‘Go back to Vietnam where you came from!’

A boy in my school whom I didn’t know from Adam, hissed at me. This was years ago when I was still new to Australia and spoke very little English. I remember the spite coming out of the handsome boy, and thinking how incongruent his inner ugliness was to his angelic appearance. We normally don’t associate attractive individuals with unattractive behaviour.

Sunhee, my Korean friend, leaped to my defence. ‘She is from Korea, you fool. You go back to Vietnam!’

It was a ridiculous thing to say. The boy was so blonde he was almost snow white. He looked at us as if we were from Pluto.

About a month later another boy in school decided to throw racial insults at me. This time a bulky Lebanese boy who looked like Goliath, came to my assistance. I remember the nausea I felt when I saw my persecutor cowering before the bigger boy who glared down at him. I’ve since discovered that all bullies are, in truth, cowards. And I’ve never forgotten my rescuer’s Arab face.

In high school it was the girls who turned mean, and frankly far nastier.

One ordinary afternoon Sunhee and I were strolling into the school library when a beautiful statuesque blonde—whose name was Marcia, I later learned—shoved Sunhee off the walkway. ‘Get out of my way, you f***ing chong!’ the blonde spat, strutting past us with her cronie by her side.

It was the first racist incident I’d ever witnessed that involved physical violence. And it came out of the blue. Before I could retrieve my jaws from the floor, Ka-Ching! Sunhee bared her claws and fangs and flew at Marcia, crashing down onto the hard concrete floor on top of the blonde. It was a dog-and-cat fight, bloody scratches, clumps of hair, the works. It took many of us to pull them apart. By the time Sunhee finished spewing her verbal venom (laced with sulfuric acid) on the blonde and her sycophant, everyone decided to leave that ‘psychopathic Asian bitch’ alone.

I hasten to add, before anyone thinks Australia is primeval soup birthing racist bullies, the above incidents happened many, many years ago. Such an overt demonstration of racism rarely occurs today. And for every racist I’ve encountered in Australia, including ethnic racists, I’ve met dozens of others who are decent, fair and kind.

In all honesty, these displays of racism did not truly hurt me, even when they came from authority figures like school teachers. I was never shocked by the racism itself, only by the ugliness that came out of the racist individuals. And I’ve found the ugliness is the same whenever one human being feels deeply superior to another, for whatever misconceptions he might entertain about himself. The unfounded, perverted pride has never failed to inspire a deep sense of distaste in me.

I also have to say I have rarely felt inferior to anyone because of my racial and/or genetic background. Even as a teenager I instinctively understood that the measure of a person—if there is such a thing—came from the solidity, depth and realness of her relationships, with her family and friends and with the significant people in her life. And growing up as I did in a close ethnic community, I didn’t lack in that department though it was far from perfect. Besides we lived in one of the migrant enclaves in Sydney, and I went to school that had its share of ethnic minorities. The existence of many ‘outsiders’ like me, let me know that there was a space in this universe that I was allowed to occupy, however small.

But I must mention one incident that made me question myself and who I was. It happened during a school camp. It was a significant event in my life when I think back on it.

I was in one of the cubicles in the girls’ change room when I overheard two girls talking outside as they patted their faces in front of the mirror. I recognised the first voice, Chloe Walters, the most popular girl in our year and a diva. Chloe had long sleek brown hair, a cute button nose, and a serious body she knew how to show off. And she was going steady with Marc Anderson, who looked like a male model crossed with a Greek god. Girls just went gooey over him. Chloe Walters and Marc Anderson were the It couple, who fed, as well as fed on, each other’s celebrity.

And Chloe Walters didn’t like competition. She was presently busy back-stabbing Mimi, another attractive girl in our year who threatened her reign in the looks department.

‘You don’t think Mimi is pretty, do you? She has big teeth!’ I heard Chloe sneer. The second girl’s response was lost on Chloe as she ranted on about Mimi’s other physical shortcomings.

Then suddenly, without warning, their exchange turned in a totally different direction.

‘But have you seen those two Asian girls?’ Chloe uttered in distaste, with an emphasis on ‘Asian’. ‘God, they’re really ugly, aren’t they?’ 

I didn’t hear anything else after that. Blood was pounding in my ears, my heart began pounding along with it. I forgot to breathe for a few seconds. There were only two Asian girls in the camp. One of them was me, the other was Sunhee. The sick and frozen deduction was simple—we were the two ugly Asian girls, and I was one of them.

I stayed inside the toilet until I was certain Chloe and her cronie finished their primping, admired themselves to their satisfaction and left. I then slowly came out from the cubicle, and stared at myself in the mirror. Suddenly my nose looked flat, my eyes slanted, and my face misshapen. And had my hair always been so jet black and so damned straight? I did look ugly, I thought.

I didn’t tell Sunhee about it. Talking about it, in my mind, made it real. And it made the two of us pitiful. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, that incident shook me.


That year my metamorphosis began—with a vengeance.

First, I went to see my English teacher. I asked her how I could improve my English. ‘Read. Read anything and everything you can get your hands on,’ the wise woman advised me. The next day I came home, armed with stacks of fairy tale books from the local library. I could follow their simple stories told with colourful pictures. Novels just looked like ink on paper. I read all kinds of folktales from around the world. I soon began to forego sleep at night to read, lock myself in the bathroom to read, and steal the torchlight into my bed to read. Soon I graduated to simple novels, then to thicker novels. That was the beginning of my love affair with the written word. Within a couple of years I was topping my English class.

But my metamorphosis was more than a linguistic one. Behind the closed doors I took intensive self-guided courses on the ancient and primal female art. I pored over all types of literature and self-help lessons on the subject of beautifying oneself. I soon mastered the technique of plucking my eyebrows to fine delicate arches to open up my eyes, and to tease my hair around my face to soften my strong jaw lines, and to enhance my natural pigmentation with just the right shade of colour. I essentially entered the world of creating illusion and tricking the eye, using hair, cut of fabric, lines and colour. I spent a minimum of an hour each day in front of the full-length mirror, perfecting my new craft. I didn’t stop until I knew no one could label me ugly—ever again.

I learned then that any female could transform herself into a creature of intrigue if she put her mind to it. And if the female in question was especially gifted in artifice and trickery, then she could indeed morph into a truly exotic creature.

Slowly but surely I lost my invisibility. Girls began looking at me with new eyes as if I’d suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Boys were buzzing in my direction. Teachers, too, started noticing me. Even Chloe Walters and her cronies so generously stopped for occasional chats. I had to admit that perversely stroked my ego.

But even as my newfound popularity continued its ascent, along with it also grew a dark sense of insecurity. I knew deep inside that what I’d achieved was just an illusion, and if I used illusion to get what I wanted, then I had to maintain the illusion to keep it. I didn’t know at the time that I was feeding a neurosis in my life! But that’s another story.

It took about a year for Marc Anderson, the Greek god cum School Superstar cum Chloe’s boyfriend, to realise that I existed on the planet Earth. I found him staring at me, sitting next to me in class, and trying to chat me up. All this I provocatively ignored—another subtle skill I’d honed by then. He dumped Chloe soon after—to her outrage and humiliation. I don’t think I had anything to do with it in the end, but the buzzing school gossip seemed to strip Chloe at once of her glamour and polish as well as her cronies. Even her supposedly divine looks appeared plain and so dull.

Scales seemed to fall from my eyes. I finally saw through Chloe and others like her. Shallow, narcissistic and boring. Pathetic really. I felt a curious sense of emptiness. I suddenly knew I didn’t want to be a Chloe.

Chloe transferred out of school shortly afterwards. I saw her just once afterwards. She smiled uncertainly at me, looking lost and unsure of herself. I remember feeling sorry for her.

My revenge was over. I finally saw that there was nothing to fight against. There never had been.

That’s when I stopped fighting my shadow.



Footnote

Marc Anderson lost his glitter and faded into the background as we progressed into senior years in high school. I bumped into Marcia a couple of years later. She’d dropped out of school, and to my shock she’d grown obese and exhibited the fashion sense of bird dropping! Her sycophantic cronie seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.

Sunhee, on the other hand, matured into an attractive woman with a successful career and formidable personality. She is married to a loving man and they have a beautiful child. But they live in squalor because they have no time for housework! (Well, you can’t have everything.)

I have observed over the years that bullies of any kind ultimately don’t do well in life. And my aim as a mother is to raise my child to be a decent and kind human being, who understands EVERYONE is welcome in our universe just as much as he is.