Last night I had a Eureka moment with my 13-year-old and it couldn't have come at a better time.
I have just finished writing a novel about longterm American expatriates in Japan and I am now in the process of going over the text for perhaps the 200th time, checking historical references and tying up loose threads. A friend having sent me another memoir about the Bataan Death March, which one of my protaganists endured as a young man, I was reading this to make sure I had some of the details right, and I found myself rewriting one paragraph over a dozen times.
Just as I was getting to a crucial point and felt that I was beginning to make progress, along came my daughter. She had a look in her eye that said I want to talk. Normally I ignore my kids when they approach me during my off-kid writing hours. I love them, but my writing is very important to me and I don't welome interruptions. But having turned thirteen, my youngest has adopted some of those truly unpleasant teenage characteristics: a tendency to spend too much time in her room doing God-knows-what; sullen, blank stares when questions about homework are posed; a habit of Oh mom! eye rolling and exaggerated shrugs when I bring up the subject of laundry. So if she wants to talk, we will talk. Who knows when I will get another chance?
It turns out that my youngest has been making an informal study of the bullies in her class. She gave me an astute description of some of the more troubled kids who pick on others, a boy with many complex issues who has since left her school; a girl who was badly bullied herself a few years ago and is now eager to get revenge on the children who picked on her -- and some who didn't. My child has carefully analyzed the sources of bullying and broken down some of the most prevalent causes as follows:
(1) Kids who have never lived anywhere but in this town, who tend to feel as though their native status gives them certain privileges. Johnnie-come-lately types like my daughter -- she started school here at age seven as opposed to the natives' average age of five -- are often dismissed as interlopers and shunned.
(2) Kids who have been bullied themselves, either by parents or other children.
(3) Kids with obvious differences, either physical or emotional.
(4) Kids with any of the above issues, who possess natural charisma or leadership skills.
What amazed me most was that my daughter realized that (4) was the most dangerous kind of bully. It was when she was describing one such boy -- a natural leader born and raised in this town who has almost certainly been beaten by his father and suffers, not surprisingly, from a behavioral disorder -- that I suddenly saw it: a Teaching Opportunity.
Having grown up in Japan, my children see themselves as Japanese. They don't want to hear any comments about Japan that they perceive as critical or negative. During our first week here we happened to meet an elderly man whose brother was a former POW of the Japanese, and my children's first question after this encounter was "Why didn't that man like us?" All I could do was point out that the man had liked us just fine; what he hadn't like was the fact that we had lived in Japan for so many years. He would forever associate the country with the unfortunate experiences his brother had suffered during the war. We tried in vain to explain to our children that they weren't Japanese. Next, I tried to educate them about the war and its causes. I got too ambitious: their eyes glazed over before I even got to Russo-Japanese War. By the time I was ready to start on the Versailles treaty, it was a lost cause.
But last night I had the perfect opportunity: a discussion of what makes bullies. We went from imbalances of power and inferiority complexes to the origins of war, touching on many issues I have long wanted to discuss with her: colonialism, racism, cultural misunderstandings, man's inhumanity to man. Right in front of me I had the materials my friend had sent. They made for painful viewing, but I let my daughter see them. Once again, we talked about bullying. We found parallels between the classroom bullies who, having been brutalized and bullied themselves, seek to do the same to others, and the worst of the officers and guards in the Imperial Japanese Army who made the Bataan Death March the horrific atrocity it was.
I don't flatter myself that I did much more than pique her interest in the Bataan Death March and other atrocities of the war that have largely -- and tragically -- been forgotten by the general public, but ladies and gentlemen, I got through. I talked, she listened; she talked, I listened. Teaching and communication took place between a grown woman and a 13-year-old girl, and if that isn't a miracle, I don't know what is.
Later, I went back and rewrote the chapter I'd been laboring over. I put in a little about bullies and what makes them the way they are. It reads a lot better.
