No. My grandparents were not in the picture. My parents were raised and schooled in our public schools and so were very conventional Canadian parents.
Both my parents were very fluent in English. We grew up speaking English at home. My parents were of course bilingual so they were very fluent in Japanese, too. But it wasn’t passed on to us. I went to Japanese school for several years but it was very much reading and writing. Conversation was not emphasized.
My parents expected us to do well in school, but they didn’t pressure me into any sort of direction. I can still remember being teased because I wasn’t going into medicine like my father. I decided long before university that I wasn’t going into medicine. I can’t really say why except to say that I was more interested in technology. And so, I wanted a career in some aspect of technology and ended up in engineering.
