The Worlds I See - by Fei-Fei Li
Published:
The Worlds I See - by Fei-Fei Li
Read: 2024-10-03
Recommend: 8/10
I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second. In the first half, she reflects on her childhood, transitioning from China to the United States, and the influence of her parents. I particularly liked how she compared the teachers from both countries. Teachers in China tend to focus solely on academic performance, while those in the U.S. encourage students to explore a broader range of topics through reading.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
I’d always been an optimist about the power of science, and I remained so, but the tumultuous years leading up to that day had taught me that the fruits of optimism aren’t to be taken for granted. While the future might indeed be bright, it wouldn’t be so by accident. We’d have to earn it, together, and it wasn’t entirely clear how.
“Now, separating Zhī nǚ and Niú láng is a river of stars. See it running between them?” He gestured at a softly glowing path tracing its way across the sky, like columns of celestial clouds. “That’s our galaxy.” In a region where overcast skies were the norm, clear nights like this were very special, igniting my curiosity and stoking my fascination with nature. From my earliest memories, the simple experience of perceiving things—anything—preoccupied me in a way I felt deeply but couldn’t express. Everywhere I looked, it was as if something new was waiting to arouse another glint of wonder, whether it was the stillness of a plant, the careful steps of an insect, or the hazy depth of far-off peaks. I didn’t know much about the world yet, but I could tell it was a place worth exploring.
Among his many quirks was an affinity for wordplay, however, and the ordeal brought to mind the Mandarin word fēi, meaning “to fly.” Its whimsical connotations, reinforced by its bird-like rendering in simplified Chinese—飞—made “Fei-Fei” a natural choice for my name. It happened to be unisex, too, reflecting his lack of concern even about an idea as fundamental to the culture as gender, and was uncommon enough among my generation to appeal to his off-kilter sensibilities. But it was also his first contribution as a parent, unpretentious and sweet. And although his own flightiness hadn’t exactly won my mother’s affections for the day, she conceded she liked the name, too.
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 high school teacher turned office worker—seemed more like facades than careers. There were countless pitfalls lurking within my parents’ relationship, but there were virtues as well. Rare, maybe, but meaningful.
In a community obsessed with inculcating respect in its children—success measured less in terms of grades per se than a reputation for following rules, listening closely, and earning the praise of teachers—my parents were unconcerned, even irreverent. My mother in particular took pride in a subtle twist on the day’s parenting norms: I was expected to work hard and pursue the fullness of my potential, of course, but not for the sake of anyone or anything else. She never went quite so far as to state it explicitly, but I could sense she found notions like “model student” and “upstanding member of the community” condescending. My efforts, she taught me, weren’t in the service of my teachers, or an ideology, or even some disembodied sense of principle. They were for me.
Still, my mother’s parents served as extensions of the values she shared with my father when it came to raising me. Although they were warm and doting, I never mistook their sweetness for passivity; they were equally principled in treating me as a person first and a girl second, echoing my family’s encouragement of my imagination and eschewing their generation’s tendency to prioritize boys. Like my mother, they bought me books in abundance, exploring topics as wide-ranging as marine life, robotics, and Chinese mythology.
Our studies were broad and engaging, with math and science complemented richly by the humanities, from geography to ancient poetry to history that reached millennia into the past. I was fascinated to learn that my own city, for instance, was the capital of Shu Han, one of China’s legendary three kingdoms. At its best, school felt like an extension of the books my mother shared and the exploration my father encouraged.
It took a moment for the words to trigger any real response in me. Questions abounded in the meantime. Did my teacher really believe that boys were “biologically smarter”? And that we girls would naturally become stupider? Was this how all of my teachers saw me? Had they felt this way all along? And what was I to make of the fact that the person saying these things was … a woman? Then, as another moment passed, the questions were shoved aside by a new feeling. It was heavy and jagged, and clawed its way up from a part of me I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t feel discouraged, or even offended. I was angry. It was an anger I wasn’t familiar with—a quiet heat, an indignation like I’d seen in my mother, but unmistakably my own.
“I’ll be frank, Mrs. Li. Your daughter may be bright, but there are many bright students in her class. That’s why intellect is only one ingredient in success. Another is the discipline to put aside one’s personal interests in favor of the studies that will prove most useful in the years ahead.” I’m not sure if what my mother said next was meant to be a response. She looked down, speaking more softly than before. “Is this what Fei-Fei wants? Is this what I want for her?” “What was that, Mrs. Li?” The teacher leaned in closer, clearly as confused as I was. My mother sighed quietly, then looked back at the teacher as a determined expression returned to her face. The look would have to do. She was done throwing jabs. She stood up, thanked the teacher for her time, and gestured to me that we were leaving. “I might have taught you too well, Fei-Fei,” she said with resignation as I tried to keep up with her pace on the walk out. “You don’t belong here any more than I did.”
Our destination was a New Jersey township called Parsippany, chosen by my father for its sizable immigrant community and proximity to nearby highways. It was my first exposure to the American idea of a suburb, and it made an instant impression after a life spent on the other side of the planet. China had an insatiable density that consumed every axis: cars and bicycles packed the streets, people filled the sidewalks, and buildings stretched as high as they could into the haze even as they pushed the space between them to the absolute minimum. It fostered an atmosphere of noise, heat, and hustle that refused to abate, and gave cities their character. Parsippany, in comparison, felt like pure space: empty sidewalks, leisurely drivers on the roads, and so much room between everything. Grassy lots surrounded single-family homes amounting to only one or two stories. Small businesses boasted vast parking lots, with space after space unused. Trees and gardens flourished. It even smelled different, as if the air itself were fresher, lacking the industrial tinge I remembered.
Increased attention was being paid to algorithms that solved problems by discovering patterns from examples, rather than being explicitly programmed—in other words, learning what to do rather than being told. Researchers gave it a fitting name: “machine learning.”
What made the work draining was the uncertainty that hangs over the immigrant experience. I was surrounded by disciplined, hardworking people, all of whom had stories like mine, but none who’d escaped the cycle of scarcity and menial labor to which we seemed consigned. We’d come to this country in the hopes of pursuing opportunities that didn’t exist elsewhere, but I couldn’t see a path leading anywhere near them.
This was my father’s true talent—not engineering, or camera repair, or even puns. He had a virtuosity for unearthing the happiness waiting to be discovered in any situation, no matter how mundane. Here we were, spurred by ideology to travel across the world, plunged into poverty, and now faced with a daily struggle to survive. But you wouldn’t know any of that to look at him, examining some family’s ski goggles or coffee maker with a contentment so pure I could feel it myself, almost forgetting everything else.
In the months that followed, my visits to Mr. Sabella’s office became the focal point of my day. He always had something thought-provoking ready to discuss, continued to share book suggestions—I took him up on exploring Clarke, although I still found the language difficult—and even began asking me for titles of my own. As my reading expanded, so did his; on my recommendation, he read through Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West. But none of it was a distraction from my studies. If anything, by helping me to think more holistically, he reminded me that there’s joy to be found in learning. He put me back on the path toward being a complete student. Along the way, my grades took care of themselves.
These were dark moments, but they made me all the more appreciative for the wealth of humanity I discovered along the way. A community that offered a place, however modest, for an immigrant family to build a life. Teachers who encouraged a student who barely spoke English, one of whom made her struggles his personal priority. An Ivy League school that offered her an education. And a country that, alien as it seemed, was beginning to feel knowable. Even my language skills, though still a work in progress, had turned a corner. I had a voice again. It was rough around the edges, but it was mine. If I were to dedicate my life to science, whatever form that might take, it would be by the grace of the people I’d met during my lowest and most confusing days. More and more, I was feeling something I hadn’t in a long time: I was grateful.
I never joined one of the school’s famous eating clubs, nor did I ever quite tap into that networking instinct that so many Ivy League students seemed to naturally possess. Looking back, in fact, I’m not sure I attended a single party. Ultimately, even admission to a place like this couldn’t change the fact that I was the product of a world that many of my peers would have found incomprehensible. I found theirs equally hard to understand. But there were advantages to living such a sequestered life. With free time already limited by my responsibilities, I found it hard to justify anything that threatened to dilute the richness of my studies. Every day brought me closer to the end of the university experience, and I couldn’t stand the thought of regretting a missed chance to learn something valuable. So I packed my schedule as densely as I could, immersing myself in math and physics, scouring corkboard advertisements for lectures and workshops, and checking out stacks of books from the library.
Research triggered the same feeling I got as a child exploring the mountains surrounding Chengdu with my father, when we’d spot a butterfly we’d never seen before, or happen upon a new variety of stick insect. Time lost its meaning in the lab, and I lost myself in the work. After an adolescence spent feeling as if I never really belonged, I was suddenly certain I’d found my place.
Part of me never left the dark of that Berkeley lab. The otherworldly sounds of its loudspeaker would roar on in my memory, each hiss and crackle hinting at a language science was just beginning to unravel. Even more than Princeton, it was the place that most fully demonstrated what my parents sought in coming to this country: the freedom to recognize a passion, and to live it, without compromise. Whatever my future held, those moments in the lab, our hearts pounding as we listened, were all the proof I needed to know they’d made the right decision.
I realized I’d already stepped beyond her familiarity with the jargon of American culture. “You know, stocks and trading. Investments. That sorta thing. Obviously I’d have a lot to learn, but I think it’s something I could do if I really set my mind to it.” “Huh,” she replied flatly. “Is that what you want?” “Well, I mean … the salary alone would be life-changing for us, and—” “Fei-Fei, is it what you want?” “You know what I want, Mom. I want to be a scientist.” “So what are we even talking about?” My mother had a way of slicing through my equivocating so fast it would take me a second to recognize it. Checkmate in barely three moves. I was going to grad school.
He smiled, then continued. “Aren’t you curious? What if it turns out that if you measure the proportions of every painting by Mondrian, some kind of pattern emerges? Wouldn’t that be fascinating?” I smiled back. I couldn’t tell how serious he was—I was almost certain he was kidding around with me—but I loved that he’d even taken the time to develop such an idea. Intelligent, adventurous, and silly, all at once. I felt like I’d waited my entire life to meet thinkers like this.
I was intrigued and challenged by the art of engineering, but I didn’t want to be an engineer. And although I was enthralled by the mysteries of neuroscience, I didn’t want to be a neuroscientist. I wanted to draw on both while constrained by neither.
A new reality was emerging, so complicated that it destabilized every decision I’d made since the day I walked into that lecture hall at Princeton as a physics major. A lifetime of curiosity had led me to a field known for fierce competition, low pay, and no guarantee of a lasting career, all while my parents needed a level of support I wasn’t capable of providing. Every day I spent pursuing my dreams felt selfish at best, and reckless at worst. The more I thought about the difference between my own family and those of my lab mates, most of whom were middle class at least, if not wealthy, the harder it was to deny the truth: I just didn’t have the luxury of being a scientist.
At our fingertips wasn’t just a data set, but a test bed that brought our ideas face-to-face with the entirety of the visual world—arming our algorithms with broader perceptive powers than they’d enjoyed, while testing them with more rigor than they’d ever faced. If image data sets can be thought of as the language of computer vision research—a collection of concepts that an algorithm and its developers can explore—ImageNet was a sudden, explosive growth in our vocabulary.
It’s because I believe in ImageNet, too! Maybe it’s ahead of its time. Maybe Jitendra was right, and you’ve taken too big a leap here. But that doesn’t make it wrong.” I smiled. He hadn’t solved my problem, but his words were heartening.
It was one of the last Fridays before the winter break, and I was attending my new favorite event: a twice-monthly closed-door gathering for SAIL students and faculty called “AI Salon,” which provided a venue for topical conversations about our field. We’d explored a wide range of topics since the inaugural meeting, from cultural issues like the depiction of AI in movies and television to a philosophical debate about whether categories and symbolic structures are fundamental facts of language or, as the title of that particular talk rather pointedly suggested, a “fantasy of linguists.”
“Terry, I’m curious about something. What made you so willing to let me into your world? I mean, let’s be honest—I’m a bit of an outsider.” He thought for a moment before responding. “You know, there’s a lot of talk in the news lately about AI, and frankly, I don’t like most of it.” I smiled, perhaps cynically. I knew where this was going. “Sure, it’d be great to automate more of my day. Whatever. I get it,” he continued. “But I’m a little tired of tech executives talking about putting people like me out of a job. You and Arnie are the only ones who actually seem to want to help me, rather than replace me.”