Bullying

 I don't really think that I had to think too much about this. I kinda used to get bullied in school, sorda. There are people who neither bully nor get bullied. There are people who bully, and people who get bullied.


I'm not one of the bullied people. I've come to realise in time that I'm actually an inert bully. As in I don't bully people, but if I wanted to, I might do a decent job.

It's not that people don't pick on me, people do that. But there's this incident I remember well when I was in primary 1. There was this guy who always bullied me, and he was causing me a lot of grief. Then one day, I fought back, and suddenly the bullying stopped. It stopped so abruptly that I was surprised.

There was this time when I was living in a townhouse. My neighbour was 2 years older than I was, and in a way he was the gang leader. I didn't really understand that he wasn't a good character. My sister was more perceptive than I was, and she knew. I didn't go out to play much, but over time, I fell out with him. I got bullied, but I fought back.

I probably remembered a few incidents. I used to get picked on by people. Sometimes I would just slug them back, and I got a bit of respect for that. Or at least I got the reputation as not the right person to screw around with. My classmates knew that I was good enough at trolling that even the teachers gave me a wide berth. There were only a few times when things turned bad.

There was this guy I had to share space with. He was a person who maybe was from a lower class background, and maybe I did say things that alluded to his lack of refinement. And for whatever reason he got really resentful of me. Today I would just avoid him totally, and cross the street if I were to see him. But he did do things like giving subtle remarks that took you down a peg every once in a while.

I wasn't really that interested in bullying people, fortunately. Maybe I was more benign than that.

There were times when I had my belongings thrown about in a bus, but a guy did stick up for me. I did try to strangle the guy who did it, and I don't know if he ever wanted to try it again. There was this other time when I was depressed, and this other guy in my class started dumping shit on me. He was an aggressive guy. I took his desk and his belongings and set them up in the toilet. I got into trouble for that, because he lost a textbook, and I had to buy a replacement for him, but I think he decided not to trouble me again.

I think that being a poison pill fends off quite a few potential bullies. At least it shows them that carrying on down this path might prove to be a tragic experience for all of us. Or they might not want to make another enemy, because if they want to victimise somebody else, they might have to be extra vigilant in case I was lurking about. 

What I had more trouble with was that in JC, people always had status anxiety, and most probably my status was pretty average, and I wasn't happy about it... I always aspired to be more popular than I was. I didn't like getting shut out of social circles. I don't know if that counted as bullying.

So when I was in school, I wasn't bullied by my classmates. But with the adults, it was a different story. My mother was quite a bit of a bully. I don't know why she was so insistent on me putting in the hours for the piano. I asked her years later if she intended for me to have a musical career. She said no, obviously. Then what was that all about? If I didn't practice, I'd get scolded all the time, and yet I wouldn't be allowed to reap the fruits of mastering my instrument. It was a truly twisted and warped logic. I put it to her that if she wanted to push me so hard on that front, she'd have to allow me to have a career in it. She totally didn't see my point. At the end of the day, she was just upset at being disobeyed, and she didn't actually care about whether what she wanted made any sense at all.

Then there were my music teachers. My interactions with them were obviously unhappy ones. I must have made them angry, and they vented their anger on me. I think the whole system was dysfunctional.

I also had an English teacher who liked to think of herself as being fearsome, but in the end it just seemed that she was giving herself permission to be an asshole. It wasn't a good match for me, because I was a teenager dealing with depression.

There was this time in national service when we were in BMT. We were in a company where … in BMT they tended to separate out the people who attained higher educational qualifications (ie the “A” level ppl who would eventually go to the uni) from the rest of the people. But since we were left overs, we were in a mixed company. There were probably 10 of us “A” level holders in a company full of people from rougher backgrounds. It wasn't pleasant.

One day, one of the ah bengs picked a fight with me. The food from the cookhouse didn't agree with me, and so I just let off too much gas during one session. He lunged at me, and the rest of the guys in the bunk we me had to separate us two. But I think he noticed that I didn't have any fear on my face, and I think a light turned on in his expression. He didn't bother me again.

It's not so easy to ward off bullies at the workplace. On my first real job at the factory, there was this guy who always wanted to be the alpha male. I was not popular with my colleagues during my first few years, but I still hung around, trying to be part of the gang. I was at the company chalet where he organised a gathering for us to get together. We hung around in the pool. And somehow we got to wrestling in the pool. I don't know if he was trying to work out his aggression toward me. He was stocky and strong, but I was tall and I had a longer reach than he did. I ended up holding his head under the water for one whole minute to teach him a lesson... at least you had to communicate to people how far you were willing to go.

I don't think that I was that great at dealing with being bullied. I think these interactions are toxic, but they are not as toxic as what it might have been if the bullying became a pattern. I think I managed the baseline, which was to avoid being somebody's bitch. People eventually get old and weak, and there's no guarantee that one day they'll become a shell of themselves and join the ranks of the bullied. But for me, it'll be a while yet.

Then there are the people who are bullied. Some of the people who are bullied, unfortunately, bring it upon themselves. Of course, this sounds a bit like blaming the victim, but there are just some ways they interact with other people which just tempt people to pick on them.

Suppose people were to do some friendly ribbing on these guys. And instead of laughing it off, they get upset. Then the guy who started the bantering ends up getting upset as well, and suddenly there's this temptation to double down and turn the screws on the weakling. It's happened to me once or twice. There are some people who … you know they're going to get hurt, and at the same time they make you lose your temper at them, and seem to be asking for it.

There are some people who are like that.... Phil Collins is a famous example. You just know that there's something really fragile in him, he's always taking things just too seriously. He just sees the side of things from the point of view of a person who's always hurt.

There was this time at work.... I tried to be friendly with one of the receptionists. I wasn't interested in her that way, but it's always better to have a friend than not. Then came a series of incidents that made things weird between us. I was once accused of using the word “ghetto”. Now she was a Latino, and I hadn't intended to say it in front of her, but it just came out, because I was talking to other guys and they were using it when she walked in. And somehow I got the blame for that. There was a time when I mischieviously scrawled “puta” on some aluminum foil which previously read “pita”. But now I think it could be interpreted as something that was hostile.

There were all sorts of things, of course. Then we got over that apparently, discussed some stuff and then made it back up. There was this time when I came across a package, and she said, “somebody being nosy huh”. I felt stung by that, and I told her that she was nosy too because her nose was too large. And for some reason she got truly offended by that.

I don't know what it is about that fragility. Afterwards, I asked her what it was that got her so mad. She said it was the nose thing. And when I realised that, it was my turn to get mad, and I stormed off. I got mad because I was fed up at talking to somebody who was such a snowflake. Either she was a snowflake or she was an entitled little Karen who thought that Asian boys should understand their place on the totem pole and not act above their station. I told her that I was never ever going to talk to her again, because I couldn't avoid pissing her off.

There was another time, I recall, when she did allude to being bullied at high school. But the problem is that some peoples' flight or fight response gets tripped off way too easily. I could not handle hanging around her.

But here's the thing: I've realised that classifying a person as a bully / a bullied or a neither is a useful way of sizing up a person and trying to figure out how you might want to interact with them. I don't think this tells you much about whether or not they have moral character, whether they are good people. But it tells you something about how you should or should not interact with them.