Dear Reader,

In the wake of rising violence against Asian Americans in our country, I sat down this week with Professors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong on the Stay Tuned podcast to help diagnose what ails us. Some of that conversation took us back to our childhoods and the taunting we received from cruel kids at school.

I have spoken about this very little, but I received a good share of bullying when I was young. Years later, I have surprisingly mixed feelings about the experience. To be sure, there were many days I was miserable. Kids intentionally mispronounced my name, asked me if I lived in a teepee. I was occasionally called a sand n***** and a couple of boys in middle school coined an odd term to account for my skin tone: “negroin.” I was mocked, sometimes spit on and punched in the locker room after gym class. There was the time, on the bus en route to the planetarium for a school trip, I was mercilessly ridiculed the entire ride. All I wanted was for someone, a teacher, anyone to make them stop. No one did. For what was probably an hour, but felt like three eternities, I was a captive victim.

Part of the bullying surely arose from my foreigner status. But there was a lot more going on too. I was a skinny, thickly-bespectacled, unathletic nerd of the first order. Funny name aside, I was a pretty ripe target.