Learning Deep Learning

Tag: memoir

  • One and a half lingual

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    by

    wombat
    in

    When your mother tongue is not your mother’s, you grow up with an echo. In our house, English was the official language, the language of information transfer. Cantonese, my parents’ first language, was the language of emotion and of secrets. It was the language of outbursts. Here’s a typical example, an exchange between my mother…

  • Viva le vélo

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    by

    wombat
    in

    I wrote a novel for twelve year olds that features bicycles. The novel is set in China in 1902, when the bicycle was a fairly new technology. Many key features of the modern bicycle were present in the 1902 bicycle. So, why bicycles? When I was in Africa for six months in 1991-1992, Chinese bicycles…

  • To 80s Hong Kong Pop With Love

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    by

    wombat
    in , ,

    In the 80s, in June, when I was in graduate school, a friend called me up and asked if I wanted to make an impromptu trip from Berkeley, California to Vancouver, BC. He wanted to drive up and see his father, who was ill, and could use help driving. I had family in Vancouver too.…

  • Cumin and Hammers

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    wombat
    in

    Once, I had a difficult plane flight from Frankfurt to Nairobi. I’d purchased my ticket from Bulgarian Airlines about 30 hours before departure, at the height of the summer travel season. The plane stopped in Sofia, where I was told that I did not have a seat on the flight to Nairobi because I did…

  • says René Magritte

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    by

    wombat
    in

    I despise the past, my own and everyone else’s. I despise resignation, patience, heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. This is a favorite quote from the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. As the author of a novel set in the past, it puts me on my toes. The quote is a little outré, and I…

  • Gender and The Hobbit

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    by

    wombat
    in ,

    It’s time to come out of the closet. I love The Hobbit. I love it so much that I love the movie too. And while I usually agree with articles that deplore the absence of women in popular media and stories, in this one case I have to make a rebuttal to those who say…

  • How I nearly blew it (and ended up blowing it for good) #1

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    by

    wombat
    in

    I started playing the alto saxophone when I was eleven. I chose the alto because a boy I liked picked the tenor, and I didn’t want to seem like I was copying him. I changed schools the following year, grade 8, and when I got there in September I auditioned for my place in the…

  • The Four Food Groups

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    by

    wombat
    in

    When I was a kid, four food groups competed in our house. Each group viewed the others with suspicion and claimed itself superior. My two grandmothers, and my mother, each stood like a pillar for a variant of Chinese food. My grandfather was an outpost of English food. My paternal grandmother, Annie Chan, was all…

  • ‘Ockey Night du Canada

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    by

    wombat
    in

    When I was a child, ice hockey was the bane of my TV watching. It pre-empted everything, for hours. And I didn’t care for it. I knew nothing about it, which made me the worst sort of philistine. There were small parts of Hockey Night In Canada that I enjoyed. The opening theme music–who couldn’t…