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by
Fei-Fei Li
Started reading
November 7, 2023
There, we’d engage in his favorite pastimes for hours: hunting for butterflies, observing water buffalo lazing in flooded rice fields, or trapping creatures like wild rodents and stick insects to care for as pets back home.
Butterflies
But history had other plans for people like my mother. As the Cultural Revolution roiled, she remained on the wrong side of generations-old divides cutting across politics and society. She came from a family associated with the Kuomintang, the defeated opposition to the now ruling Chinese Communist Party, an affiliation that doomed her prospects well before her own political identity had a chance to mature.
Kuomintang / Chinese Communist Party
As is so often the case with prejudice, her defeat was the slow, unspoken kind. There was no threat of violence or imprisonment, no conspiracy or scandal, just a status quo that revealed its presence through the passive-aggressive remarks of teachers and administrators, politely but firmly discouraging her, even at her academic peak, from applying to the best schools. Their dismissal, ever-present and stifling, was a malaise that hung over her teenage and young adult years, compounding my grandfather’s sense of aggrievement into a now generational burden for her to carry as well. And it
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Mother
He may have lacked ambition in all but the most childish pursuits, but she reveled in his antipathy toward the social climbing that preoccupied so many of their peers. And although she could be judgmental, even elitist, he was charmed by her fearlessness as she flouted the norms that surrounded them. As their friends hosted fawning dinner parties for their bosses, purchased them gifts in the hopes of earning favor, and talked endlessly about status in one form or another, my parents sat proudly on the sidelines. Even their jobs—his in the computing department of a chemical plant and hers as a
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11.11 @2.35
As a teenager, my mother had endured a long bout of recurring rheumatic fever that silently eroded the tissue of her heart valves and left her with a chronically deteriorating cardiovascular condition in adulthood. She was even warned by her doctors that having a child—me—was too dangerous to be medically advisable. It was a detail that warmed and hurt my heart at the same time; I already owed so much to her renegade spirit, and it was fitting to add my very existence to the list. Now, however, the severity of her condition risked spilling over from an unpleasant chronic illness to an acute,
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Romantic Ferver
The first of my would-be advisors was Pietro Perona, who exuded Italian charm and had no sense of boundaries when it came to interdisciplinary research; he was situated in the electrical engineering department but loved cognitive science and shared my desire to blend the two. Even conversationally, his interests struck me as unusually well-rounded from our first interaction.
First would-be advisor w/ Pietro Perona.
Thankfully, Caltech is the kind of place where fellow obsessives aren’t hard to find. I encountered one in particular outside Pietro’s office, when I heard what appeared to be two conspicuously Italian voices, rather than the one I was used to. I soon learned that the second belonged to a fellow grad student I’d yet to meet. He was tall, with an accent so impenetrable it made Pietro’s practically vanish in comparison, and boasted a head of wildly curling hair that stood out from across the room. He also happened to be in a hurry that day, making for a forgettable first encounter even as Pietro
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First meeting w/ Silvio.
