Breaking the Cycle: Rethinking Bullying, Resilience, and Parenting in Asian Culture

Bullying doesn’t build character—resilience comes despite it, not because of it. This essay unpacks the long-term impact of bullying, the cultural pressures that silence pain, and how Asian parents can break cycles of harm by embracing vulnerability, accountability, and emotional connection with their children.

Video of me reading the essay on Instagram

The Myth of Bullying and Success

Every Pink Shirt Day, we hear the same narrative: that bullying builds character, that struggle makes us stronger. It’s a familiar story, one that suggests that those who succeed in adulthood owe their resilience to the adversity they faced as children.

But let’s set the record straight—success doesn’t happen because of bullying. It happens despite it.

People who rise above adversity often already have a deep well of resilience before the bullying even begins. I know this because I was one of those kids. In elementary school, I was part of a close-knit group of Asian Canadian girls—one from a Hong Kong family, one Taiwanese, and myself, also from a Hong Kong family.

At some point, they decided I no longer belonged. Maybe it was because I preferred drawing, music, and books over gossip and teasing. Maybe it was because I refused to play their mean girl games. Whatever the reason, I found myself cast out.

By high school, the bullying escalated. The same girls who had once been my friends convinced another group of _______ girls to challenge me to a fight—code for “we’re going to beat you up”. I lived in fear at school, though I masked it well behind academic achievement, creativity, and imagination. But their cruelty found new ways to haunt me.

They learned my locker combination and plastered menstrual pads and tampons across it, a reminder of how much I didn’t belong.

Desperate for safety, I turned to a new group of Asian girls who were tougher and harder. They weren’t the academically driven Asian girls who studied hard during the week and gossiped on the weekends that I had grown up with. This newer crew came from broken homes, from families filled with violence and addiction. I didn’t recognize the danger I was stepping into; I only knew that, for the first time in years, I wasn’t alone anymore. I had a place where I belonged and people who vowed to protect me.

Three years into my friendship with this group, I was brutally gang-beaten. A fight had broken out between one of my new friends and a tougher girl crew from another part of the city. When the violence began, I tried to fight back—but I was outnumbered. Over ten girls jumped me.

Later, in the parking lot, I pulled out clumps of hair they had torn from my scalp. For an entire week, I hid my black eyes beneath a baseball cap so my parents wouldn’t notice. I never told them. They never knew.

The Hidden Trauma Behind Success

If you Googled me today, you wouldn’t find a bullied kid. You’d see a successful social entrepreneur—someone who changed Chinese culture around shark fin consumption, someone with a long list of accolades. But here’s what’s missing from that story:

The trauma I carried for years. The way I adapted to survive. The fact that my success happened despite the bullying, not because of it.

Asian culture—especially Chinese culture—is collectivist. We are taught to prioritize the harmony of the whole over the needs of the individual. We are taught self-humility over self-reference.†1

This means that many of us are conditioned to keep our struggles private, to bear pain quietly, as if speaking about it would make it more real—or worse, bring shame upon ourselves and our families.†2

But pain doesn’t disappear just because we refuse to acknowledge it. Silence doesn’t erase trauma—it gives it more power. The only way forward is to confront it. With the right resources, we can begin to heal. Research has shown that repressing our pain by means of silence or denial can drive us into deep feelings of isolation. These feelings of isolation and repressed pain can contribute to mental health illnesses including anxiety and depression.†3

That healing starts with speaking our truths. Sharing our stories allows others who have experienced similar pain to feel less alone. These aren’t just stories of suffering—they are stories of resilience. Studies have shown that giving our emotions a name can actually help us constructively process the emotion. Consequently, the emotion has less power over us. In the words that have been attributed to Carl Jung: “What we resist, persists.”†4

In mindfulness literature, authors speak about the mechanism of experience: that we can’t fully appreciate true joy unless we also allow ourselves the opportunity to appreciate the pain when it is there:

Many of us end up tuning out unpleasant feelings as a way of self-protection. In the long run, this simply doesn’t work. It also means we numb out more generally from all feelings – unpleasant and pleasant. In this way, we cut ourselves off from much of the potential richness of life and from our mind and heart’s deep potential for healing. Paying attention directly to the simple sense of whether an experience is pleasant or not can reconnect us with the wider world of feeling and open us more fully to the wonder of being alive.†5

Vulnerability Is Not Weakness, It’s A Skill

Many of us were raised to believe that admitting pain is a weakness. That vulnerability brings shame.

So, we learned to hide it. I did. When I was beaten up as a kid, I was too afraid to tell my parents—I feared it would bring shame upon them, upon our family.

I don’t share this story to place blame. I share it because I want us to evolve, to grow, to learn. I want us to give the next generation of children everything they deserve.

I understand now that parents who never had the opportunity to learn about vulnerability can’t model it for their children. I know this because I was one of those parents. I had to learn how to show vulnerability through therapy, through friendship, through community.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post about “vulnerability as purpose”, vulnerability is a skill that can help built trust and foster human connection.

Breaking the Cycle: A Message to Asian Parents

Many Asian parents believe they have to have all the answers. That their role is to provide certainty, to be an unwavering guide for their children.

But the truth is, children don’t need us to know everything. They need us to be present, to listen, to love them. Showing that we don’t always have the answers is not weakness—it’s the skill of vulnerability, and it’s a form of humility.

We all need to be resilient. But no child should have to rely on their own personal resilience just to feel safe.

Too often, I hear aunts and uncles say, “See? He’s doing great, even though I treated him like crap. It worked!”

But the truth is, we don’t know what that child’s full potential could have been if they had been nurtured instead of hurt. We only see what they’ve managed to accomplish—we don’t see what was lost, what never had the chance to grow.

Children need their parents and caregivers to give them secure attachment. Evidence from childhood developmental psychology and psychiatry have demonstrated without a doubt that the number one public health issue today – from obesity to criminal activity – is childhood abuse and attachment injuries.†6

So here’s what I want to say to Asian parents:

• Hold on to your kids.†7

• Listen to them. Feel their hearts.

• Yes, give them boundaries, but stop endlessly punishing them.

• Support them. Hold them. Tell them you love them.

• Don’t hit them. Don’t yell at them.†8

• Stop making your kids feel ashamed for not speaking Chinese—it won’t help them want to learn it.†9

• Stop calling them lazy, stupid, mental, useless. Stop calling yourself those things.†10

• Don’t lie to your kids about your mistakes. Show them accountability. Show them what real leadership looks like.†11

Because the best leaders—the best parents—are the ones who take responsibility for their actions.

Healing Starts Here, Now, and with Us

If you’re struggling, if you’ve experienced trauma, it’s okay to get help.

Therapists and psychologists are just mind doctors. And we Asians, we like doctors!!!

Smart people know when to seek help. Asking for support is not failure—it’s wisdom. In fact, it takes strength to recognize that we don’t have to carry everything alone.

We only perpetuate harm because we’ve experienced it. That doesn’t make it okay, but it does make us responsible for breaking the cycle.

It’s okay to cry in front of your children. It won’t show them that you’re weak—it will show them that you’re human.

Working hard to provide for your children is important. But what’s even more important is making sure they feel safe, seen, and heard.

I’m not perfect. None of us are.

And I know this work isn’t easy. But I promise you—the healing, the breaking of intergenerational trauma—the rewards on the other side are worth it.Let’s start now.

Footnotes

†1 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000). Confucian moral self cultivation (2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing Company.

†2 Kramer, E. J., Kwong, K., Lee, E., & Chung, H. (2002). Cultural factors influencing the mental health of Asian Americans. Western Journal of Medicine, 176(4), 227–231. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071736/

†3 Keng SL, Smoski MJ, Robins CJ. Effects of mindfulness on psychological health: a review of empirical studies. Clin Psychol Rev. 2011 Aug;31(6):1041-56. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2011.04.006. Epub 2011 May 13. PMID: 21802619; PMCID: PMC3679190.

†4 Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01943.x

†5 Teasdale, J. D., Williams, J. M. G., & Segal, Z. V. (2014). The mindful way workbook: An 8-week program to free yourself from depression and emotional distress. Guilford Press.

†6 Van der Kolk, B. A., & Fisler, R. (1994). Childhood abuse and neglect and loss of self-regulation. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 58(2), 145–168.

†7 Neufeld, G., & Maté, G. (2005). Hold on to your kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers. Ballantine Books.

†8 Norman, R. E., Byambaa, M., De, R., Butchart, A., Scott, J., & Vos, T. (2012). The long-term health consequences of child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Medicine, 9(11), e1001349. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001349

Teicher, M. H., Samson, J. A., Polcari, A., & McGreenery, C. E. (2006). Sticks, stones, and hurtful words: Relative effects of various forms of childhood maltreatment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 163(6), 993–1000. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.2006.163.6.993

†9 Sullins, J., Turner, J., Kim, J., & Barber, S. (2024). Investigating the impacts of shame-proneness on students’ state shame, self-regulation, and learning. Education Sciences, 14(2), 138. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020138

†10 Vissing, Y. M., Straus, M. A., Gelles, R. J., & Harrop, J. W. (1991). Verbal aggression by parents and psychosocial problems of children. Child Abuse & Neglect, 15(3), 223–238. https://doi.org/10.1016/0145-2134(91)90067-N

†11 Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Lee Hecht Harrison. (2016). The leadership accountability gap: A global study of leadership accountability. LHH. https://www.lhh.com/lhhpenna/en/-/media/lhh/uk/pdfs/lhh-leadership-accountability-global-research-report.pdf