More than half way through NaBloPoMo and I’m stumped. What to write about? Hmm.

How about I tell you the story where I nearly got punched in the face?

It took place on a school bus. I was about 14 years old at the time, pretty fluent in English already and becoming bolder by the day. At our school (remember, this is Iowa), there were whites, blacks, a few Hispanics and quite a number of Vietnamese students. I was the only Chinese out of several hundred. Most of the time people stuck to their own ethnic groups. I had no group to belong to, so I was kind of the oddball out. I had friends of every color, except, none were really really close friends.

I used to get extremely bad motion sickness. I disliked riding the school bus as it does a lot of stop and go, picking up and dropping off students at every possible street, and it seems like I’m always the first one to get picked up and the last one to get dropped off.

One day on the way home from school, I was feeling ill and wanted some quiet so I could concentrate on imagining my happy place. Some girl sitting two rows behind me kept talking very loudly, standing up and down, waving her arms in the air etc. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and asked her to please turn it down because I wasn’t feeling well. OH she was upset, as NO ONE tells her what to do! She’s the queen! She was furious. She blathered all sorts of words at me, one of them hit a nerve. She called me a “chink” and told me to “shut the F up or else blah blah blah”.. I was suddenly not nauseous anymore. At this point I could care less if she was twice my size, I shouted back at her “YOU shut up n!gger.”

Yea. I said the N word. Right to her face. Very loudly.

What! She called me the C word. It’s only fair.

You should have seen the look on her face. And the faces of those around us. Everyone’s jaws dropped and looked at her, and then looked at me, waiting for the inevitable. Even the bus driver glanced worriedly in the rear view mirror. She is more than furious. She charged towards me like a bull seeing the biggest piece of red cloth. You can even see steam coming out the top of her head! Thankfully others stepped in and held her back.

I then calmly explained that she called me names first, and if she says it again, I will too. Amazingly, she understood and left me alone. It was probably the first time someone stood up to her. I think I shocked myself as much as I shocked her.

I was a legion of sorts. I stood up to the bully.