My Search for Ramanujan

by Ken Ono

  When we realize that we have made a mistake, a predictable electroneurological process called error-related negativity (ERN) is triggered in the medial prefrontal cortex of our brains. It acts as a reset button for the brain. It is now believed that the strength of ERN is negatively impacted by prolonged exposure to harsh criticism.

  I didn’t need this research to understand the validity of its conclusions. I have firsthand knowledge. I became desperate for the love and approval of my parents, and when I failed and failed again to obtain it, my life began to unravel.

  For you to understand how all this came to be, I will have to explain my family. My parents raised my two brothers and me under the assumption that we were somehow genetically predestined, with each son to follow a well-defined path that my parents determined in response to the talents and strengths we exhibited in our early years. Our job was simple—stay on track and succeed in the lives that our parents had prescribed for us. I felt that I never had a choice.

  My oldest brother, Momoro, was gifted in music. He was a child prodigy. You know the kind—the cute Asian-American third-grader with a bowl haircut, dressed in a tuxedo, dazzling television audiences with a precocious rendition of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto. He was going to be a concert pianist who performed at Carnegie Hall.

  Santa, the middle son, had a different path. He was often described as the black sheep of the family, which is ironic, because he is the one who will go on to be the most successful son. My parents felt that he was unlikely to amount to much of anything, so he was expected to be an ordinary company man, whatever that meant. As a second-grader, I understood only that it referred to something that my parents viewed as significantly below concert pianist and university professor.

  I was being groomed to be a mathematician in the image of my father. But I was also expected to be an outstanding musician. I was only in second grade, but I already had the next twenty-five years mapped out for me. I was to attend one of the best Ivy League universities, earn a PhD in mathematics, and then secure a professorship at a top university.

  My parents showed their love for us, which I didn’t understand at the time, by defining our long-term professional goals and offering opportunities that powered us toward them. Their entire focus was on those goals, in the belief that we would reach our happy places by achieving them.

  The rules that they made were simple to follow, reducing each of our lives to an individual formula. To achieve the goals that our parents had set for us was going to be easy—as easy as basic algebra: just as plugging x = 2 into the formula y = 3x + 1 gives the value y = 7, I was given a simple formula for becoming a mathematician—I had to be a straight-A student who earned top scores on all my tests. And for good measure, I was expected to become an accomplished violinist.

  Everything outside of the formula was considered extraneous, and if we ever strayed in the slightest from our formulas, we were subjected to a litany of rebukes and threats that discouraged and humiliated us.

  Here is a vivid example of what I am talking about. I was in third grade. Each year in elementary school, we took the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, standardized tests that were administered as a tool for improving instruction. These tests evaluated our skills in grammar, reading comprehension, and mathematics. When my parents received my scores, they were shocked at my poor performance: ninety-eighth percentile in math and ninety-seventh percentile in reading comprehension. They summoned me to the kitchen and sat me down at the head of the table. Pacing behind me, they rebuked me for my embarrassingly inadequate performance:Ken-chan, one in fifty people did better in math. Even more better in English. That’s fifty thousand kids in country. You aren’t even among best fifty thousand. Harvard only accepts few thousand. If you don’t fix, you might end up at University of Maryland, or, God forbid, Towson State. You must get ninety-ninth percentiles. That professor’s children all got these scores, and look how successful they are. We sacrificing everything for you three boys, and this how you thank us? If you won’t do better, then get out of house!

  Then they left the room, while I sat alone at the table crying, with only the ticking of the clock and the rumble of the fridge to keep me company. Half an hour later I’d hear the shuffling of slippers, which signaled their return, and they repeated the diatribe again. I wanted to sink through the floor, or at least to escape to the privacy of my room.

  Between me and my two brothers, incidents like this were common in my early childhood. One of us would be scolded while the other two would cower in their bedrooms, thankful that it wasn’t their turn. Truth be told, I was on the receiving end of these rants much less often than my two older brothers.

  My parents forbade just about everything that was not directly tied to our formulaic lives. There was no room for Gilligan’s Island. Santa was forbidden from attending his high-school prom. When he sneaked out to attend despite their prohibition, my parents tracked him down and brought him home. Imagine the humiliation of being pulled from the prom in front of your classmates. My parents’ view was that this time-honored rite of passage was not for serious students, not part of the formula. Perhaps they also wanted to protect him from the bad influences they imagined he would be exposed to.

  Here is another example. Let me explain why I can’t watch the Star Wars movies. When the first Star Wars film came out in 1977, I begged my parents to let me go with my friends to the movie theater to see it. Many of my friends saw the film several times, and so I had plenty of opportunities. After incessant pleading, my parents finally relented, but under one condition—that I write a three-page essay explaining the importance of the film and the deeper meaning of the story. I was a nine-year-old who simply wanted to delight in the droids and bizarre space creatures that everyone was talking about. Instead, the film became an academic exercise complete with edits and revisions. To this day, I can’t watch any of the sequels. The mere thought of Star Wars stirs up painful memories.

  But when it came to academics and music, my parents offered me the best. They bought me computers: I was one of the first kids at school to get an Apple II. They enrolled me for violin lessons at the Peabody Institute. Peabody is an internationally renowned conservatory that has trained famous musicians like singer Tori Amos and pianist André Watts. My parents engaged Yong Ku Ahn, a distinguished Peabody Institute professor, to teach me to play the violin. And the violin they bought for me was the product of a nineteenth-century Italian craftsman. I didn’t understand until much later that beginning violinists don’t usually take their first lessons from a well-known virtuoso, and they don’t typically play an instrument whose value is roughly that of a brand-new car.

  As part of my mathematical training, my father had me write computer programs to collect data for his mathematics graduate students. I actually enjoyed doing this, and it was the source of some of the very few memories I have of the parental attention and approval that I so badly craved. Even though I didn’t know anything about class numbers of quadratic forms, I was able to write computer programs that computed tables of them. I was delighted that I, a kid in elementary school, could help produce results that were published in a PhD thesis.

  But these opportunities always came with a price, and when it came to music, the price was more than I was able or willing to pay. I took lessons from Professor Ahn for almost ten years. Each week, both my parents drove me to his home, and then they sat in on my lesson, taking note of my progress. The pressure was unendurable. Instead of concentrating on my playing, I constantly had my eyes on my parents, looking for evidence of their approval or chagrin. They never told me that I had done well; I believe that the thought of giving praise never crossed their minds. And on the long drive home, they would rehash the lesson, reminding me of the mistakes I had made and emphasizing the improvements that were expected of me for the next lesson.

  Despite the fact that I became an accomplished violinist, making second chair in the first violin section of the Peabody Preparatory Orchestra, there
is very little that I can say that might put a positive spin on my musical career. I hated the violin.

  One day, when I was in tenth grade, I simply quit. I have picked up a violin only once since then, and that was five years later, when Erika, who would later become my wife, brought me to her home for the first time to meet her parents. In my desire to impress them, I unthinkingly broke my black-hole rule: I mentioned that I had been an accomplished violinist. To my surprise, they actually wanted to hear me play. And to my chagrin, there was a violin—Erika’s sister’s—in the house. They no doubt thought that I would be delighted to play for them, and they had every reason to expect to hear an “accomplished violinist” produce lovely music. I tried to play, but I couldn’t. Instead, I sat alone in Erika’s sister’s bedroom, holding her violin while I tore myself apart inside. How could I possibly explain? How could I make them understand? They had no idea of what they were asking me to do.

  Still in the bedroom, I finally worked up a bit of courage and began softly playing Bach’s Partita Number 3 from memory. The sight of my reflection in the mirrored closet doors aroused painful long-dormant memories, and it was more than I could bear. After a few minutes, I stopped playing, and I told Erika and her parents that I just couldn’t perform for them. At least, I thought, they had overheard enough to know that I had indeed been a competent violinist. And I was grateful that they had apparently recognized that I was in the grip of an inner struggle, and I was relieved when they let the incident pass without pressing me for details. When this book is published and Erika’s parents read this paragraph, they will finally understand something of the inner torment that I was suffering on that day almost thirty years ago.

  Quitting the violin was my first successful act of rebellion against my parents. They berated me for the decision, and it took several weeks before they retreated in the face of my implacable conviction. We had heated arguments, and I heard many reasons why I had to resume my lessons:If you quit, then what will everyone think? You disappointment for family. You let Professor Ahn down. He will never forgive you. He believe that you talented enough for Juilliard School. How can you quit after all that he done? He spent hundreds of hours when he could have taught someone else who grateful. If you quit he will cry. You understand how lucky you are? How can you quit something you good at? If I had your talent I would practice ten times as much as you. How could you be so thankless? We struggled to pay for expensive violin and lessons. Your mother took part-time job as seamstress doing alterations for local dry cleaner so that you can have violin and lessons. She could have go to beauty salon, but more important to make you something good for your life.

  Although I had hell to pay for quitting the violin, I had stood up for myself, and I was proud for having had the courage and strength to do so. I had no idea that I would soon draw on that strength to rebel again by running away from my life.

  I know now that my parents loved me. What I didn’t understand at the time is that they showed their love in ways that I didn’t, couldn’t, recognize or appreciate. It was love, but it wasn’t enough. I was completely unaware of their personal history as immigrants to America who had come of age in Japan during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. My parents rarely spoke of their childhood, and we had almost no contact with our relatives in Japan. I had no way of comprehending the demons and challenges that they faced as they did their best to raise three boys, isolated in a culture that they knew nothing about. I understood only that life—with my parents at the center—was not treating me fairly, and for that my heart was full of bitterness.

  In my memory I was never hugged by my parents, and they never told me that they loved me during my formative years. I understand now my parents’ rationale for how they raised me and my brothers. Their parenting focused exclusively on long-term professional goals, and they believed that offering praise and love for smaller accomplishments would diminish our chances of achieving the more worthy ones. They wanted their boys to be hungry for success, and so they starved us of praise. They aimed to foster our competitive spirit in this way, a common practice among tiger parents.

  Of course, I didn’t understand this as a teenager. I couldn’t get beyond my pressure cooker of a life, and as one of the few Asian-American kids at school, I felt alone, without anyone to identify with. I was being tossed around between two divergent cultures. At school, I was a star student, while at home, I was a disappointment to my parents and a failure for falling short of their impossible expectations. And like any child, I wished to please my parents, but nothing I did was good enough for them. No matter how hard I tried, my accomplishments were ignored or belittled. They saw no point in acknowledging such insignificant achievements as straight A’s on a report card or a medal from the local science fair.

  My parents did not approve of my friends. Without a cohort of Japanese-American classmates at school who also happened to be the offspring of university professors, there was no way that I could have more than one or two friends that they were willing to embrace. In their view, it wasn’t even important to have friends. It was enough that we had a dog, a dachshund, named Igor Stravinsky in honor of my father’s favorite Russian composer.

  My parents never said so, but I think that through the end of elementary school, I did my job well. I was one of the best students. But it wasn’t easy; plugging into my formula was an emotionally exhausting occupation.

  Beginning in seventh grade, my life became more of a struggle. My math teacher, Mrs. Sprankle, a wonderful woman in her fifties, encouraged her pupils’ parents to be involved with her class. To promote this, she required us to show our parents our graded tests and return them to her with a parental signature. Although I was the top student in class, I couldn’t bear to show my parents any test that had less than a perfect score. I knew what they would say. After all, my job was not to be the best student in class, it was to be a perfect student, and for the son of a famous mathematician, nothing less than perfection would do. We are not talking about higher mathematics here. This was first-year algebra, a subject that my parents didn’t even view as mathematics. It was barely a step above glorified counting. As I write this, I hear echoes of their voices from the past. In a slow drawl with a Japanese accent they are saying, “Ken-chan, you got ninety-five percent. Not good. Why you get easy problem wrong? You must do better.”

  Despite the fact that I earned an A on every algebra test that year, I never showed a single one of them to my parents. Test after test, I locked myself in the bathroom and stared at the test paper trying to summon the courage to ask my mother for her signature. I was good at doing what I was told, but I could not do what Mrs. Sprankle had asked of me. Yet the test had to be signed, and so I deceived Mrs. Sprankle by forging my mother’s signature again and again. The voices in my head began around that time.

  Mrs. Sprankle was very fond of me. I was her best student. I spent hours visiting with her after school. I cleaned her chalkboard. I tutored other kids in class. She offered me encouragement and love. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I realize now that she was nurturing me in ways that she must have seen I desperately needed.

  I was so ashamed to have to deceive her, for she was one of the few adults in my life at the time who offered me encouragement and recognition. I couldn’t understand how I could be the best math student at school, earning the praise and attention of my teachers, but then be not quite good enough at home. Not quite good enough? At home, I was an abject failure!

  By the end of tenth grade, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I awoke each day with very painful thoughts: I will never be good enough. I’m an impostor. My parents will never love me because I will never live up to their expectations. No matter how well I do, I ought to have done better. It seems that there is nothing I can do to earn their approval.

  And so I dropped out.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

  Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.10
07/978-3-319-25568-2_2

  2. My Parents’ Generation

  Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2

  (1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

  (2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

  If you are to have a sympathetic understanding of my history, you will have to understand my roots, the story of how my parents left their families and everything they knew behind when they came to America for what was supposed to be a short visit. That short visit became a lifetime, and my parents became issei, “first-generation” Japanese immigrants to the United States of America. And as the American-born sons of my parents, my brothers and I are nisei, children of the second generation.

  Takasan, Tokyo (1943)

  The slight fourteen-year-old-boy with angular facial features is riding his forty-pound one-speed Japanese bicycle, fenders creaking, through the crowded narrow streets of his Tokyo neighborhood. Dressed in his military-style uniform, he is riding to school on his daily route, passing bustling markets selling rice, tea, vinegar, and other goods at the start of what had begun as an ordinary school day. The streets are teeming with bicycles and pedestrians, all traveling in a frenetic but somehow orderly fashion. Many of the men are dressed in bland western business attire as they head for work, but the women are radiant in their colorful flowery kimonos.

  The two-wheeler gives the boy a sense of freedom. He rides his bike ten miles every school day, safely weaving through the commotion that is Tokyo. Those miles of solitary travel in Tokyo’s tumult offer him a private world, an island of solitude where he can escape boredom as the time flies beneath his wheels.