Bully For You

“Chink.” “Faggot.”

Have you ever been bullied? Have you ever bullied someone else? Do those experiences still affect you? If so, how? If they don’t, when did they stop affecting you, and why?

INT. NICE CHAPEL – DAY

A choir of children in white dresses sings a choral Christian song in unison. Focus on JOHN, 12, a short skinny Asian kid with bushy black hair and glasses.

I went to a private Christian school from kindergarten to 6th grade. It had its own trials and tribulations but overall it was a social paradise. The class was very intimate, and pretty much everyone was genuinely nice to each other. I had a crush on the same girl from 1st to 5th grade. I had many close friends.

EXT. CRAPPY MIDDLE SCHOOL – DAY

Music abruptly transitions to gangster rap. Shot from behind of John, standing on a cracked, treeless sidewalk with a roller backpack. John walks through the chain-link fence onto the campus. Hordes of preteens with spiked hair and frosted tips mill around, roughhousing. As John walks by each group, kids notice him and laugh. JUSTIN breaks off from a group and steps on the handle of John’s backpack, knocking it out of his hand.

JUSTIN
Chink!

We’re not in Kansas anymore.

Then my dad decided he wanted to move to the Central Valley of California. We moved on the 4th of July, 2001, to a town appropriately named “Hickman”. I was starting 7th grade. In this school district, “middle school” started in 6th grade, so that meant that everybody already knew each other for at least a year. In a small agricultural community like Hickman, all their parents had gone to school together too. One of the self-proclaimed cowboy capitals of the world was a few miles away. My P.E. class has the usual staples, along with hay baling, roping, and line dancing. I was smaller than other kids my age for most of the years I went to school. (What were they feeding these kids? Fertilizer?)

I was the smart kid in class. The teacher assigned me to give out candy for things. I would supplicate kids by giving them candy. Wanting people to like me. This behavior didn’t last.

One of my biggest problems was that I didn’t like to do things just because other people did them. I’m a natural contrarian. I didn’t want to get my hair spiked and tips frosted like every other prepubescent boy in America. I wanted to shake hands, not do the hand slap to fist bump. My family listened to K-LOVE and Christian radio. I was totally oblivious to things like Eminem and Blink 182, South Park and Dude, Where’s My Car?

My lack of awareness and stubbornness contributed to my downfall. I didn’t realize my ridiculous old man glasses and little roller backpack were like a big glowing neon sign flashing “ASKING FOR IT” over my head.

Most kids were either indifferent, dicks (but dicks that didn’t actively target me), or the worst: active bullies.

Some things were more mundane. Kids would come up and tousle my hair. They would try to put trash in my hoodie. They would throw paper at me or draw on me or stick gum on me. Or dump my stuff all over the place. We would put our backpacks in big piles outside on breaks. You had to make sure no one threw yours in the girl’s bathroom. I used to feel my heart race looking over the backpacks and not immediately seeing mine.

The Central Valley is all whites and Mexicans, so I was the only Asian kid in the entire school. Kids would walk by me and do the Bruce Lee “Waaaah!” Later I got compared to Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I’m just glad I didn’t grow up in the 80s Long Duk Dong era otherwise that would have been the most salient example of an Asian male in the media. Kids would say, “Ching chong ching chong!” to make fun of Chinese. When they were talking about Cheech and Chong in class, I didn’t know if the teacher was laughing at a racist joke with them or not. Remember: I was sheltered. I didn’t know what Cheech and Chong was or more appropriately, who.

Kids would pants you, i.e. pull down your shorts in P.E. I learned that quickly pulling them back up made you look weak. If you take a moment and then reach down for them, it’s much better. This applies to everything. Try it next time you drop your pen.

The paradigm of bullying is weird. Most kids would call you gay and make fun of you for being gay but also act aggressively and predatorily homoerotic. Like, making kissy sounds and saying “Yeah, come here” or “Mmm yeah, can’t get enough of him…”

They would say “John Queer” instead of “John Greer”. I can still tense up when telling someone my name, as if someone is going to use that. We’ve seen the power Trump wields with Crooked Hillary and Low Energy Jeb, they’re “linguistic kill shots” as Scott Adams puts it. Rhymes are particularly nasty because they can stick.

My main bully was Justin Stubblefield. He would be in the bathroom and say “Asians have small dicks” while I was pissing. Sometimes I would fantasize about him dying and then get angry imagining people saying nice things at his funeral.

The people I hung around were friends with him. I was the one who got picked on and made fun of in the group. Years later, in high school, one of the kids gave me some old video games. I remember loading one of them up and stumbling across characters they had made. One of them was named John, and it was an exaggerated Asian head on a giant body. It felt weird in a stinging, voyeuristic way to see this old residue of them making fun of me.

When we went on a school trip to D.C., I ended up being in the same room as Justin and his dad. I remember jumping around and kicking towards him and just acting silly, play-fighting. His dad said, “I don’t know what you know or what you think you know, but Justin can take you.” I am still angry at my past self for not acting harder.

I wanted closure from these experiences. I wanted the bullies to come back from the past and apologize for how horrible they were. There was an episode of Rocko’s Modern Life where (spoilers) Rocko heard his childhood bully was coming back into town and he trained and trained to be able to beat him up and get revenge. His bully comes back but has turned into a Zen pacifist who is sorry. The same thing happens in Anger Management. That’s what I wanted.

I don’t think it’s healthy to need other people to do something for you to get closure because many people aren’t going to do those things. Some people grow up and change, but when I looked Justin up on Facebook a few years ago he was saying the same racist shit.

One of the worst situations in school is where you don’t have any real friends. You’re isolated, alone. If you have good friends, even if you’re picked on, it’s different. You have support. But even the people I hung around with would call me “chink”, “faggot”. I had never heard the word “chink” before, but I ended up hearing it every day of middle school. I had no idea what it meant but knew it wasn’t nice. (I had more of an idea what “faggot” meant, though.) I was a loser. I spent a lot of time in the library reading.

I hoped to be friends with this kid who lived near me. He wasn’t my first choice. One time he tried to impress me by calling this girl a bitch over the phone and getting away with it. But he had GTA III and I wanted to play it. (I made the mistake of being loyal to Nintendo and getting a Gamecube. This was when Halo was out for Xbox as well…) I imagined having neighborhood friends. I could ride around the small town we lived in and have the idyllic childhood experience Mark Twain wrote about. I developed glory fantasies where I would save the day or do something else where people thought I was cool.

Figuring out where you’re going to sit during lunch can be really anxiety-provoking. You don’t want to look like a loser sitting by yourself, but you also don’t want that “What the fuck are you doing here?” vibe either. You’ll settle for anyone who won’t actively treat you like shit. I noticed some kids would hang around our group for a bit and then move on when they had found a real friend group and got tired of being picked on.

One of my “friends” told me that he used to shoot birds and kick them around like a soccer ball while they were still alive. Another kid who was my “friend” talked about robbing drunks of their gold chains outside of bars. (Seems like bullshit that he participated in that given how young he would have had to be. That’s the thing about people telling tall tales in middle school or high school that are supposed to be from their previous life somewhere else, they would have had to be doing this shit in elementary school.) My “friends” prank called me one time and I stopped talking to them. It was weird to spend so much time together and then suddenly ignore each other.

I didn’t know what to do about all this. The problem with the bullied trying to use similar tactics is they often don’t know what the bullies are doing to not get caught. The same person that has been calling you a faggot for years can run to the administration and cry about how you hurt them, and the administration can see you as the monster!

I was hypervigilant. I would feel tense all the time, as if someone was going to throw something at me from behind. I would think through conversations in my head of what to say if someone was trying to fuck with me. I had to be on the lookout constantly to avoid being pantsed in P.E. I would ruminate during class and at home, before bed, thinking about what to say or what to do. My sleep quality was about a 1 out of 10.

I didn’t tell my parents. In my head, it felt like they would be hurt by me being hurt. Like they were vulnerable and needed to be shielded from that world. I didn’t tell teachers because it felt pointless and like it wasn’t my community — like I was the outsider. Even the teachers would have only been able to do so much. The best you can hope for is that the kids stop doing things that tend to get them caught, and cut down to only things that don’t. 

INT. CRAPPY MIDDLE SCHOOL CLASSROOM – DAY

MRS. PORTER, 40, circles words on the blackboard.

MRS. PORTER
We walked up the stairs.

CHRIS TIPTON, 13, flicks a wad of paper at the back of John’s head.

MRS. PORTER
My mom took a walk around the block.

CHRIS
Hey, Queer.

MRS. PORTER
I looked under my bed.

CHRIS
John Queer.

MRS. PORTER
My friend jumped over the bushes.

CHRIS
Chink, I’m talking to you!

John turns around and stabs his mechanical pencil into Chris’ arm.

CHRIS
AAAAH! Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Porter!

MRS. PORTER
I walked aboard the –. Yes, Chris?

CHRIS
John just stabbed me! I’m bleeding, Mrs. Porter!

MRS. PORTER
John? There’s no way John would do that.

John smirks.

MRS. PORTER
I walked aboard the ship.

I snapped in 7th grade and stabbed a kid with a mechanical pencil. I’m skeptical that people actually believe violence is never the answer, but if they do, they’re dead wrong. Violence is both swift and effective. Jam a pencil into someone’s arm and they tend to fuck with you a lot less. Slam a book into someone’s ribs and they can’t find the breath to call you a chink.

When I took karate as a kid, the instructor told my parents that I was too nice, that I never wanted to hurt anyone. Boy did that change. Discovering violence was like discovering fire.

One time, a kid walked past me and sprayed me with his Axe deodorant, so I took it from him and sprayed him in the face. I would see some kid acting like a jackass, making fun of some loser kid, so I’d go up and start fucking with him. I might physically hurt him, or wash my hands and wipe it on him and say it was piss. Or my friends and I could shove him into a trash can. Some kids would struggle hard and you’d need more people to hold their legs, but some would instantly submit like the antelope that just stops moving when the cheetah sinks its teeth in.

You can use a lot of things as weapons. I would ask kids, “Do you know what I can do with this Snapple bottle?” I’d slam the Snapple bottle or a Spanish textbook into someone’s hip bone.

I had a pen that I nicknamed Felipe. I would brandish the pen and ask if they wanted some of Felipe. If they didn’t acquiesce, I’d jam it into their arms or ribs or back. One of my friends still has a stab mark I left on him.

I would carry steak knives I stole from the restaurant I worked at in homemade sheaths made out of newspaper. This one time, someone punked my friend Chris Arkley and had problems with my other friend Mike Drake. When my friends and I went to the bowling alley (one of the only things to do in the area), we saw the guy’s truck there. I was going to slash his tires but didn’t want the sound to be too loud so I stuck the knife out and dragged it alongside the car. It made a big “LOOK AT ME” screeching sound.

I broke two kids’ fingers in my high school career. Both were my friends or kids that I at least hung around with periodically. I wasn’t trying to break their fingers. The problem happens when you grab their finger and then they start flailing around. Really they broke their own fingers.

If a psychiatrist had observed me, I would have been diagnosed with conduct disorder. My nickname among the Mexicans was “El Chino Loco”. That or “the Crazy Asian” was my usual bowling name.

Middle school basically made me hard. It was like the boot camp in Full Metal Jacket. I would watch violent movies over and over again, and have a kind of cathartic experience seeing things like the (spoiler!) Billy Batts scene in Goodfellas. 

We used to have sparring sessions in my friend John Brasher’s backyard. Some kids would get beat up a little more than others because they couldn’t fight as well. Again, I think some people often have that role in these types of male groups. It’s probably not ideal and in some cases, points to a lack of better friend options. People’s jobs or relationships can often be like this. Your boss is a dick and no one respects you, you hate your job, it’s not important, you’re a cog in a machine, etc. Or maybe your boyfriend is an asshole, your wife is constantly complaining about something, whatever. In these situations, especially ones that have been happening your whole life, it can be hard to really know that other ways exist or that they could exist for you. It’s like living in the desert and not being able to imagine an oasis. The same shock a poor person gets when they see a mansion for the first time, or when they start making good money and don’t have to mentally calculate the cost of everything to make sure it’ll be covered by the EBT card.

I gave people nicknames. One was Cottage Cheese Boy because he used to fill up a styrofoam bowl at the cafeteria with cottage cheese and ham cubes from the salad bar. One kid was Stencil Boy because he used stencils to put his name on his P.E. shirt rather than just writing it with a sharpie. Another was Hollister T-shirt Kid because, you guessed it, he always wore Hollister T-shirts. (It was nowhere near as dehumanizing as the names a friend of mine gave some kids: #1 and #2.)

Sometimes there’s someone you’re in conflict with and you can’t hurt them for whatever reason, usually because they’re a girl. So one tactic I learned was to just hurt someone they care about.

Size doesn’t really matter for people’s temperament. I picked on some football players who could have bench pressed me. I remember this one kid saying I could date his sister if I stopped hurting him.

I wasn’t a complete monster. When one of my friends threw an Indian kid’s religious necklace in the trash, I dug it out for him and handed it back. We stopped other kids from picking on kids who didn’t deserve it. The kids we were actually mean to were the assholes.

My family was poor in high school so I ate state-subsidized breakfast and lunch. I would go to school early and get in the minority line to get breakfast (I called it the minority line because it was mostly me and the Mexicans). I still have dreams where I’m super anxious to get to the line in time to get a good spot.

We had a burrito place by our school called “La Perla” where kids would go after school to hang out. We would occasionally sneak off campus to get lunch there. I was a kid that liked eating. It wasn’t fair to see these kids enjoying hot, delicious burritos just because their parents had money to give them! Turns out extortion is a valuable tool when you’re hungry. First you nicely say, “Can I have a dollar?” If they don’t give it to you, you apply more pressure: “Come on, man, give me a dollar.” Then you ramp up the aggression and the threats until they give in. You don’t even have to be that violent, usually an arm grab or the threat of Felipe was enough. I ended up having a burrito whenever I wanted one.

We had a Gatorade machine on campus. I didn’t like going without Gatorade. I would often ask kids for a dollar for Gatorade and would give them the hard press. Sometimes I’d save the dollars. I remember this one kid was walking around with a whole box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. I got that primal, baffled, animal-kingdom feeling like, “This kid is begging for me to take them!” I went right over and took most of the cream pies from the box.

Lasting Effects

Years and years later, I visited some of my high school friends I hadn’t seen for at least five years for a poker game. The people there who didn’t know me were told not to fuck with me. It felt great to know my reputation was already cemented. I was respected, I had juice. 

Reputation is important. That’s why people are willing to kill over it. Your reputation determines how you’re treated. Do people nod at you when you walk by or do they try to punk you? Do they give you the benefit of the doubt or do they immediately call you a liar? Do they listen when you give your opinion or do they scoff at whatever you say? (American Me has some great scenes that illustrate the concept of respect and I’d recommend watching it.)

In a closed environment with repeat interactions (like school), reputation is especially important. If someone bumps into me on the street and calls me a name, I can just walk away. I’ll never see that person again. But if I’m in an environment where I will see them every day for at least a year, and everyone else knows I don’t defend myself, it’s open season.

I still care about respect, and being slighted bothers me a lot, but most people aren’t trying to be malicious or rude, they just aren’t naturally that considerate.

I still get anxious around adolescent males, the demographic most likely to do stupid shit.

Being bullied and bullying others affected my emotional sense of justice. If I see someone who is begging to be robbed or picked on, I think “This kid needs to act tougher!” or “Why are they acting so flamboyant? They’re going to get made fun of!”

I feel an affinity for minorities that lived in rural areas and pioneered the way —shifting the Overton window for other races. (Listen to these accents of Chinese-Americans in Mississippi! https://youtu.be/2NMrqGHr5zE?t=2m20s)

I finally put a name to all the rumination and hypervigilance I experience: intrusive thoughts. People with real OCD (not to be confused with “I like things neat” OCPD) experience intrusive thoughts constantly. These are the thoughts that can be hard to get out of your head, like imagining bad things happening to loved ones, or picturing all the germs you interacted with that day, etc. I recently realized one of my coping mechanisms for dealing with them has been to take the imagined horrible thing and “put it” on the main bully. Say I imagined my girlfriend or mom getting shot or getting into a car accident, I would imagine it happening to him and then feel okay.

I often have dreams in which I have some unresolved issue and I’m craving closure. I’ll fight the bullies or I’ll try to be friends with them.

I try to be vulnerable and talking about these experiences is one of my ways of dealing with these types of things.

Your Experiences

I’d love to hear about your experiences with being bullied or bullying and how they shaped you.

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