The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence
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Title : The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence
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Title : The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence
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news-today.world | Hi guys, I'm back from visiting family in Ireland and if you're interested, you could see my photos and videos on Instagram. I had come across an article on the BBC entitled 'You don't want to be Chinese anymore' and I didn't like it because it was an extremely one-sided article. Now in the article, it mainly discusses the experiences of Chinese-Americans growing up and facing racism as students at school. Now I don't want to seem unsympathetic or cruel and of course any kind of racism in the classroom is totally wrong, but my first reaction was "the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence". Allow me to explain that I have spent the first half of my life in Singapore up till the age of 21 when I left upon completing my national service, then I had spent the second half of my life in Europe and I'm now 42 years old - so that means I'm in a unique position to compare both sides of the fence. I've also encountered a lot of BBCs (British-born Chinese) who have complained about similar kinds of racial abuse when they were growing up in the UK and actually, I'd like to have my say on the issue, if I may because I hate it when journalists do not hold their subjects to account even when they're wrong.
I grew up in Singapore and as a Chinese-Singaporean, I was in the majority: 76.2% of the population in Singapore is Chinese and the minorities in Singapore were the Malays, Indians, whites and others. So whilst I wasn't exposed to racist bullying as a child growing up in Singapore, there was nonetheless a lot of bullying going on as my parents sent me to a school where there was an endemic culture of bullying. So for example, there was this fat kid (let's call him Ah Pui) in my primary school who kept getting picked on by the rest of the kids because of his size - Ah Pui was as Chinese as they came but that wasn't enough to protect him from the bullying. I think there's a terrible misconception that kids of the same ethnic group or same skin colour do not pick on each other and that's completely false of course. The fact is kids will find a way to find those who are different and single them out for bullying, as in the case of Ah Pui because he was just so much fatter than all the other kids. The kids who were from poor families got bullied for being poorer than everyone else, then there was the girl who had a birthmark on her face who got picked on just for that - the name-calling was irrational, even downright cruel at times (especially for the girl with the birthmark - more on her later), but the bottom line is that even as a Chinese-Singaporean kid in a Chinese-majority environment, holy fuck there was so much bullying and that's because children are inherently horrible creatures. We only learn to reign in our feelings and control our behaviour later on in our lives as teenagers and adults, when we behave in a more civil manner - well, at least most of us do anyway.
I sat down with one of my best friends here in England called Laura and talked about the topic of bullying earlier this year - allow me to explain please that Laura is as white as they come. She is English, has light brown hair and beautiful blue eyes. I got to know her through gymnastics and I had always imagined that someone who looked that beautiful would be one of the popular girls at school - however, she confessed that she was viciously bullied when she was growing up. A group of girls ganged up on her and were determined to make her life miserable because one of them in the group just didn't get along with Laura - now the rational reaction to that is to stay away from the people you don't get along with in school and focus your energies on the nicer friends you get do along well with. However, unfortunately in Laura's case, she had somehow made an enemy and she just didn't know how to deal with the situation - it is a big ask for a teenager to deal with a situation like that when the other person is unreasonable and irrational. The bottom line is that both Laura and the group of girls who traumatized her for so many years at school were all as white as they came - being white didn't protect Laura from the bullying at all. This is why I am so frustrated when I read stories like that because it sees the entire issue of bullying through the filter of race: it's black vs white or white vs Asian whilst completely disregarding the other issues at play that may lead to the bullying in the first place. Furthermore, it also implies that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence in mostly homogeneous Asian countries, so allow me to assure you, that's really not the case because the one thing that children around the world share in common is that they really like indulging in bullying.
So let's look at one of the case studies as highlighted in the BBC article. One of the tweets from Chinese-American Kimberley Yam reads like this: "You're eight years old. Your third grade class orders Chinese food and your father delivers it. Apparently other kids don't think he's so cool. They laugh at you and mimic his accent," How about this: let's change the setting to Singapore and we substitute Chinese food with McDonald's since McDelivery operates in Singapore! So the new tweet would read: "you're eight years old. Your primary two class orders McDonald's hamburgers and your father deliver it. Apparently other kids don't think he's so cool. They laugh at you and mimic his accent." Yeah I can totally see that happening in Singapore - the issue here isn't racism per se but social class. Some of the kids in the class may have parents who are doctors, lawyers, bankers and other professionals who earn a lot of money, whilst other kids have parents who are struggling to make ends meet. It is hard for the kids to reconcile that difference without a mature understanding of the world, about why some people are rich and others are poor. If I see children from a poor family, my instinct is to respond with sympathy because it is not the children's fault that they have to endure the poverty - it is the parents' fault. It is a complete lottery whether you get born with rich or poor parents, so it is hardly fair to judge a child on that basis. So if you have a father who shows up with the McDelivery for your class party, then even young children can imply that your family is rather poor and that your dad probably isn't very highly educated otherwise he wouldn't be doing a job like that.
As for the part where the kids made fun of the Chinese man's accent, that's something we all have to cope with in our everyday lives. It goes far beyond racism: a person's accent is often something we use to derive information about the person speaking. Now whether we choose to discriminate against the other person once we have derived that information is another matter, but even amongst Chinese people, I can assure you that they are constantly judging each other's accents as your skin colour doesn't really tell you anything about your social class and that is what really determines your place in society these days. Most people are not blunt enough to ask questions like, do you have a degree? Which university did you graduate from? What is your job and how much do you earn a year? Do you have your own house and car? Are you my social equal or are you inferior? The fact is even if you have the audacity to ask such questions, I doubt you'll get an honest answer (or an answer at all). So instead, we use more subtle ways to evaluate the people we meet by trying to get that information from the way they speak. So if this Chinese-American woman's father had a job delivering Chinese food, he would not speak English the same way a Chinese-American professor at Stanford or Yale would speak English. Likewise, a white person who did an unskilled job like delivering fast food wouldn't exactly speak in a particular articulate or eloquent way either - so is this racism or more a function of one's social class? You might argue that it is both, but I think it is probably far more the latter.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but clearly not all Chinese people speak English with an accent (or much of an accent) and the biggest factor would be your education: the more educated you are, the less likely you are to have a strong Chinese accent. It also depends on where you live and work - if you worked in a small shop in Ang Mo Kio, then the people you interact with on a daily basis are not really going to care if you speak English with a strong accent. Contrast that to my work today: just within the last 12 hours, I have spoken to people from India, Egypt, Taiwan, Singapore, America, Sweden, Spain, Panama, France, Indonesia and the UK. I am obliged to strip my English of any kind of strong regional accent and speak in a very clear form of international English that would allow me to be understood by people who have learnt English as a second or foreign language. I do encounter people who speak English as a foreign language all the time and in fact, I am going to an Islamic banking conference tomorrow where I am sure a lot of people will not be native speakers of English but I am just grateful that they are willing to deal with me in English instead of making me struggle on in their native languages. I know how to be gracious when I meet someone who has an accent in English - we have all learned social graces which means that we learnt to hide our feelings, even if we have negative feelings about someone. Children however, are far more tactless and often just speak their minds with no filter - whilst that can lead to embarrassing situations, but surely that's children lacking tact rather racism per se.
I hate to be blunt but in the case of the father who delivered the Chinese food, a lot of the embarrassment arose from the fact that Kimberley was ashamed of the fact that her father didn't have a particularly impressive job. He was the humble delivery man for a Chinese restaurant, probably because he wasn't educated enough to become a doctor, lawyer or banker. Yet of course, because she is so Chinese, she couldn't bring herself to pin that shame on her father - after all, to be fair, that poor man is trying his best, working an honest job to try to put food on the table for the family and anyone who looks down on a man like that are just vindictive. If she was honest enough to admit that she felt ashamed of her father because he looked pathetic compared to the parents of her classmates, then I'm sure many people would criticize her for being ungrateful. So instead, she shifts the focus to her white classmates and accuses them of making her feel bad about being Chinese - when really, this is really not a clear-cut case of racism. If a white classmate's father had showed up with a McDelivery and he spoke like an inarticulate, uneducated country bumpkin, then I am sure the children in the class would have equally made fun of him. Does a strong foreign accent make us sound inarticulate and even stupid at times? Yes, unfortunately, that is the case. In this context, it wasn't just the fact that he was Chinese that led to the awkward situation - it was his job and consequently the low social status of that family that embarrassed her..
The article then goes on and describes an incident where Kimberley recalls being made fun of at ballet camp - she was told her eyes are of an 'ugly shape' and she responded by hating herself. Good fucking grief. Her response was wrong on so many levels. Look, I survived pretty extreme bullying in my teenage years in Singapore and yes, my bullies were Chinese too, like me. Did I ever crumble like that and hate myself just because someone insulted me? For crying out aloud, I was brutally insulted on a daily basis in that awful school I went to, if I was going to hate myself as a result from all this bullying, then I would not have lived to have seen my 15th birthday. I would have probably killed myself sometime between 1989 and 1990 when the bullying got really bad. No, instead I responded like for like - I gave as good as I got. You wanna insult me? Bring it on bitch, I will find a way to undermine your self-confidence and scar you for life - you'll still be crying to your therapist 40 years from now as a result of the mountain of shit I am going to unleash on you. You want to punch me? Bring it on, I will fucking break your nose and you'll know you've messed with the wrong person. Look, kids and teenagers are juts awful to each other - even when you remove the element of racism from the equation, oh believe you me, kids will still find a way to hate each other and fuck each other up. The way Kimberley just crumbled emotionally is totally the wrong response, so why is the BBC journalist not challenging her for the wrong way she reacted then? Instead they put her on a pedestal? Hell no, not on my watch, hence I needed to respond with this piece on my blog.
The truth is our kids are going through a very harsh environment at school and the only way they can make sense of this environment is if they learn to how to deal with difficult people at that young age. Can you engage them? Befriend them and get them on your side? Or at least get them to leave you alone by scaring them away? Remember I told you about the girl with the birthmark on her face in my primary school? Sure some dumb kids tried to make fun of her face, but did she crumble and cry over that? Hell no. She stood up to the bullies and fought back. She even once beat up this boy to teach him a lesson, the teachers got involved because the boy was bleeding after she kicked the shit out of him - but did anyone who witness that beating dare to even speak of that birthmark ever again? Hell no. We knew what would happen and we didn't go there. And may I remind you that this girl with the birthmark is Chinese, the boy she beat up was Chinese, practically everyone in the class then was Chinese - racism didn't have a part to play in that situation, it was just dumb kids being cruel to each other over anyone who looked slightly different. Usually they would pick on someone who was short, fat or stood out for whatever reason - that was why that girl with the birthmark on her face got picked on and she was forced by circumstances to stand up for herself. After all, she couldn't fix her birthmark - that wasn't anyone's fault, but what she could do was to teach the bullies a lesson so they would never ever dare to mess with her again. And may I remind you - that girl was just 7 and she didn't go crying to mummy, hell no. She stood up for herself and fought back. Good for her, we all have so much to learn from that 7 year old Chinese girl with the birthmark on her face!
Now Kimberley, that's how a 7 year old Chinese girl dealt with the situation. And that's how you deal with such situations in life, you can't always expect people to be nice, but you can always be prepared to make sure nobody dares to mess with you.Yes in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to deal with racism and we most certainly wouldn't want to deal with bullies. However, the fact is there are idiots everywhere you go and the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence. Being in the majority from an ethnic or cultural perspective doesn't protect you from bullying - even if Kimberley grew up in somewhere like Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai or Singapore where she would have been surrounded by mostly Chinese kids, they would have still found a way to bully her. It would not be about the fact that she is Chinese, but it may be about her weight, her hair, her schoolbag, her parents, the way she spoke or anything else these cruel kids can find out about you. In fact, from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, bullying is a huge problem in our schools and the fact that our societies are so focused on us achieving good grades almost sweeps the issue under the carpet. Years later, when I confronted my parents about the extreme bullying I had to endure in secondary school, my mum went into denial and claimed, "well you were still getting very good grades at school, so it couldn't have been that bad, you weren't that badly affected, right?" That's typical Chinese parenting for you - in light of that, I had to learn to solve my own problems.
Now allow me to talk about a situation which is what I would describe as a 'false positive' - the definition of that term is as follows: a test result which wrongly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present. I moved to London to start university in the year 1997 and that was after I had completed my national service in Singapore. Within a few weeks, I had settled into life in London and started making many new friends. At first I thought, wow this is awesome because everyone is so incredibly nice here - British people are wonderful. And during this honeymoon period, I genuinely believed that and that was in fact a false positive because I didn't give myself enough credit for the efforts I have made to both make new friends and fend of the wrong kind of people. What had happened was that having gone through both a school with an endemic culture of bullying and national service, I had been learnt how to cope. You know the saying, what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger? Having gone through two extremely toxic environments, I felt like I had swam through a river full of nuclear waste: either the radioactive waste would kill you or you would mutate into something extremely strong like the Incredible Hulk. Well, for me, thankfully it was the latter - by the time I had arrived in London, I had matured into a young man who had developed much better people skills and I had become a lot better when it came to developing relationships with those around me. So by that token, it wasn't that the people here in London were any nicer than the people in Singapore but simply because I wasn't bullied here, I thought the people here in London were much nicer as I hadn't accounted for the fact that my social skills have improved a lot as I got older.
I'd like to end on a positive message: no the white people in London weren't nicer than the people back in Singapore. It has never ever been about white vs Asians or anything to do with racism at all, which is why I believe Kimberley Yam has been barking up the tree all this time. Look, I've dealt with loads of British Asians who give me sob stories about, "but I was the only Asian kid in my class, you don't know what that's like!" Oh really? I've been the only Asian person in the company for so many years now in the UK and guess what? I'm coping just fine and I've learnt to give myself a lot more credit for that. In demonstrating that I am a mature, confident and happy person, the bullies at my university decided that I wasn't the kind of person to mess with and whilst there was some bullying going on at my university, the bullies chose to stay away from me. The same thing happened at work at my first and second job - gosh, there was quite a nasty office bully in my second job but even he chose to stay the hell away from me. What Kimberley doing is wrong for a very fundamental reason: she is giving the bullies exactly what they want by hating herself and marking herself out to be a vulnerable target for the bullies. Okay, she is trying to retrospectively fix her negative feelings about herself which can't be a bad thing, but I can't help but want to scream at her, "girl, stop being such a victim, stop feeling sorry for yourself and start standing up for yourself. Don't you see you need to shoulder the responsibility for what happen because you reacted with self-pity and self-hatred rather than strength and pride?" But once you take responsibility for the situation, then you can start to fix it by improving your social skills: the ball has always been in Kimberley's court but she did nothing.
School can be a tough place socially and you have to either get people to like you or at least be afraid to mess with you - if you fail on both accounts, then you identify yourself as a potential victim for bullying. That failure is down to a lack of social skills. It's a big ask for young kids to develop those social skills quickly when many adults don't even have all the right social skills - we tend to spend our childhood developing those social skills. Young children tend to have the worst social skills but as we become teenagers, we learn how to make friends, socialize and form relationships with those around us. Well, at least most of us do anyway, being autistic, it took me a long time to do so and I was always a few years behind my peers in that aspect. Now I don't know if this was the case when it came to Kimberley, but my Chinese parents (who are autistic too by the way) never really cared what the situation was when it came to my social skills and my ability to make friends, all they focused on were my grades - as if that was all that mattered. In fact, my parents viewed having too many friends and being popular as a distraction - the popular kids will have friends to play with and if you were a loner with no friends, then you would have no choice but to turn to your books, study and get straight As. Yeah and the latter would also lead to your kid being utterly miserable at school, but my Chinese parents just couldn't understand that. I'm suggesting that Kimberley's Chinese parents could be part of the problem as well if they had failed to prepare her socially for the challenges at school and thus Chinese parenting could be a major part of the problem! The question is: are you honest enough to be critical of your own culture? Well, I certainly am.
As for myself, I really don't see the point about being proud of being Chinese or having to like being Chinese. I think it is far more important to like being me and certainly, my skin colour or culture doesn't define me. No, rather my pride is based on my personal achievements: if I want to feel good about myself, I have to earn the right to do so by doing something awesome that I can point out to people, "hey, look at me, I did this, I achieved this." I am able to get instant gratification for that on Instagram these days when I post videos of my gymnastics but generally I tend to get that same gratification through work when I am able to make sales and earn money through commissions. My pride is not linked to the culture of my ancestors, but rather on things that I have done recently. For example, I had a wonderful time at the gym last night with three friends and I nurtured that friendship to where it is today - they are very nice to me and I can derive pride from having forged those brilliant social relationships. And if I do meet someone who says something derogatory or racist about Chinese people, I may choose to challenge that person, I may choose to confront that person but the fact is I can shrug my shoulders and say, "you're just being ignorant, obnoxious and stupid - that's your problem and I won't let it become mine. My self-esteem is most certainly not in your hands." The problem with Kimberley was that she gladly allowed the ignorance, stupidity and bigotry of others to become her problem. Her pride and self-esteem should have been based on her personal achievements and not what other kids in her school thought about Chinese people.
So that's it from me on this topic. Over to you, what do you think? Am I being too unsympathetic when it came to this case? Is it right to put the onus on victims of bullying to stand up for themselves and blame them for not doing so? What do you think about people like Kimberley Yam who go on social media playing the victim's card? And do you think it is racism or just a classic case of bullying in her story? How have you dealt with being bullied in the past? Do leave a comment below please, many thanks for reading.
I sat down with one of my best friends here in England called Laura and talked about the topic of bullying earlier this year - allow me to explain please that Laura is as white as they come. She is English, has light brown hair and beautiful blue eyes. I got to know her through gymnastics and I had always imagined that someone who looked that beautiful would be one of the popular girls at school - however, she confessed that she was viciously bullied when she was growing up. A group of girls ganged up on her and were determined to make her life miserable because one of them in the group just didn't get along with Laura - now the rational reaction to that is to stay away from the people you don't get along with in school and focus your energies on the nicer friends you get do along well with. However, unfortunately in Laura's case, she had somehow made an enemy and she just didn't know how to deal with the situation - it is a big ask for a teenager to deal with a situation like that when the other person is unreasonable and irrational. The bottom line is that both Laura and the group of girls who traumatized her for so many years at school were all as white as they came - being white didn't protect Laura from the bullying at all. This is why I am so frustrated when I read stories like that because it sees the entire issue of bullying through the filter of race: it's black vs white or white vs Asian whilst completely disregarding the other issues at play that may lead to the bullying in the first place. Furthermore, it also implies that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence in mostly homogeneous Asian countries, so allow me to assure you, that's really not the case because the one thing that children around the world share in common is that they really like indulging in bullying.
So let's look at one of the case studies as highlighted in the BBC article. One of the tweets from Chinese-American Kimberley Yam reads like this: "You're eight years old. Your third grade class orders Chinese food and your father delivers it. Apparently other kids don't think he's so cool. They laugh at you and mimic his accent," How about this: let's change the setting to Singapore and we substitute Chinese food with McDonald's since McDelivery operates in Singapore! So the new tweet would read: "you're eight years old. Your primary two class orders McDonald's hamburgers and your father deliver it. Apparently other kids don't think he's so cool. They laugh at you and mimic his accent." Yeah I can totally see that happening in Singapore - the issue here isn't racism per se but social class. Some of the kids in the class may have parents who are doctors, lawyers, bankers and other professionals who earn a lot of money, whilst other kids have parents who are struggling to make ends meet. It is hard for the kids to reconcile that difference without a mature understanding of the world, about why some people are rich and others are poor. If I see children from a poor family, my instinct is to respond with sympathy because it is not the children's fault that they have to endure the poverty - it is the parents' fault. It is a complete lottery whether you get born with rich or poor parents, so it is hardly fair to judge a child on that basis. So if you have a father who shows up with the McDelivery for your class party, then even young children can imply that your family is rather poor and that your dad probably isn't very highly educated otherwise he wouldn't be doing a job like that.
As for the part where the kids made fun of the Chinese man's accent, that's something we all have to cope with in our everyday lives. It goes far beyond racism: a person's accent is often something we use to derive information about the person speaking. Now whether we choose to discriminate against the other person once we have derived that information is another matter, but even amongst Chinese people, I can assure you that they are constantly judging each other's accents as your skin colour doesn't really tell you anything about your social class and that is what really determines your place in society these days. Most people are not blunt enough to ask questions like, do you have a degree? Which university did you graduate from? What is your job and how much do you earn a year? Do you have your own house and car? Are you my social equal or are you inferior? The fact is even if you have the audacity to ask such questions, I doubt you'll get an honest answer (or an answer at all). So instead, we use more subtle ways to evaluate the people we meet by trying to get that information from the way they speak. So if this Chinese-American woman's father had a job delivering Chinese food, he would not speak English the same way a Chinese-American professor at Stanford or Yale would speak English. Likewise, a white person who did an unskilled job like delivering fast food wouldn't exactly speak in a particular articulate or eloquent way either - so is this racism or more a function of one's social class? You might argue that it is both, but I think it is probably far more the latter.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but clearly not all Chinese people speak English with an accent (or much of an accent) and the biggest factor would be your education: the more educated you are, the less likely you are to have a strong Chinese accent. It also depends on where you live and work - if you worked in a small shop in Ang Mo Kio, then the people you interact with on a daily basis are not really going to care if you speak English with a strong accent. Contrast that to my work today: just within the last 12 hours, I have spoken to people from India, Egypt, Taiwan, Singapore, America, Sweden, Spain, Panama, France, Indonesia and the UK. I am obliged to strip my English of any kind of strong regional accent and speak in a very clear form of international English that would allow me to be understood by people who have learnt English as a second or foreign language. I do encounter people who speak English as a foreign language all the time and in fact, I am going to an Islamic banking conference tomorrow where I am sure a lot of people will not be native speakers of English but I am just grateful that they are willing to deal with me in English instead of making me struggle on in their native languages. I know how to be gracious when I meet someone who has an accent in English - we have all learned social graces which means that we learnt to hide our feelings, even if we have negative feelings about someone. Children however, are far more tactless and often just speak their minds with no filter - whilst that can lead to embarrassing situations, but surely that's children lacking tact rather racism per se.
I hate to be blunt but in the case of the father who delivered the Chinese food, a lot of the embarrassment arose from the fact that Kimberley was ashamed of the fact that her father didn't have a particularly impressive job. He was the humble delivery man for a Chinese restaurant, probably because he wasn't educated enough to become a doctor, lawyer or banker. Yet of course, because she is so Chinese, she couldn't bring herself to pin that shame on her father - after all, to be fair, that poor man is trying his best, working an honest job to try to put food on the table for the family and anyone who looks down on a man like that are just vindictive. If she was honest enough to admit that she felt ashamed of her father because he looked pathetic compared to the parents of her classmates, then I'm sure many people would criticize her for being ungrateful. So instead, she shifts the focus to her white classmates and accuses them of making her feel bad about being Chinese - when really, this is really not a clear-cut case of racism. If a white classmate's father had showed up with a McDelivery and he spoke like an inarticulate, uneducated country bumpkin, then I am sure the children in the class would have equally made fun of him. Does a strong foreign accent make us sound inarticulate and even stupid at times? Yes, unfortunately, that is the case. In this context, it wasn't just the fact that he was Chinese that led to the awkward situation - it was his job and consequently the low social status of that family that embarrassed her..
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| What was the root cause of Kimberley's shame? |
The article then goes on and describes an incident where Kimberley recalls being made fun of at ballet camp - she was told her eyes are of an 'ugly shape' and she responded by hating herself. Good fucking grief. Her response was wrong on so many levels. Look, I survived pretty extreme bullying in my teenage years in Singapore and yes, my bullies were Chinese too, like me. Did I ever crumble like that and hate myself just because someone insulted me? For crying out aloud, I was brutally insulted on a daily basis in that awful school I went to, if I was going to hate myself as a result from all this bullying, then I would not have lived to have seen my 15th birthday. I would have probably killed myself sometime between 1989 and 1990 when the bullying got really bad. No, instead I responded like for like - I gave as good as I got. You wanna insult me? Bring it on bitch, I will find a way to undermine your self-confidence and scar you for life - you'll still be crying to your therapist 40 years from now as a result of the mountain of shit I am going to unleash on you. You want to punch me? Bring it on, I will fucking break your nose and you'll know you've messed with the wrong person. Look, kids and teenagers are juts awful to each other - even when you remove the element of racism from the equation, oh believe you me, kids will still find a way to hate each other and fuck each other up. The way Kimberley just crumbled emotionally is totally the wrong response, so why is the BBC journalist not challenging her for the wrong way she reacted then? Instead they put her on a pedestal? Hell no, not on my watch, hence I needed to respond with this piece on my blog.
The truth is our kids are going through a very harsh environment at school and the only way they can make sense of this environment is if they learn to how to deal with difficult people at that young age. Can you engage them? Befriend them and get them on your side? Or at least get them to leave you alone by scaring them away? Remember I told you about the girl with the birthmark on her face in my primary school? Sure some dumb kids tried to make fun of her face, but did she crumble and cry over that? Hell no. She stood up to the bullies and fought back. She even once beat up this boy to teach him a lesson, the teachers got involved because the boy was bleeding after she kicked the shit out of him - but did anyone who witness that beating dare to even speak of that birthmark ever again? Hell no. We knew what would happen and we didn't go there. And may I remind you that this girl with the birthmark is Chinese, the boy she beat up was Chinese, practically everyone in the class then was Chinese - racism didn't have a part to play in that situation, it was just dumb kids being cruel to each other over anyone who looked slightly different. Usually they would pick on someone who was short, fat or stood out for whatever reason - that was why that girl with the birthmark on her face got picked on and she was forced by circumstances to stand up for herself. After all, she couldn't fix her birthmark - that wasn't anyone's fault, but what she could do was to teach the bullies a lesson so they would never ever dare to mess with her again. And may I remind you - that girl was just 7 and she didn't go crying to mummy, hell no. She stood up for herself and fought back. Good for her, we all have so much to learn from that 7 year old Chinese girl with the birthmark on her face!
Now Kimberley, that's how a 7 year old Chinese girl dealt with the situation. And that's how you deal with such situations in life, you can't always expect people to be nice, but you can always be prepared to make sure nobody dares to mess with you.Yes in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to deal with racism and we most certainly wouldn't want to deal with bullies. However, the fact is there are idiots everywhere you go and the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence. Being in the majority from an ethnic or cultural perspective doesn't protect you from bullying - even if Kimberley grew up in somewhere like Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai or Singapore where she would have been surrounded by mostly Chinese kids, they would have still found a way to bully her. It would not be about the fact that she is Chinese, but it may be about her weight, her hair, her schoolbag, her parents, the way she spoke or anything else these cruel kids can find out about you. In fact, from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, bullying is a huge problem in our schools and the fact that our societies are so focused on us achieving good grades almost sweeps the issue under the carpet. Years later, when I confronted my parents about the extreme bullying I had to endure in secondary school, my mum went into denial and claimed, "well you were still getting very good grades at school, so it couldn't have been that bad, you weren't that badly affected, right?" That's typical Chinese parenting for you - in light of that, I had to learn to solve my own problems.
Now allow me to talk about a situation which is what I would describe as a 'false positive' - the definition of that term is as follows: a test result which wrongly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present. I moved to London to start university in the year 1997 and that was after I had completed my national service in Singapore. Within a few weeks, I had settled into life in London and started making many new friends. At first I thought, wow this is awesome because everyone is so incredibly nice here - British people are wonderful. And during this honeymoon period, I genuinely believed that and that was in fact a false positive because I didn't give myself enough credit for the efforts I have made to both make new friends and fend of the wrong kind of people. What had happened was that having gone through both a school with an endemic culture of bullying and national service, I had been learnt how to cope. You know the saying, what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger? Having gone through two extremely toxic environments, I felt like I had swam through a river full of nuclear waste: either the radioactive waste would kill you or you would mutate into something extremely strong like the Incredible Hulk. Well, for me, thankfully it was the latter - by the time I had arrived in London, I had matured into a young man who had developed much better people skills and I had become a lot better when it came to developing relationships with those around me. So by that token, it wasn't that the people here in London were any nicer than the people in Singapore but simply because I wasn't bullied here, I thought the people here in London were much nicer as I hadn't accounted for the fact that my social skills have improved a lot as I got older.
I'd like to end on a positive message: no the white people in London weren't nicer than the people back in Singapore. It has never ever been about white vs Asians or anything to do with racism at all, which is why I believe Kimberley Yam has been barking up the tree all this time. Look, I've dealt with loads of British Asians who give me sob stories about, "but I was the only Asian kid in my class, you don't know what that's like!" Oh really? I've been the only Asian person in the company for so many years now in the UK and guess what? I'm coping just fine and I've learnt to give myself a lot more credit for that. In demonstrating that I am a mature, confident and happy person, the bullies at my university decided that I wasn't the kind of person to mess with and whilst there was some bullying going on at my university, the bullies chose to stay away from me. The same thing happened at work at my first and second job - gosh, there was quite a nasty office bully in my second job but even he chose to stay the hell away from me. What Kimberley doing is wrong for a very fundamental reason: she is giving the bullies exactly what they want by hating herself and marking herself out to be a vulnerable target for the bullies. Okay, she is trying to retrospectively fix her negative feelings about herself which can't be a bad thing, but I can't help but want to scream at her, "girl, stop being such a victim, stop feeling sorry for yourself and start standing up for yourself. Don't you see you need to shoulder the responsibility for what happen because you reacted with self-pity and self-hatred rather than strength and pride?" But once you take responsibility for the situation, then you can start to fix it by improving your social skills: the ball has always been in Kimberley's court but she did nothing.
School can be a tough place socially and you have to either get people to like you or at least be afraid to mess with you - if you fail on both accounts, then you identify yourself as a potential victim for bullying. That failure is down to a lack of social skills. It's a big ask for young kids to develop those social skills quickly when many adults don't even have all the right social skills - we tend to spend our childhood developing those social skills. Young children tend to have the worst social skills but as we become teenagers, we learn how to make friends, socialize and form relationships with those around us. Well, at least most of us do anyway, being autistic, it took me a long time to do so and I was always a few years behind my peers in that aspect. Now I don't know if this was the case when it came to Kimberley, but my Chinese parents (who are autistic too by the way) never really cared what the situation was when it came to my social skills and my ability to make friends, all they focused on were my grades - as if that was all that mattered. In fact, my parents viewed having too many friends and being popular as a distraction - the popular kids will have friends to play with and if you were a loner with no friends, then you would have no choice but to turn to your books, study and get straight As. Yeah and the latter would also lead to your kid being utterly miserable at school, but my Chinese parents just couldn't understand that. I'm suggesting that Kimberley's Chinese parents could be part of the problem as well if they had failed to prepare her socially for the challenges at school and thus Chinese parenting could be a major part of the problem! The question is: are you honest enough to be critical of your own culture? Well, I certainly am.
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| Kimberley's Chinese parents have to shoulder some blame for what happened. |
As for myself, I really don't see the point about being proud of being Chinese or having to like being Chinese. I think it is far more important to like being me and certainly, my skin colour or culture doesn't define me. No, rather my pride is based on my personal achievements: if I want to feel good about myself, I have to earn the right to do so by doing something awesome that I can point out to people, "hey, look at me, I did this, I achieved this." I am able to get instant gratification for that on Instagram these days when I post videos of my gymnastics but generally I tend to get that same gratification through work when I am able to make sales and earn money through commissions. My pride is not linked to the culture of my ancestors, but rather on things that I have done recently. For example, I had a wonderful time at the gym last night with three friends and I nurtured that friendship to where it is today - they are very nice to me and I can derive pride from having forged those brilliant social relationships. And if I do meet someone who says something derogatory or racist about Chinese people, I may choose to challenge that person, I may choose to confront that person but the fact is I can shrug my shoulders and say, "you're just being ignorant, obnoxious and stupid - that's your problem and I won't let it become mine. My self-esteem is most certainly not in your hands." The problem with Kimberley was that she gladly allowed the ignorance, stupidity and bigotry of others to become her problem. Her pride and self-esteem should have been based on her personal achievements and not what other kids in her school thought about Chinese people.
So that's it from me on this topic. Over to you, what do you think? Am I being too unsympathetic when it came to this case? Is it right to put the onus on victims of bullying to stand up for themselves and blame them for not doing so? What do you think about people like Kimberley Yam who go on social media playing the victim's card? And do you think it is racism or just a classic case of bullying in her story? How have you dealt with being bullied in the past? Do leave a comment below please, many thanks for reading.
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