An Earnest Attempt to Humanize Bullies, Part 3
Jenny Zhang
First Posted: 01/28/2012 1:12 am Updated: 01/28/2012 1:12 am
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Trying to talk seriously about bullying is hard. The word alone sounds cheesy. As part of Rookie’s continuing series on bullies, and how we are them and they are us, we asked some of our writers to confess to times when they were the aggressor.
By Jenny Zhang
1.
When I was kid, I had such absurdly high self-esteem that I once confessed to my best friend that I was seriously afraid to sing in public, lest some music mogul accidentally overhear my beautiful lark voice* and force me to become the world’s next singing sensation, whereupon I would be forced to go on to win a bunch of Grammys and have so many devoted fans that I would have no choice but to continue singing, in order to -- you know -- give the people what they want. When she burst out laughing, I was offended.
“You don’t think I need to worry about that?”
“Um, no,” and then, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
My grandfather used to pick me up from preschool on his bicycle every day. He’d bike across Shanghai with me on the back of the bike, legs dangling. I would tell him stories about my day -- mostly tall tales and little fibs, like how we took a class trip to the zoo and were allowed inside the lion’s cage and I was the only one brave enough to stroke that magnificent cat’s long mane of hair. When we arrived home, I’d follow him up the stairs, still talking about my day, and as he unlaced my shoes in the living room, I would still be telling him about my day, and I’d follow him into all the rooms of our house, talking talking talking, and then finally, in Chinese, “OK, Grandpa, show’s over. You can go now.”
When I moved to the New York City at the age of five, I spent a lot of time in the backseat of my parents’ car. Every time we hit traffic, I would unbuckle my seatbelt, take off my shoes, shoot my legs up in the air, hang my head off the car seat like it was a monkey bar, and begin to “entertain” the cars behind us.
“What’re you doing, honey?” my mom would ask me in Chinese.
“I’m entertaining, Mom. Can you not interrupt me?”
In fourth grade, there was a period of time when three different boys liked me, and there was a rumor going around school that the three of them were planning on fighting for me. Needless to say, my self-love was spiraling out of control.
2.
Something changed when my family and I moved to a new town in the middle of seventh grade. It would be easy to blame it on my sudden growth spurt the previous year. I was so skinny and gangly that my babysitter would regularly pull me aside and whisper into my ear, “Are they feeding you meat or just vegetables?” It would be easy to blame it on the tooth I lost when I was nine in a bike accident that was subsequently shoved back into my mouth where it rotted for years and messed up my gum line and the rest of my teeth so badly that I had to wear a combination of braces, rubber bands, and retainers for the next six years, and I remember this kid in sixth grade advised me to keep my mouth closed, “If you want a boyfriend someday.” It would be easy to blame it on the glasses I had to wear all the time, starting in sixth grade, and my messed-up nose, which used to make every pair of glasses look crooked on my face. But I think what really happened is that I finally became aware of what was going on around me. The idea of my essential self was finally corrupted by others -- I realized that the charming, charismatic, beautiful, and brilliant entertainer I thought I was existed only in my own tiny universe. To other people, I was just some shy, weird, annoying, weak-looking girl with crooked glasses and really bad teeth.
Once I realized that the person I thought I was had very little to do with the person other people thought I was, I couldn’t stop the rush of revelations -- each day the fog over my brain lifted a little bit, and I hated what I saw. I would replay certain memories only to remember horrifying details that I hadn’t noticed before, like a nightmare where you’re standing in front of a picnic table covered with delicious food, but you find you can’t move your arms and legs at all, and suddenly the chirping birds have become horrible, extinct pterodactyls, and the park turns into a forest with mangled trees, and what had looked like a bunny from a distance is actually a man in army fatigues running toward you with a syringe full of heroin.**
It dawned on me that the neighborhood boy, who used to walk with me in the mornings on my way to school, wasn’t a nice boy who just wanted my company in the mornings, but he was, in fact, a raging racist who would shout racial epithets at me the entire time. He would pull his eyelids back and ask me if I knew how to ka-rah-tay.
The girls who came up to me during recess and told me that I was a “such a ho bag” for wearing a crocheted white sweater without a bra weren’t paying me a compliment at all, but were giving me my first taste of slut-shaming.
There were entire incidents that I blocked out because they didn’t fit with how I saw myself. There was the time this boy followed me around for a week and threw rocks at my back, and when my mom found red marks on my skin, I told her that a friend had done that to me, and she sat me down and tried to explain why a true friend would never do that.
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