Covid-19, Paris and the damsel in distress

Hi guys, I'm back from northern Greece and I am still slowly uploading all the photos onto my Instagram.  Well, I had been in a country without a single case of Covid-19 but as I got back to London and caught up with the news I had been missing whilst on holiday, all the stories about how Covid-19 is impacting people around the world is just depressing, so I thought I want to write something to tackle a pertinent issue and offer something quite pragmatic and helpful. I'm not denying that there is racism against Chinese and East Asian people in the wake of Covid-19, there have been plenty of reports in the media about it. In this post, I want to focus on one story that has been featured in the BBC and talk about how I would have handled such a situation because I don't believe the BBC journalists did a good job in reporting that story. So here's the excerpt from that BBC article: "Shana Cheng, a 17-year-old Parisian of Vietnamese and Cambodian origin, told the BBC that she had faced humiliating comments on a bus in the city on Sunday from both young and old. "There's a Chinese woman, she is going to contaminate us, she needs to go home," she heard one passenger say. Those people looked at her "in a disgusted way, as if I was the virus". No-one stood up for her, she said, so she decided to ignore those comments and listen to her music. But she did cough and sniff "so as to play on their fears", she added."

Now before I go any further, I realize that the woman in question here is only 17, so I must remind myself not to be too harsh on her. Furthermore, I realize that the BBC journalist is only there to report on what happened rather than give Ms Cheng any advice on what she ought to do in such a situation - well, even if the journalist did give any personal advice, it wouldn't be a part of the story on the BBC news website. What I do want to talk about is dealing with bullying because the abuse that Ms Cheng received on the bus was a form of bullying and she clearly wasn't able to deal with it - she hoped for someone else to intervene, to stand up for her but when no one did, she stayed silent and listened to her music; only to complain about the incident to a journalist later on. I grew up in Singapore where I was subjected to a lot of bullying - look, I am autistic, I have Asperger's Syndrome, as a child and a teenager I had very poor social skills. Allow me to be very honest about what I went through: I had a terrible time in school in Singapore as a result of the bullying because I didn't know how to cope with the situation. It was even tougher when I had to serve 2 years 4 months in the army as part of my national service but allow me to jump to the punchline: even as a ethnically Chinese person (well I am mixed, technically speaking, but I digress) in a Chinese majority country, there was an insane amount of bullying going on in Singapore. My secondary school had a particularly toxic environment for bullying where it was treated as normal - even sometimes regarded as a character building exercise. But somehow, during my time in Singapore, I realized that the only way I was going to survive was to learn to deal with the bullies and this would tantamount to throwing a child into the deep end of the pool in a bid to teach the child how to swim. Well, that was exactly what happened. I decided to learn very quickly as the alternative was to drown and I chose wisely. Whilst I may be rather autistic, I am also very intelligent.

Thus allow me to analyze the situation in more detail and explain why I feel that Ms Cheng's reaction was wrong. The person who made that racist remark really wasn't that concerned about being infected by Ms Cheng - let's apply some common sense here. If you were near a person who had a highly contagious disease and you were genuinely worried or scared, what would you do? Run away as quickly as possible to avoid infection or move closer to the person in order to make sure that person can hear your racist remarks? So no, there were no 'fears' to be played on - Ms Cheng had really misjudged that point. The issue here isn't Covid-19 or even racism per se, this is quite simply bullying and the bully wanted to say something to make Ms Cheng feel bad about herself, so they picked something topical in order to send her the message that she isn't welcomed in France, that they can verbally harass her in public, humiliate her and nobody would intervene or help her. This is no different from when a school bullies insults someone in the middle of the crowded school playground, daring the others around to intervene or challenge them. Thus Ms Cheng tried to invent a version of the story to try to make herself feel better about her inability to stand up to the bully: in her version of the story, the bully was genuinely concerned about her spreading the virus. But even if that encountered happened this time last year, way before Covid-19 came along, the bully would have picked on something else to attack her about such as by making fun of her appearances or her accent. All she could do was cough and sniff in the face of the abuse - she wasn't brave, articulate or eloquent enough to confront her bully there and then when it happened so she wants to believe that her response was acceptable or adequate. My father does this all the time I'm afraid - he is autistic and struggles to deal with difficult social situations, so he always invents an alternative version of events that he finds more acceptable, that he can actually live with. Oh he was quite the Walter Mitty, inventing alternative facts way before Kellyanne Conway came along.

Why was Ms Cheng unable to deal with the situation - why was she paralyzed by fear to the point where she hoped that Superman who magically appear out of nowhere to save her? Why are people like her (and my father) defaulting to the 'damsel in distress' mode when they are in such a situation? A lot of it has got to do with the way we are brought up - I remember when I was in primary school, we didn't have much of a bullying problem then as the children were conditioned to run to their teachers the moment there was any kind of dispute. For better or for worse, the teachers would then get involved in the dispute (however petty) and act as a judge - as children, we were taught not to try to resolve these disputes ourselves but to simply get a teacher involved. I suppose that was reasonable for a bunch of kids in primary school, but what happens when we become teenagers? Well, teaching teenagers how to resolve their own social disputes is a major part of growing up and acquiring the necessary social skills we need to function as adults in society. However, as a bid to protect children out of genuine altruism and with all the best intentions, adults (parents and teachers alike) often swoop in to try to prevent social disputes or resolve any that may arise, rather than taking a step back and observing how teenagers may attempt to resolve these tricky situations for themselves. The reason why adults choose to step in is because teenagers can be savage, oh they can be downright vicious: we're talking about a kind of "Lord of the Flies" situation where they can act with impunity if they know the adults are simply going to turn a blind eye.

A lot of bullying isn't even brought to the attention of the adults because the victims often feel embarrassed to be in such a situation in the first place. Many victims of bullying feel ashamed of what has happened, they blame themselves for the situation and so they suffer in silence instead of asking for help. In my case, I suffered really bad bullying in my gymnastics club: but I loved gymnastics so much and I didn't dare tell my parents about it because I didn't trust my parents - I feared they would simply try to solve the problem by stopping me from doing gymnastics. My mother had never liked the idea of me doing gymnastics anyway - she was convinced it was way too dangerous and it was a distraction from my studies; thus even suggesting that I was being bullied at my gymnastics club was the last thing I was ever going to tell her so I put on a brave face and told her everything was fine. I did go on to become a 3-time national champion in gymnastics and that proved that I made the right decision. In hindsight as an adult, I can look back and realize just how fucked up the whole situation was: my parents failed to win my trust, can you imagine a bullied child not trusting his own parents to do the right thing? In fact, I was more worried about my parents trying to use the bullying to pull me from my gymnastics club than the actual bullying itself - that's how poor my parents' parenting skills were. Well, they're severely autistic and are really quite stupid (sorry to be this blunt), so I can't blame them anyway. Faced with such a situation, the only alternative was to learn how to stand up for myself in order to get what I want: keep the gymnastics club a bearable environment for me and once again, I learnt how to defend myself out of sheer necessity as a teenager, when I was Ms Cheng's age. The reason why I am telling you this is because I don't want to seem like some kind of judgmental adult with no sympathy for Ms Cheng - au contraire Mademoiselle Cheng, I have plenty of empathy for you. 

For the record: I have both studied and worked in Paris, French is my second language and I am totally fluent in French. Hence, I am very familiar with the situation that Ms Cheng is facing. Is there racism in French society? Yes, but it's not as if all French people are racist: the situation is pretty similar here to the UK. We have different social classes in Europe: you have the upper class, the middle class and the working class - the lower down the pecking order you go, the more likely you are to encounter xenophobia and racism. Now the incident that Ms Cheng described was on public transport, the kind of people you encounter on public transport in Paris would vary depending on the neighbourhood you are in. There are some very rich neighbourhoods in central Paris which are very safe of course, then there are some poverty stricken neighbourhoods where crime rates are shockingly high. If this had happened in somewhere like the notoriously dangerous neighbourhoods of Aubervilliers or St Denis then the police would probably just roll their eyes and ask Ms Cheng, "Did they rob you? Did they stab you? Did they shoot you? Did they rape you? Oh they just passed a racist comment. Fuck off and grow up, deal with it. The police don't have the time to deal with this kind of thing, we are chasing dangerous terrorists, drug dealers, murderers and rapists and you want to come to us over some stupid comment an idiot made to you on the bus?" Such is the difference between being in primary school and being an adult - you see, if another student did make a racist remark like that in school, you can indeed run to the teacher and ask for help. But as an adult in the big bad world, we're often expected to simply deal with it ourselves because we are not children anymore. 

I have told this story before in a recent post so forgive me if you have already read this before but I need to use this story to make an important point. When I was about 8 years old, I witnessed an incident which left a deep impression on me about what not to do in such a situation. My father is a retired primary school teacher and I would go to his school sometimes as a child to play badminton with other members of staff. On the day in question, another female teacher had used some of my father's rackets and shuttlecocks - my father was not happy that she did that without his permission but instead of apologizing for the mistake, she was very rude to my father about it and even insulted him in front of everyone. Now my father had the chance to react: he could have scolded her, yelled at her, called her an ugly fucking bitch from hell, threw a few rackets at her - he could have done something, but instead like Ms Cheng, he was stunned into silence and inaction. He did absolutely nothing, then he looked around the sports hall like a damsel in distress and wanted someone to intervene to resolve the problem for him but no one did. So this female teacher got away with insulting my father but for days after that, that was all my father could talk about at home, he was clearly very angry about what had happened and complained to his family members about what an awful bitch that colleague was. However, I was there, I witnessed the whole incident - in my defence, I was only about 8 years old. Had I been older, I would have been my father's Superman and swooped in to defend him, but as a young child, I was left puzzled as to why my father reacted that way - in fact, he did exactly what Ms Cheng did despite the fact that he was dealing with a much younger colleague.

The fact is if you have never been taught how to deal with resolving conflicts, if you have never ever been faced with such a situation before, how are you supposed to know what to do? Thankfully we now live in the age of the internet and there are so many resources online for us to find out more about developing these vital social skills, it is so much easier to get help these days. But for someone who is a severely autistic adult like my father who is in his 80s today, there was no way for him to try to get any kind of professional help with his poor social skills and that's why he did exactly what Ms Cheng did during a confrontation - nothing. He was stunned into inaction and hoped for someone to help him out. Now in an ideal world, we would hope that there were nice people out there who would intervene when they witnessed something like that. I am watching a series on Youtube by Chinese Youtuber 大树君TreeMan whereby he would stage some situations and hope for members of the public to intervene, so of course his social agenda is to prove to people that Chinese people are kind, compassionate and righteous. So for example, one of his videos involved a very rude young man insulting an old man who was sweeping the road and goes as far as to push the old man over, how would bystanders react? So in these 'social experiments', you only get to see the people who rush up to intervene - but having traveled through China for work, I wonder how long he had to film for each short Youtube video that is no more than a few minutes. In an ideal world, there would be kind people on every street corner ready to intervene, but in reality, the only person you can rely on is yourself. It's not that most people are unkind and refuse to help, but in the case of my father and Ms Cheng, they simply do not have the requisite social skills to know how to deal with such complex conflicts.

So if I was in Ms Cheng's shoes, what would I have done? I would have stood up and confronted the person who made those comments. The fact is she is a young Asian lady on the bus, she was picked on because she was perceived to be a soft target. But if she actually stood up and confronted the person, I am sure she would have felt better about the whole situation. Here's the thing: you have a chance to deal with the situation and if that window of opportunity passes by because you were stunned into silence and inaction, you're going to be left with a lot of frustration. I can't predict how the person who insulted her would have reacted, but if she had the guts to have confronted that person in question, then she would have felt a lot better about her ability to deal with such a situation. It's the difference between 'nobody messes with me' and 'the damsel in distress', you know my take on the issue: I have always chosen for the former because I know I'm way too ugly to be anyone's damsel in distress. Ms Cheng needs to start by realizing that playing the damsel in distress is never ever the right option in life, even if she is undoubtedly a lot more beautiful than I am. At this point, a lot of people would say, "oh Alex, Ms Cheng is the victim here, how can you say this? You are making it sound as if it is her fault for not having confronted that racist when nobody deserves to be racially harassed in public like that. This is victim-blaming." Whilst that may be true, we have to deal with the fact that we live in a deeply flawed imperfect world. Even if Ms Cheng were to move to an Asian-majority country like Singapore where I grew up, guess what? There's still plenty of bullying going on in Asian countries like Singapore - therefore the only way to deal with it is to learn how to stand up for yourself.

So, allow me to share with you this incident from a few years ago - I was at Singapore River Safari when a young Singaporean woman was extremely rude to a member of staff working there. This lady and her parents were the last people to board the river boat cruise and all the seats had been taken - so she threw a massive tantrum, demanding that the member of staff move people so she could sit with her parents. Nobody said a word so of course, I had to be the one to scold that young lady for being such a rude cunt. Now I judge people by appearances, that's what I do - so I took one look at her and her parents and decided that they were Mandarin-speaking folks from the HDB heartlands, so she got a scolding in Mandarin. When she responded in English, telling me that Singapore is not China and that I am not in my country, I realized, oh I get it - my Mandarin doesn't sound local so you think I'm from China. Well today is your lucky day, she got a scolding from me in English, Mandarin and as an added bonus, I gave her my Singlish with Malay version to make her feel at home. When her father tried to ask me to calm down, I told him, "uncle, please be patient, I am still busy scolding your stupid daughter because you have been such a lousy father in having brought up such a rude girl. What kind of father are you? Once I am done with her, I promise you I will scold you too - you can then have your scolding in Singlish, Mandarin, Cantonese or Hokkien." Yeah I am a rude bitch who will always intervene in such a situation, I am the kind of person who will end up in a 大树君 TreeMan video - but I am clearly in the minority, no one else on that crowded river boat said a word to defend the member of staff who was taking abuse from this rude cunt. I knew the member of staff couldn't simply scold this rude bitch - therefore I had no choice but to step up and do something about the situation.

When I told my father what happened, he shook his head in disapproval. He said I was looking for trouble, what if the young lady challenged me to a fight? I said I was a lot taller and stronger than her, I would have pushed her into the water with ease - we were surrounded by water, it was a River Safari. And as for her parents, well they were old so I would have no problems pushing them into the water too if it came to that. My father than said he was very disappointed in me because he didn't teach me to be so aggressive - he totally ignored the fact that I was the only person who had the balls to defend a member of staff whilst everyone else just sat there silently doing nothing. But I know what is going on - if my father had been there, he too would have minded his own business and did nothing because he simply doesn't have the social skills to deal with such a situation. Oh my father is severely autistic and has zero social skills, so such a confrontation would simply scare the shit out of him - besides, he's very short and has always been quite fat, thus he is always afraid of any possibility of a confrontation turning physically violent as he is unable to defend himself in any way. Instead, he places his faith in social order to ensure that he would never be in a situation where he would need to challenge others or resolve conflicts. You would like to think that someone who worked as a primary school teacher had better social skills to handle such situations and resolve social conflicts, but oh no, not my father. Even when my sister argues with my mother, rather than try to calm them down, he would literally run and hide in the bathroom for a long time so as he would be too afraid to get involved just in case he was forced to take sides. On one hand, yes it all does sound totally fucking ridiculous, but on the other hand there's a part of me that does feel sorry for him to go through life like that.

I hear you say, "okay Alex, I get your point, having better social skills would probably help one deal with difficult social situations, but where do we begin? How do we get young people like Ms Cheng to acquire those social skills then?" Allow me to speak from experience: I was lucky in having had two older sisters and that meant that from a young age, I have always been in an environment where I was encouraged to speak up since my two sisters would always be there to listen to me. From a young age, I took part in drama classes at school and participated in various kinds of activities like debating and acting which required me to overcome my fears of speaking to large groups of strangers. The problem with a lot of people is that they know exactly what they would like to say and how they would like to handle the situation in an ideal world, however, especially in the age of the internet when people tend to interact online rather than in person, many are people are just so shy that even the thought of speaking to a stranger is daunting and scary. I'd like to contrast that to the Cambodian internet sensation Thuch Salik who speaks 15 languages - Salik taught himself how to speak those languages selling souvenirs to tourists at Angkor Wat. Do you think he doesn't get shy approaching strangers trying to sell them souvenirs? I often meet kids like that on my travels around the world, especially to poorer countries. These street kids simply don't have the luxury of being shy - if they don't sell enough, they don't get to eat, it's that simple. Hunger is a very strong motivator to help one get over shyness. I hate it when people hide behind their excuses about being shy - that's just fucking lame. I have no sympathy for people like that: go join a drama club, get used to performing in public, lose your shyness so the next time you encounter a bully on a bus, you will have no problems having the guts to stand up for yourself. After all, no amount of complaining is going to eliminate the bigots, racists and nasty bullies in the world - all you can do is learn how to be prepared to handle such situations with a "nobody messes with me" attitude.

So to Ms Cheng, I have this to say to you (English version will follow). Je suis vraiment désolé d'entendre ce qui vous est arrivé dans le bus à Paris, j'ai aussi vécu à Paris et c'est une ville que j'aime. Si j'avais été là-bas, je serais certainement intervenu et je vous aurais alors aidé. Cependant, la dure réalité est que nous vivons dans un monde imparfait et je crains que Superman (ou une connard grossièr et vulgair comme moi) ne soit pas toujours au coin de la rue pour vous aider lorsque les choses tournent mal. Quant aux autres personnes dans le bus qui ont été témoins de ce qui s'est passé et n'ont rien fait, je ne pense pas qu'elles soient racistes: elles sont tout simplement comme vous et mon père. Ce sont des gens qui n'ont pas les compétences sociales essentielles pour faire face à un conflit aussi complexe. Si mon père avait été dans ce bus, je pense qu'il aurait été trop terrifié pour faire quoi que ce soit pour vous aider - cela ne signifie pas qu'il est une mauvaise personne, cela signifie simplement qu'il a de très faibles compétences sociales. S'il vous plaît, ne pensez pas un instant que les autres dans ce bus ont toléré ce que cette personne raciste a dit, ils avaient probablement juste peur et ne savaient pas comment gérer la situation. Imaginez que si vous voyiez cela arriver à quelqu'un d'autre, auriez-vous intervenu et aidé cette autre personne ou vous attendriez-vous à ce que quelqu'un d'autre fasse quelque chose à la place? Donc, si tout le monde adoptait cette approche et avait cette attitude, s'attendre à ce que quelqu'un d'autre répare quelque chose qui était clairement faux, notre société serait dans un tel pétrin. Je peux pas être là pour vous aider en personne Mlle Cheng, mais je peux vous encourager à être une personne forte et confiante avec d'excellentes compétences sociales pour gérer des situations aussi difficiles. Concentrez-vous sur l'amélioration de vos compétences sociales - et afin d'être prêt à faire face à toutes les situations folles que la vie vous lancera à l'avenir.

And here's the English version: I am so sorry to hear about what happened to you on the bus in Paris, I have lived in Paris too and it is a city I love. If I had been there, I would have definitely intervened and helped you out then. However, the harsh reality is that we live in an imperfect world and I'm afraid Superman (or a rude, loudmouthed bitch like me) isn't always around the corner to help you out when things go wrong. As for the other people on the bus who witnessed what happened and did nothing, I don't think they are racists: they are simply like you and my father. They are people who lack the vital social skills to deal with such a complex conflict. If my father had been on that bus, I think he would have been too terrified to do anything to help you - it doesn't mean that he is a bad person, it simply means that he has very poor social skills. Please don't think for a moment that the others on that bus condoned what that racist person said, they were probably just afraid and didn't know how to deal with the situation. Imagine if you saw this happen to someone else, would you have intervened and help that other person or would you expect someone else to do something instead? You see, if everyone took that approach and had that attitude, to expect someone else to fix something that was clearly wrong, then our society would be in such a mess. I can't be there to help you in person Ms Cheng, but I can encourage you to be a strong, confident person with excellent social skills to handle such difficult situations. Do focus on improving your social skills, so that you could be ready to deal with whatever crazy situation that life will throw at you in the future.

So that's it from me on this issue; I certainly do hope that the BBC journalist who interviewed Ms Cheng would have at least given her some useful and kind words of advice and support. But now, over to you: what would you have done if you had heard a stranger being verbally abused on a bus like that? Would you have intervened or would you have done what the rest of the passengers on the bus (or those others on the river safari boat in Singapore where I witnessed that rude bitch being so nasty to the member of staff) and simply remained quiet? What is it with this culture of 'mind your own business' that allows people to justify looking the other way instead of intervening to help someone else in trouble? Is this a matter of having very poor social skills as I have postulated here, or do you think there are other factors at play as well? Please leave a comment below, share your thoughts on the matter. Many thanks for reading - merci beaucoup!