Diary June 10 2005

How to be myself

It took me an hour to translate the abstract of one of daddy's papers for him yesterday.Something he enjoys so much while I can never comprehend for my whole life. He 's still publishing at a rate of more than five papers every year. Most of them in top academic journals on Zhaoming Wenxuan Studies,Tabooism and Textology. Three sole author books up until now. And a new one waiting in his laptop. He gets up at six every morning and works more than eight hours a day. He's in late fifties,has been working for more than twenty years and starts gaining much fame in his field only during recent years. Sometimes, I'm worried, if I go for academic researches, I would have little hope to catch him and even overtake him. Plus those closest people to me ...(haha, everyone of them wears glasses except me).  This is frustrating!!!!The problem of living in an academic family is that a Ph.D. degree itself never makes u different from the rest while it is the ranking of the university from which u receive ur degree and your academic fame in your specific field later that matters. I'm really poor cuz they've already set too high a standard for me. I once had a friend,whose dad is a very successful entrepreneur and owns a large company in China. I asked him why he enjoyed staying in Canada and living on an average salary of computer engineers instead of going back to inheritate the family business. The answer is that he thought he would never excel his dad in the same career, and therefore, he would prefer to taking some job that his dad is not able to do even if he does not perform as the best in that field either. I think about his words very often these days . Would I make the same decision of quitting? Does that sound kinda cowardly? Yet I can feel in my deep heart that I do love academic researches.Or it can still be possible that I got hypnosized by the people around me:)