I have spoken to my parents about the bullying...

Hi guys, as you know, I wrote a piece about being bullied as a teenager at school when I was 13 - 14 years old and the response has been great. I raised the topic with my parents on Skype - well, I didn't mean to confront them per se, but it kinda slipped out as I wanted to raise the issue particularly since my nephew is now at the age when I suffered the very worst of the bullying as a student. Older teenagers and adults are in a much better position to cope with the bullying but younger kids would struggle and suffer the most, especially if they are the kind of people who would blame themselves rather than ask for help. I wanted to share with you what my parents' response was to show you why Asian parenting is a huge part of the problem. My parents' reaction disappointed me, but actually it didn't surprise me lah.

"But your grades weren't affected, you had good results - so it couldn't have been that serious?" 

"I can't believe this would happen in such a good school. Don't all the boys at RI have good grades?"

My mother honestly said that, which meant that she really only used my grades at school to check if everything was okay with me - as if my report card was some kind of barometer for everything in my life and she would only react if I started getting Cs and Ds or failing. It was true that I generally kept my grades up throughout my secondary school regardless of the bullying - that didn't change the fact that being a victim of bullying made me utterly miserable at times. I suppose she thought that having good results would have been enough to have kept me happy through the miserable years, but clearly, that was not the case (as I can tell you), as if nothing else matters. In her eyes, it would have only been worthy of complaining if the bullying had been so traumatic that it stopped me from getting straight As at school. But wait, it isn't that straightforward at all.

The fact is I had evolved from being just a victim to both a victim and a bully at the end of my time at RI - such was the culture of bullying. In standing up to anyone who dared to bully me in such an aggressive way to send the message, "back off, you're messing with the wrong guy", I had become quite a bully myself. It was a matter of survival, I had little choice in the matter really. In short, I admitted that I did loads of awful things I am not proud of, that I can look back in hindsight and say, "yes, I did a lot of bad things and I should be ashamed of all those times I bullied others in the past." However, she was willing to overlook all the bad things I did because I did deliver brilliant O level results at the end of the day and dismissed it as unimportant, as long as I had good grades. In short, her attitude condoned the culture of bullying and allowed bullies to get away with it - as long as they had good results of course. I wonder if my mother would be happy to turn a blind eye to my rather colourful sex life just because I've always been academically brilliant?

All that emphasis on grades and sure enough...

Now I have a huge moral issue with this - what if we told my mother that Hitler or Kim Jong Un had good results at school and got scholarships to the best universities in the  world before he became an evil dictator, does that let him off the hook? Being good at studying, getting great results at school doesn't automatically make you a good person - by the same token, some people are not particularly intelligent and had failed loads of exams at schools, but they can be kind people who are incapable of ever doing anything evil. I just think it is so ridiculous to make any kind of assumptions about one's moral character based on one's report cards and yes, I've long accepted that my mother isn't particularly educated and says a lot of stupid shit all the time - but she is only a product of her culture and thus I blame her whole fucked up Chinese culture rather than her per se, when she comes up with totally ludicrous bullshit like that.

The reason behind this mindset for Asian parents is simple: the student needs to spend many hours at home, studying in solitude to achieve straight As. In so doing, he is not out making friends, socializing, possibly getting into trouble, doing drugs, shoplifting, having sex and breaking the law. The conscious choice of choosing studying alone instead of socializing with friends is a sign of good moral character, that the child is capable of making the right choices in life - in choosing right over wrong. But of course, it isn't that simple: you can quite easily work hard to get the top grades at school and still make some pretty evil choices in life to do very bad things to others. Tackling the issue of morals and values is often too difficult for Asian parents, so they default to using the report card as a barometer for the child's morals. Great - let's not forget how Ouyang Xiangyu the brilliant scholar went on to commit murder in America, despite having the kind of brilliant academic record that would make all Singaporean parents have spontaneous orgasms.

I have been both a bully and a victim.

"If we had sent you to (insert name of another school), then it wouldn't have happened."

Again, this isn't true. I accept that there is an element of chance whether or not a child ends up being bullied - it may be something as random as which class you get assigned to based on the spelling of your surname, your NRIC number or your date of birth. That was certainly the case in NS (I'll talk more about that in a future post). You could meet your best friend and soul mate in one class or meet your worst nightmare of a class bully in another class. After all, students select the school they wish to go to - but they have little say over which class they are assigned and virtually no say about whom their classmates are. Parents can only judge a school by measures like league tables, various form of rankings and their reputation - even good schools can have a culture of bullying and this is usually swept under the carpet because the victims often blame themselves rather than seek help. Who knows how things would have turned out if my parent had chosen a different secondary school for me - there is a possibility that things could have been better or they could have been far worse.

The only thing parents could realistically do for children in this situation is to equip them with the social skills to stand up for themselves should they encounter a situation where they are indeed being bullied. Or at the very least, established a good enough relationship with their children so that the children will trust their parents enough to turn to them for help should they encounter bullying in school. Now in my case, my relationship with my parents had become so poor by then, that I simply didn't trust them enough to want to tell them anything or ask them for help - I instead chose to solve my problems myself. I think my parents were partly placing the blame on me for having chose RI despite having the grades to have gone on any secondary school in Singapore I wanted with my PSLE results. There was an element of, "well you wanted to go to RI, how were we supposed to have known that you were going to get bullied there? I did talk about other schools as well but no you wanted RI because it was the best and that was your decision, so don't blame us if you got bullied there, okay?" Again, I am so used to my parents refusing to take any responsibility when things go wrong like this. Nothing has changed, I wasn't expecting anything different at all.

Did you have a good experience in your secondary school?

"But (insert name) was your friend then, so you couldn't have been that hated or bullied?"

OK let's deal with the messiness of being bullied - yes I did manage to make some friends during secondary school. Even victims of bullying do succeed in making friends sometimes you know - but if you were to go to (insert name) and asked him if I was bullied back in the day, he would tell you, "yes Alex was bullied, there were a group of guys who just didn't like him and went out of their way to make life hard for him. There was little/nothing I could do about the situation in the school. But for what it was worth, yes we were friends and when Alex wasn't being bullied, we had a pretty normal friendship like most teenage guys." The fact that I had some friends didn't change the fact that I was bullied and they were not in a position to protect or help me in any case - my parents had a simplistic view of the situation: if you had friends, why didn't you just hang out with them and ignore the bullies? It wasn't that simple: bullies tend to hunt down their victims - it wasn't a simple case of simply choosing your friends in school and staying away from the wrong crowd. I wasn't looking for trouble - trouble came looking for me.

"If you didn't tell me what was happening, how was I suppose to have helped you then?"

Hmmm. Tough one. I didn't go to my parents then as I feared they would have suggested the simple solution of me quitting gymnastics so I wouldn't have to face my bullies any more. I didn't trust them enough to give them the benefit of the doubt - the generation gap was so big by then that I thought they would never understand what I went through in any case. So I could turn around and blame them in return, having failed to even win the trust of their own child.

Do you wanna play the blame game?

"You should have complained to the teacher about what was happening."

Again, my response is the same. I didn't say anything to the teachers and coaches in charge as I didn't trust them, nor did I think they would care either way. Quite simply they had failed to win my trust and so I could turn around and point my finger back at them and claim that I was totally failed by the system as well. 

I know I am 40, working on some amazing projects in Europe. I just got back from Berlin yesterday and have a great vlog piece to share with you. I also have some great stories to tell about the interesting people I met in Germany. But there's a part of me that was curious to know what my parents would say if I told them what had happened and well, now it's done, I do think, "damn what's the point? All you have proven was that it was the right decision not to tell them all those years ago, so what's the point in mentioning it to them today if they are just going to put the blame all on the school, the teachers and you and refuse to accept any responsibility in any shape or form? What's the bloody point? At least, well, I could turn this into a blog post and show you why Asian parenting is a major part of the problem and now I turn this over to you dear readers. Do let me know what you think please about this issue. Many thanks for reading.