Klarize Medenilla | Asian Journal
In 2001, the massive influx of Asian immigrants settling in the United States that began in the 1980s and 1990s was still in full swing — and so was the promise of the American Dream.
The Vargas family
Among those immigrants was the Vargas family, who migrated from Bicol, Philippines to the U.S. at the beginning of the year. A family of five, the Vargas clan includes eldest daughter Geraldine Vargas, who was 11 years old at the time.
“All I knew about America I learned from watching sitcoms like ‘Full House’ and ‘Friends’ so in my little kid mind, I thought my experience would be just like that: having lots of friends and getting into hilarious situations,” said Vargas, now 33.
Since Vargas had two distant relatives who lived in nearby Tempe, Arizona, the family chose nearby Mesa as their home. Following her initial culture shock, Vargas was confident that she would be able to conform in what she described as a “very ethnically diverse” city.
“I wanted to be like Rachel from ‘Friends’ but Filipino,” she quipped. But unfortunately, the expectation of making lots of friends in her new home soon dissipated.
In the 2001-2002 academic year, Vargas started middle school, where the trouble began. Vargas shared multiple classes with a group of students whom she described as non-Asian people of color, and who took every opportunity to make snide comments toward Vargas.
Even though she spoke fluent English, Vargas still had a distinct Filipino accent, which these bullies targeted. They called her a slew of offensive terms like “Mulan,” “Ling Ling,” and “chink.”
Vargas said the name-calling often happened during lunchtime when these students also mocked her lunches of traditional Filipino food. If she spoke up in class, these bullies would repeat what she said in an exaggerated Filipino accent. She said what hurt her most was when they’d make lewd sexual jokes related to the stereotype of submissive Asian women.
“I think I was an easy target because I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I was quiet. Those kids knew that I wouldn’t fight back,” Vargas said.
After school, she would shut herself in her bedroom, leaving her parents wondering what went wrong. Eventually, she told them what had been going on, and her parents went to the school to seek administrative recourse.
However, the school did little to nothing to remedy the situation. Staff encouraged Vargas’ parents to send their daughter to the school counselor, but did nothing to bring her bullies to justice.
Shortly after, the family moved to Los Angeles, California. For Vargas, it was a game changer.
In LA, Vargas met and befriended other Filipinos. She also found that the non-Filipino students at her new school in LA were much more welcoming, helping her establish meaningful friendships.
However, her experience of being bullied impacted her greatly in the years to follow. Additionally, as is common among Filipino and Asian families, her parents never considered seeking professional mental health care. They also assumed that because she made friends in LA, everything was fine.
“Even though the situation was better, I still struggled with having confidence, which I didn’t really experience before . Sometimes, even now, I get a heavy feeling from those mean words of those bullies and I hear those voices and remember what it felt like to be so targeted,” Vargas said, adding that that situation made her feel like she couldn’t ever voice her concerns.
For the past decade, Vargas has attended weekly therapy sessions and regularly sees a psychologist, who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Vargas wished that she’d sought professional help much earlier, but admitted feeling ashamed about having to do so.
As a self-described non-confrontational person, Vargas said that the bullying affected her self-esteem in her young adulthood. Though she feels more mentally stable these days, she expressed resentment regarding the school’s inability to curb the bullying.
“It’s frustrating because bullying can really mess with a person’s psyche, even though it is 100% avoidable,” she explained.
Though the bullying lasted only a few months, it stayed with her for decades.
“It was disappointing that didn’t do anything about those bullies. Who knows how those people turned out because nobody ever stopped them and said, ‘Hey, the way you’re treating that student is wrong,’” Vargas said.
Rising Asian hate
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), Asian students are the least likely to report being bullied in school —18%, compared to white students (35%), Black students (31%) and Latino students (28%).
Among bullied Asian students, 54% of reported incidents occurred in class.
Those facts may underlie a more disturbing reality for Asians, who are among the least likely to report issues to authorities.
According to a 2021 study, 80% of U.S. Asian American students experienced bullying in school, but only 38% had reported the incident to an adult.
To Filipino American social worker David Hernandez, the phenomenon of keeping one’s head down and avoiding conflict is all too common. As a youth counselor, he regularly works with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) families in his ethnically diverse hometown of Cerritos, California.
In one recent situation, an elementary school-aged Filipino girl—who migrated from the Philippines as a toddler and had a Filipino accent—was bullied by a white American girl.
“ was regularly mocking the immigrant student because of her accent and belittling her in what I can only call a xenophobic way,” Hernandez said. “Unfortunately, it seems like this kind of bullying of Asian people has really become more apparent in a world.”
Since 2020, the nationwide trend of anti-Asian hate —including verbal and physical assaults prompted erroneous connections between those of Asian heritage and the virus itself—has been widely publicized.
As a response, Stop AAPI Hate—the national groundbreaking non-profit that tracks self-reports of harassment and violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander community members—was established to examine the rise in xenophobia and racism during the Covid-19 pandemic.
From 2020 to 2022, the organization documented 11,409 individual hate acts, with a majority of them occurring in 2021 (49.8%) during the peak of media coverage on major anti-Asian attacks.
Though a majority of hate reports described settings like public transit and retail stores as among the most common areas, for AAPIs under 18, about a third of these incidents happened in school, according to Stop AAPI Hate’s data from 2020 to 2022.
Hernandez emphasized that though this kind of schoolyard bullying isn’t new, it has been exacerbated by the reemergence of backward stereotypes of Asian people.
In fact, it took several months to resolve the incident between the Filipino girl — who didn’t report the bullying — and her white bully; the event only came to light when a teacher overheard the bully berating the young Filipina and reported it to the school.Nevertheless, both families eventually came together and solved the issue. Hernandez encouraged the bully’s family—which he said was very compliant and apologetic—to adopt a more involved and structured parent-child relationship.
To prevent similar incidents, Hernandez encouraged the Filipino girl’s parents to open the flow of communication in their home to create a more emotionally inviting atmosphere—to avoid the tendency to shut one’s self off.
According to a 2023 study from the National Center for Education Statistics, less than half (46%) of middle and high school students who were bullied notified a teacher about it.
“It’s important to have regular conversations with your child and to really emphasize being honest. Kids really benefit from that, even if it feels awkward at first,” Hernandez said.
He added that parents of bullied children should “strongly” consider counseling for the child to avoid the long-term ramifications of bullying—as Vargas saw.
Vargas acknowledged that if she lived in an environment that punished bullies, and had a family that was receptive to mental health care, she would “not be struggling with the same issues years and years later.”
But what happens when your child is not bullied, but is the bully?
A bully breaks the cycle
Fiona, a 42-year-old Filipina American who asked not to share her real name, is a stay-at-home mother in San Bernardino County. Her 10-year-old daughter is a straight-A student who regularly gets glowing remarks on her elementary school report cards.
“We see her grades and how well she’s doing, and think, ‘Wow, my child is perfect!’” Fiona said, laughing.
However, during a parent-teacher conference in April 2023, her daughter’s teacher alerted Fiona to concerning behavior: a female student reported that Fiona’s daughter had been taunting her for the clothes that she wore.
The teacher said Fiona’s daughter had been making fun of this student for several months for “looking poor,” and for often wearing the same clothes on consecutive days.
“I was in shock. That was not how I raised my daughter, or so I thought. But I knew that we needed to make some changes in our home,” Fiona said, adding that she had attended a separate meeting with the school principal and the parents of the bullied child.
Fiona recalled that she wasn’t sure where to start with remedying the situation, revealing that she felt ashamed as a parent for the first time.
“I wouldn’t say that, as a kid, I myself experienced bullying, but I do remember the mean girls and how brutal they can be, so I had a hard time coping with the fact that my own daughter was a mean girl to someone else. It did feel like I had failed in a way,” she said .
Beyond making fun of this student for wearing “poor people clothes,” Fiona’s daughter had also been calling her names like “hobo,” and bragging about the expensive clothes and makeup she herself received on her birthday.
“Hearing that made me realize that spoiling is turning her into someone I didn’t want her to become: arrogant, conceited, and classist,” Fiona said, pointing out that she and her husband both grew up “without much” and wanted to give their kids “the world.”
Fiona and the bullied classmate’s parents arranged for an out-of-school meeting with the two girls. There, Fiona’s daughter apologized and each student shared their thoughts and feelings about the situation.
Modern psychology suggests that bullies become bullies through a variety of channels, ranging from media to family life. A common reason kids bully is to secure the upper hand within the hierarchy—pushing down as a form of social mobility up the schoolyard food chain.
In a way, kids can bully as a defense against becoming a social outcast. In Fiona’s daughter’s case, she targeted a girl who appeared to be less fortunate to flaunt her wealth, Fiona said.
Fiona’s daughter stopped bullying the other girl, but she felt that her daughter didn’t truly grasp why her behavior was wrong, so she and her husband sought more constructive solutions.
With their daughter, Fiona and her family arranged to see a child psychologist.
The psychologist worked with the family to broaden the daughter’s understanding of humility, while the parents would ease up on spoiling the daughter—which Fiona admitted was becoming a problem—and would teach her that “having money doesn’t make you a better person.”
While the family has just begun healing the cycle of hate, Hernandez said the positive change is a lasting one: “It really starts at home, and it really starts with parents who are receptive to change and are concerned with how their child treats others,” he said, adding that the ubiquity of bullying doesn’t mean its effects on youth aren’t lifelong.
“We have to remember that our kids are not just our kids. They’re eventually going to be adults, and in order for them to be responsible and kind adults, it’s important to teach responsibility and kindness right now,” Hernandez said.
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.
