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO of RIM, to be a think tank on issues of international relations. (In fact, after the Perimeter Institute moved to its new location in late 2004, the two institutes were located just across the street from one another.)

I felt that it was an incredible stroke of good fortune that everything I wanted to study happened to converge in one place. Therefore, I came to Waterloo.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science

I featured a number of projects on the web site which had nothing to do with school. I posted articles on Buddhism and in Klingon, discussed the design of a really “old school” computer game, and reviewed books. The book reviews page was particularly interesting because I used it to hint at some parts of my life and some of my interests without being explicit; for example, Evelyn Lau’s Runaway was the autobiographical account of a Chinese Canadian girl’s escape from her abusive parents, and V. S. Naipaul’s travelogues recounted his observations about the malaise in the Muslim world.

When I was at the Systems Control Group at the University of Toronto, about half of the graduate students (at least those who showed up in the lab regularly) were Iranian. I learned Persian very quickly by listening to their conversations. So a rumour started about me that I could learn a language just by listening to other people speak it for a week. The rumour was very amusing to me, and I wish it were true. But the reason that Persian was relatively easy for me to pick up was that I had learned (and forgotten) how to speak Urdu previously, and had been writing software to parse Urdu, Arabic, and Persian texts for a number of years. Also, I could memorise songs and poems and recite them without, at first, understanding their meanings. My Iranian friends were very impressed by this, and taught several songs to me.

Some time in the summer of 2001, I added a Persian section to my web site. At around that time, my father criticised me for a web site filled with “frivolity”, and told me that any employer who saw it would laugh at me and not hire me. I knew that was nonsense, because my web site was in fact getting a lot of attention. People e-mailed me about various things on it from all over the world, so at least some people found it interesting, and perhaps these included my future employers. But I took it down while I planned a way to put up a “serious” web site — presumably one that looked as bland as everyone else’s — while still featuring the content that I wanted to showcase.

Then the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened. And V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature. My parents were unusually quiet for the next little while.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program