I was chatting with a friend the other day who told me she was worried that, when her daughter eventually has to go to school, she might get bullied. My friend moved from Hong Kong to the Netherlands a few years ago, and gave birth to a very cute baby daughter, who is about to celebrate her first birthday.
When she shared her concern, I froze a little bit, because it brought back memories of me being bullied growing up in the Netherlands. I didn’t know what to say to her then. This is what I wish I had told her.
I was bullied in elementary and high school here, where I stood out because I was the only ethnically Chinese in the school. To survive, I developed a superpower: I learned to be invisible, I learned to cover up. But sometimes my superpowers would fail me.
This is one such moment: I am in the gym with my best friend. The gym is empty, except for us. Perhaps we were early, perhaps it was our turn to set up the equipment. The gym was quiet, but suddenly I hear the sound of a door opening. In the distance, I can see my classmate. He yells my name, with this big grin on his face. He doesn’t walk towards me but stays there.
Then it starts: him laughing, prancing around, saying “ching chang chong”, making faces at me, making fun of me. For a while, I just stand there. I don’t say a word. But I can feel the tension in my chest building and my face getting hot. Everything after is a bit of a blur, but I know I started running after him. I remember I wanted to beat the crap out of him.
I try to kick him, but he keeps running away. When I finally grab him, I see my friend’s shocked face as he tries to stop me, and my classmate covering his face with his arms, telling me he was just trying to be “funny”.
Could I have dealt with the bullying in better ways? Why did I not tell my parents or teachers? Well, my dad was never around, and even if he was, his Dutch was not very good. My mum’s Dutch was better, but I could not imagine her going to school with me. I imagine she would have asked me if I was okay, and would have told me to be “smarter” next time.
Growing up, I was taught to rely on myself, and that I could trust no one except family. Except that in this case, I knew that my parents could not protect me. This is not a criticism of my parents, I know they had it tough. It must be difficult to send your child to school knowing you cannot protect him because you are in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language fluently, where you don’t have friends you can trust, and where you are not familiar with the culture.
So what can we do? I Googled, “what to do when your kid gets bullied at school”. The first advice I found was to document the bullying and report it to the school. Okay. I want to say that the schools I went to were all really good schools, with good teachers who cared about their students. But even in the best schools with the best teachers, discrimination, racism, and bullying can happen. And even in the best schools there can be a significant lack of awareness.
For example, there is (still) an ongoing campaign to stop the singing of a racist birthday song (“hanky panky Shanghai”) in Dutch classrooms. More generally, a news article from March 2024 shared research findings that at least half of the people in the Netherlands with a Chinese background experience discrimination. This is not news to me, but it is telling that this is (literally) news to the majority of people in the Netherlands in the year 2024. Perhaps this is why back in high school I didn’t tell my teachers what happened.
The second advice on what to do if your kid gets bullied was to comfort your kid. This blew my mind. This is not something I was raised with in my home. But my guess is that my mother did not know how to comfort herself, let alone her child.
I want to wish my friend this: I hope her child will feel safe enough to turn to her for comfort, now and in the future. This requires that we know how to turn to ourselves for comfort first. I hope our next generation will continue to work for a better future, that when they are faced with injustice, they know we will have their back.
Violence is often a response to injustice, but it is sad and tragic if people feel this is the only way left for them to defend themselves.
