When life was hell evading sibling abuse at home and racism for ten years
from Grade 5 to the middle of university (racial slurs, pranks and
physical abuse), two angels graced my path.
(This is a guest blog by Miranda Wong in Canada.)
My grade 5 ESL teacher, Mrs. McKibbin, was so much more than a teacher to me. After escaping my country with my family at age ten and immigrating to Canada in 1980, I craved stability. Mrs. McKibbin showed me empathy, generosity and kindness in a world that was far from kind. She gave me serenity, even if brief in her class, and she continued to show genuine love and concern in our letter exchange for almost ten years after my last class with her. I received love and encouragement from this angel; I idolized her in the face of chaos and the fear of the unknown. She must have left Earth years ago, as I never received a reply to my last letter in late 1991; nor did I hear back from my voicemail message.
I hope that the phone message I'd left gave some comfort to her family, knowing her legacy and generosity; that's if her family still lived there. She was loved and appreciated by me for how deeply and positively she affected me.
I only managed to salvage two photos of her after my ex-husband burned her letters out of spite.
My grade 10 English teacher, Mrs. Jones, was another wonderful teacher. She was inclusive and generous with her smile and steadfast attitude. No matter how much other kids threw verbal punches at me, and pranks that I didn’t dare to report, Mrs. Jones set the tone in her class. My classmates and I knew it was time for English. We all knew to respect her. Her tone was calm but firm and collected. We knew instinctively that there would be trouble if we deviated or acted up. Her demeanor made for a stable classroom, which is what I needed. When she said “Girls and boys” and paused for three seconds with her arm raised high, she got our attention before saying something like “On page ...” then page number of the book we needed to turn to. The kids signaled to one another to turn around, be at attention and quickly open the book to the exact page. If anyone started talking to one another during class, she gave a silent look and, if needed, all she did was clear her throat. She instilled in us a need for self-discipline, solving our own problems and relying on one another to stay focused. “You snooze, you lose” attitude worked with those grade 10 kids.
When I copied her method of standing down my perpetrators with a firm and neutral voice and kept at it, it did work on some of them to reduce the racism and bullying. Still, I was still not big enough, I didn’t have a deep voice, a tough demeanour nor the right skin colour to scare them off. I had no clout in making a difference in stopping onslaughts of racist acts. The examples in the list below are not exhaustive:
- name calling
- making faces with squinted eyes
- taping and/or marking their own eyes with eyeliner on a deep upward slant
- approaching me with markers pretending to draw on my face
- making gibberish sounds to make believe they were speaking Chinese words
- throwing my backpack against the ground or the wall, to damage my things
- taking my notes, binders, text books or lunchbox from me, tearing things up, throwing them into puddles or over a steep hill to send me scrambling for my belongings
- dumping out my lunch in the morning so that I’d go hungry
- shoving me against something and making punching gestures a few millimeters away past my jaw or cheek to scare me
- eye rolling
- pretending to hurry to run away as soon as they spotted me as if I was a plague
- running towards me full speed as if they were going to jump me
These were just some of the ways I was made to suffer. I didn’t have the privilege of support from my family. My father was too busy, working to provide for us ... and getting bullied himself at work. He died early from cancer when I was 22. My mom kept to herself after becoming burned out looking after a seriously ill son. My brother died from organ failure caused by Hong Kong Police brutality by the time he turned 23 and from two years of suffering when Dad prolonged his death by experimental Chinese Medicine.
My schools didn’t report concerns about bullying to my parents, and although I was overwhelmed with the abuse, I knew my parents already had their plates full.
However, to return to my story about those two teachers: To this day, what those two beautiful angels did for me had a life-long positive effect. Mrs. McKibbin taking her time to show me how to write English script, making me feel empowered that I could learn a new language and translate my thought onto paper, which in turn improved my self-esteem to carry on. She constantly showed affection and concern for my well-being, compared to none elsewhere at home or at school. Particularly when no one else helped to eliminate the rampant racism, especially in the first year in a tiny town of 11,000 people in farm country with only two non-Caucasian families. As for Mrs. Jones, she taught by example a skill that empowered me to stand up for myself. The bigheartedness, perspective and compassion from my two saviours—Mrs. McKibbin and Mrs. Jones—stood out over the rest. They gave me hope in humankind where many of the human race were not "kind" and far from it.
They had the foresight to make a difference to me where I most needed it, and they knew which small battles to help me fight in times when the odds for change were stacked against me: the individual battles within me. Their impacts were both immediate and lifelong.
All it takes is a pebble in a pond from which the ripple effect is boundless.
Miranda Wong, September 2022