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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– davinci

Related posts:

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