ADULTS ARE BULLIES, TOO, AND SOME OF THEM BECOME TEACHERS

   

Earlier this month Malaysian news reported that M. Vasanthapiriya, the 13 year old Penang student who attempted suicide back in January after being accused by her teacher of stealing her iPhone had died.

Having followed the story these past few weeks I was, and still am consumed with grief at the news of Vasanthapiriya's death. While police investigations haven't revealed much of the details as of yet, what the case tells us clearly and undeniably is that a teenager took her own life after a teacher (with the help of colleagues) drove her to act on the guilt and shame she was made to feel in a way someone still in the prime of their innocence would.

All else is irrelevant, including the missing iPhone, which, as Vasanthapiriya's father had had to point out, embarrasingly enough is replaceable. What this whole case shows, along with last year's death of 11 year old Mohamad Thaqif Amin Mohd Gaddafi as a result of being physically abused by his teacher – or, "disciplined" as some would call it – resulting in his limbs being amputated, is that a) a lot of people end up in the wrong profession, b) corporal punishment as enforcing discipline in the school – another great legacy of European colonialism which sought to "broadcast authority" over natives – is still perpetuated by some retarded Malaysians today, and c) many adults are just bullies looking for someone to pick on.

I don't come to that conclusion lightly. My conclusion is in fact informed by years of experience in the Malaysian public school system. From the sixth grade to the twelfth, I had my school experience forever blighted by some of the worst, dark-hearted bullies who called themselves teachers. I'm not about to go off on a revenge rant, or share some sob story, but what makes the tragedies of Mohamad Thaqif and Vasanthapiriya so sickening is how these issues are only now coming to light, and after damage has been done.

Nevermind the many students who were often too vapid to be around, as the school as an institution for learning can become too much like a factory priming the subervient herd. But with teachers abusing their authority and leaving permanent psychological scars on the student with smug satisfaction, the world becomes a dark place. So dark in fact that at age thirteen, and feeling the true torment of depression as a teenager for the first time, I wrote a poem about it. It was a cry from my soul. And it was published in a 1999 edition of a Chicken Soup book.

I stand by that poem, despite its mediocrity. Because over the years I still hear from strangers around the world – high school students – who had come across the poem and expressed gratitude and relief for a little poem having helped them feel less alone in a difficult time, much like how I had felt at that age.

School became a demoralizing place for me. So some mornings, after my father dropped me off at the school entrance, and attendance was taken at assembly, I broke from the crowd of students and headed to the back entrance. And I walked the two miles back home, where, with my parents both at work, I'd sit in my room and read. Books like The Catcher In the Rye by Salinger, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. To me, I could finally be in the right company, and educate myself through the best teachers. Because cutting school became a necessary habit of mine to escape an unbearable environment, it only gave teachers more opportunity to ridicule and verbally abuse when I was present in the classroom.

I never forgot a single one of them, and truth be told, if there's a reason why I teach now when I can it's because of all of the sadistic teachers I've had, who picked on the defenseless because it gave them pleasure or a sense of dominance. Everything that they were, I am not. No doubt these sort of situations go on constantly in Malaysia, and elsewhere, but the normalcy of it all makes change seem almost like an incredible notion. A distinction between a strict teacher, and someone with wickedness in their heart needs to be acknowledged.

Vasanthapiriya and Mohamad Thaqif are just the two victims we've heard about, and only because their lives ended in tragedy. It's time for more of these adult bullies to be exposed as the uncivilized brutes that they are in failing to do their jobs responsibly and professionally as teachers. If you can't conduct yourself in such a way then you don't belong in the most honorable profession there ever was.

WHEN YOUR NATIONALITY BECOMES LIKE CLOTHING – SOMETHING YOU WEAR ACCORDING TO TRENDS

During a phone conversation I had earlier today the topic landed on Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the true firebrand "father of Malaysia," in my opinion. Tunku Abdul Rahman declared Malaya's independence and everything, but Dr. Mahathir showed the world that we are.

No leader of a country is free of faults, obviously, but let's state the even more obvious fact that only a rare number of leaders are actually leaders because they love their country, regardless of what state it's in. You see it in their actions, words, and commitment to the long and arduous process of development. And in a genuinely multiethnic, multicultural society like Malaysia this endeavor becomes even more insane.

So the recent comments made by Mukhriz Mahathir, Dr. Mahathir's son, and who is widely perceived to have ambitions of becoming Prime Minister has pissed off some people, and might work against him. Unaware of what he said during the phone conversation, I googled his name on the laptop in front of me.

“When we travel abroad or perform the umrah, if we are asked which country we are from, we would feel embarrassed and say we are from Brunei. 

“(Because) if we answer Malaysia, people would ask us why there are so many problems (in Malaysia), it was magnificent and great (in the past), but (in a) terrible (state) at present,” reads the quote. (Malaysiakini)

Speak for yourself, Mukhriz.

And allow me to refer to a past post I'd written after Fidel Castro's death, concerning great leaders, romantics, and those of weak character who look for a different flag to wave when hardship falls on their native country. Mukhriz is echoing the same pomposity exhibited by Americans today who seek to distance themselves from the Trump presidency by announcing their intent to become Canadian (although many Americans said the same during the Bush administration).

What's also amusing about Mukhriz's ill-contemplated comments is that he refers to Brunei as the preferred country of choice for embarrassed Malaysians.

Ummm....the country whose leader has been known to be a barefaced hypocrite, controlling the population with threats of shariah law and other restrictions while he sips his wine, holds sex parties and chums it up with Donald Trump – that Brunei? He might as well just use Saudi Arabia as the country embarrassed Malaysians can claim to be from when asked by strangers.

The problem with Mukhriz's rhetoric is that he comes off as a weak individual. Weak individuals don't make good leaders. Weak individuals don't love their country when it's suffering and needs love the most – they give up and start calling themselves something else, not just to feel better about themselves, but to sound more pleasing to others. He is not like his father, but children aren't extensions of their parents anyway. They've been influenced and conditioned by a different generation of ideas and people.

When people in the States ask me, and they often do, where I'm from, I tell them. The general response is of admiration for Malaysia, even though many of them have never even been there. If any of them comment on the problems going on there at present, and they rarely do, because we're in the US, and the problems here are profound and endless and incomparable in many ways, I tell them, yes, like all countries, we need to work at it. And most importantly, we need strong leaders of the romantic breed, because love cultivates, and love is a battle, and a leader who exercises power without love is a leader without wisdom.

HYPOCRITES AND THE "ME TOO" MOVEMENT

So now that some powerful men have toppled so sensationally from their plinths, the ongoing witch hunt for badly behaved men has suddenly roused those who for the longest time had been complicit in endorsing such men to suddenly grow a conscience. Maybe "grow a conscience" is the wrong phrase. Saving one's own career or reputation is probably more apt. Jumping on the bandwagon is always the more convenient route when the opportunity presents itself, especially in the liberal and loud entertainment or fashion industry, it seems.

In the US, where this whole exposé first found a furious audience, the call for female empowerment rang like a battle cry, prompting women who'd suffered, and endured degrading treatment from men to step out of their chains finally, without fear. I, too felt a sense of satisfaction when the Harvey Weinstein story broke. It called to mind an incident I once had at Mass General Hospital a few years ago, after I'd been brought to the ER in a wheelchair and looked as pale as a corpse, due to a stress related stomach illness. I was called into a small room to be examined by a large, male doctor. While lying down on the exam table, he put his hands under my sweater aggressively, without warning. I reacted impulsively, my body jerking away, and he snapped loudly at me, "let me do my job!" Just like that, I was silenced. No apology, no retreating of his hands to acknowledge my surprise, and then explain, like any doctor would, what he was doing. It was just the two of us in the room with a closed door, and he was exercising his power over me, in the least professional and concerned manner that I'd ever experienced with a doctor. After awhile, I sat in the seat next to him while he asked some questions. The entire time he did not hide the fact that he was staring at my chest, and when I held my bag to cover my front, his eyes simply traveled slowly down the rest of my body.

I understand how power structures work, and how one female voice gets shut down when it tries to confront a pig in a powerful position. In incidents like the one I experienced, it becomes even more difficult to make a complaint because some male doctor made a female patient feel uncomfortable, who cares? Perhaps some people would just roll their eyes at what I described above, because he was just a massive sleazeball like a lot of men. The point is that it was a professional setting, and he was a doctor showing brazen disrespect for his sick patient by creating an uncomfortable atmosphere all on his own. Did I make any sort of complaint? Of course not.

Because like Harvey Weinstein and others like him, they are protected by their status and a culture of entitlement.

But then came the pitchforks and torches, brandished by young naive girls, in some cases, who've had poor luck with the opposite sex due to, perhaps, poor choices, and are intent on placing blame on anyone but themselves. The whole Aziz Ansari debacle last week is what I'm mostly referring to. And I really can't stand Aziz Ansari. In fact, I find him revolting for reasons I will likely delve into in a future post. But some petulant girl decided that he is guilty of treating her in a way that made her uncomfortable, after she desperately tried to get his attention at a party, and then, fast forward to a date in New York City where Ansari hurriedly paid for a meal, she went back to his place thinking...what? He was eager to get back so he could read some poetry to her?

Aziz Ansari is more guilty of being bad at comedy than he is of being a typical guy. There needs to be some responsibility shouldered by girls like "Grace" who're too comfortable with feeling like helpless  little flowers while expecting guys to be machines, and then crying when they realize guys are in fact not machines in situations that she has helped enable or advance.

A movement that began as a call for women to rally together in solidarity against specific types of men has become tainted with immature individuals who are quick to play the victim while disregarding their own behavior. Take the Tariq Ramadan incident, as another example. The revelations stunned me as well when it was first reported in France in their feminist version of "Me Too." It was crushing to learn that religion, and Islam in particular, has exposed yet another raging hypocrite (see also Nouman Ali Khan, the sleazy Pakistani-American Muslim speaker). Those parading around basking in their celebrity "religious scholar" status, preaching on how to be good to others while they themselves are not. 

I am in no way defending Ramadan for what he is accused of, but the statements made by two of his accusers, a French woman and a Morrocan woman, does raise some pertinent questions. The former confessed that she had agreed to meet him at his hotel room to "discuss religion" and that she had fantasized the possibility of the handsome, intelligent Islamic scholar falling in love with her and they would marry. The former disclosed that she had been in a relationship with Ramadan for five years. What stories like this always fail to consider is the naivete of women, and aside from Ramadan's own lack of self-control, what about their's? "I was under his influence, he manipulated me," claims Henda Ayari, the French Tunisian woman who went on to sleep with the renowned Islamic scholar.

"I pointed out to him that he had promised to take me to the light," says Majda Bernoussi, rather pathetically, and who intends to publish a manuscript titled, "A voyage in troubled waters with Tariq Ramadan."

When I was eighteen and attending a college in Malaysia, students in my program were encouraged to attend a college fair to meet representatives from various universities around the US. Before the event, the program director, an American woman, took a few of us female students aside and said to us, "if any of the male reps suggest that you meet him in his hotel room later to discuss your options further, do not go." She implied with that warning that such incidents had happened before, and had not ended well. Still, as good advice as it was, I don't think most girls or women need to have such things explained to them. It's just common sense. It's not flattering, or bold. It's naivete, and gross. Besides, there's a cafe in the hotel if you desperately want to ask a man some questions about religion and seek some direction in life. If he refuses to meet in the hotel lobby, cafe or any other public setting tell him to piss off. Ramadan's shady, manipulative text messages, as described by his accusers had already filled them with suspicion in regards to his character, yet they reacted with shock and dismay in the end when his allegedly grotesque behavior in person matched the conniving statements he made to them in private correspondence. Well, don't follow your intuition or anything!

The fact that these Muslim women are supposedly intent on improving themselves as human beings through religious study highlights the reality that they really have a long way to go in that department, if they don't see a problem with encouraging a married man's unprincipled behavior, but instead cling to the hope that he will leave his wife for them, his sexual play things. This is not just wicked, self-serving behavior on both sides, but unequivocally anti-woman –– ruin another woman while also playing the victim, and profit from some books detailing your dalliance with a hypocrite, while revealing yourself to be one as well.

Well done to Western feminism, where women are more content with calling themselves oppressed victims, and helpless in their "free" state, instead of seeing themselves as capable of risilience, and taking responsibility for their own actions and lack of common sense.

HOW ARE YOU FEELING THIS WINTER?

RESPONSIBILITY

Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, D.C.

I got to meet my two nieces and nephew for the first time this past October. I could not stop holding on to them for the duration of their visit as we drove from Washington, D.C. where a family was reunited at Dulles Airport, through Maryland, and Philadelphia. In New York City, my mother and I shared a king size bed at night in one of the hotel bedrooms. The two girls––the oldest five, the other three–lay between us, recalling events of the day, asking me questions sposmadically in my half awake state, and then, suddenly, asleep before I was.

Their voices overlapped one another's in the dark as they told me about their visit earlier to the zoo––we had split up in two groups and only rendevouzed at the hotel later that night.

"What did you feel when you saw the animals in the cages?" I asked. The both of them went silent, unsure of what I meant. The oldest responded after a moment, "Ummmm...". 

So I asked, "Did you think it was right or wrong to keep them in cages?" I felt guilt rise inside of me right as the question left my mouth because it was more of a leading question. Clearly I was suggesting a particular response, one that I desired. Much like a certain type of lawyer or journalist would. Conflicted, I wondered if I was being irresponsible, or already too severe on two kids enjoying their childhood experience. I'd prefer not to be the spoilsport aunt who's quick to point out everything that's wrong with the world, but this generation of entitled halfwits, groomed by their similar parental units haunts me daily.

After we had a big lunch at Dean and Deluca in Georgetown, D.C. earlier in the trip, one of the girls announced that she wanted chocolate. "No," I responded before anyone else at the table could, as her parents had gone for a stroll. She starts to tear up quietly in the corner, and I am immediately demonized by my mother, who says to my brother and father, "Zihan semua tak boleh!" (With Zihan, everything is a no!) I proceed to protest the accusation hurled at me by my mother, who, along with my father, had denied me and my siblings most things growing up, regardless of how many tantrums we threw.

Another conflicted moment for me. I found myself apologizing sweetly to my niece like the many spineless adults of today while everyone continued judging me, the vicious oppressor. Coaxing her into the store, I buy her and her sister ridiculously expensive icing-coated cookies she picks out, which isn't her fault, since everything in Dean and Deluca is a rip off.

But I suppose there are less manipulative ways to educate children, especially when it comes to important issues like animal rights. When I was in the third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Rogers, a calm, exceptionally kind woman who always wore long A-line skirts that swirled gently around her legs when she walked would read to the class after break time. She would sit on a chair in the back of the room and us students gathered around her on the floor to listen. One day she read from a short storybook about elephants. I can't remember the name of the book, but there was an injustice that the theme touched upon. Towards the middle of the story Mrs. Rogers began to cry. She cried as she continued reading, until she had to rest the book on her lap and wipe at her face while the rest of us stared at her wide eyed. She apologized, and explained that she really loved elephants, and the story broke her heart.

"It's wrong," my older niece replies to my earlier question. We explain to each other in the darkness why we think it's wrong to cage animals, kept from their natural habitats for human profit and amusement. I fall asleep thinking how frightening it is to navigate through that duty called responsibility as there is no compass for it, and how I can be the best aunt in the world despite that.