Navigating the fear and freedom of independence as a teenager was the grown-up reality that we were all barreling toward—and Deah Fishman had gotten there first.
* * *
Okay, so middle school wasn’t all party boats. I got bullied a lot. This was back when bullying was just something that happened, and not yet the subject of congressional commissions. Some of it was more “bullying lite,” like when the popular girls would purposely bump into me:
ME: Oh, excuse me.
POPULAR GIRLS: Ugh, there is no excuse for you!
Popular Girls storm off laughing.
It was demoralizing in the moment, though I suppose character building in the long run?
Then there was the kind of bullying that wasn’t mild or instructive, even with the benefit of hindsight. Kids like me or Praveen or Ed would get taunted because we were supposedly the weird, ugly, fat, skinny, dark, fill-in-the-blank-different kids. Harshad Shah, who was both Indian and fat, got a double dose. An extra target on our backs came from not wearing designer shoes or jeans. （This is how I learned that Sears did not classify as “designer.”） It wasn’t uncommon to get spit on or beat up between classes, usually with a side order of whatever movie or TV show quote the bully happened to be motivated by.
Chilled monkey brains!10 A whack to the face.
Hey Apu! Thank you, come again!11 Some asshole’s spit lands in your hair.
Long Duk Dong!12 Your books and folders have been thrown sky-high and papers are raining everywhere. （Why didn’t these kids watch wholesome things like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or Back to the Future?!）
Teachers knew this was going on. Most chose to ignore it. One outlier was our kind music director, Mr. Manziano, who freely gave bullied kids passes to “practice music” whenever we wanted. This meant that instead of the hell of a middle school cafeteria, we could retreat to Mr. Manziano’s practice rooms, which is where I ate my lunch most days.
For the bullies at Marlboro Middle School, reciting those catchy lines from some of the most popular mainstream movies and shows weaponized them. The Simpsons, Sixteen Candles, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had something in common: stereotypical, dehumanized Asian characters who fueled the bullying.13 Short Circuit had all that and a sweet robot named Johnny 5. Picking up my papers in a crowded hallway with spit dripping from my hair was an intimate way to learn that images of what we all watched on television crept into our thinking.
Aside from movie quotes, more direct slurs were thrown around, too, albeit none of them were especially creative.
Hey dothead: A reference to a bindi, or dot, that some Indian women （and Gwen Stefani） wear. In Jersey City at the time, a gang called the Dotbusters was thriving. These racists would go around harassing, assaulting, and even killing Indian people. A man named Navroze Mody was murdered by four men who were ultimately only sentenced to between six months and ten years. It was a scary time. My aunt lived in Jersey City. My grandmother would stay with her often. Grandma regularly described how she’d hold her head high as groups of young men taunted her on afternoon walks. I guess after marching with Gandhi, a bunch of morons in New Jersey seemed pretty B-list, but it was all terrifying to me.
Speaking of Gandhi, they managed to turn this into an insult too. Which obviously never made sense. Are you comparing me to the guy who nonviolently kicked the British Empire’s ass—and inspired Dr. King and others in the American civil rights movement—because you’re trying to insult me? These kids confused nonviolence with being docile. Confounded use of force with strength. And why wouldn’t they? Our favorite TV shows were riddled with racist tropes, and one of Navroze Mody’s murderers only got six months in jail.
I don’t recall much of the Indian community’s reaction to Dotbusters, but I remember there being more fear than shock. This sort of racism was a fact of life. It was up to the community to look out for itself, which was harder with big newspapers like the Jersey Journal14 giving a candid platform to these terrorists and their hate crimes:
We are an organization called dot busters. We have been around for 2 years. We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her. We plan some of our most extreme attacks such as breaking windows, breaking car windows, and crashing family parties. We use the phone books and look up the name Patel. Have you seen how many of them there are?… You said that they will have to start protecting themselves because the police cannot always be there. They will never do anything. They are a week [sic] race Physically and mentally. We are going to continue our way. We will never be stopped.
“Jersey City Dot Busters,”
The Jersey Journal, September 2, 1987
Anyway, that’s the message I was getting. An entire brown lifetime is worth six months.
* * *
Something that made middle school a little more tolerable15 was drama club. I know what you’re thinking. “How can this be? Drama club kids are teased mercilessly at middle schools across America.”
The crazy thing about drama club meetings in our town was that the school thought it was a good idea to hold them during soccer practice on a stage inside the gymnasium, directly across from the locker rooms. That meant the athletes （aka the worst offenders of bullying） would catch the beginnings and ends of each rehearsal as they jogged to and from the practice fields outside. In a bizarre twist of arrogance, the soccer players were so into themselves that for better or worse, little attention was ever paid to anything the drama club was doing. So, we had the creative solace of an after-school bubble, buttttt had to endure the late-bus ride home with them. You had to really love drama club to put up with it.
In the spring of eighth grade I was cast as the Tin Man in our school’s musical, The Wiz. For two hours each day after school, the six weeks of rehearsals were everything I’d wanted: an escape from the frustrations of the day, discovering artistic expression, being able to play a character who was confident when I was anything but.
I couldn’t wait to sing his iconic song, “Slide Some Oil to Me.” I was going to kill it!
A week before The Wiz was set to make its evening debut on the illustrious middle school stage, our director enthusiastically gathered the cast together. “Guess what, everyone? We’re going to be doing three scenes from the play for the whole school at a special assembly on Thursday morning! Your peers will get a little teaser of the musical to entice them to come see it in the evening!”
Now, look. Doing a play in front of a hundred gracious parents who willingly paid $4 a ticket to watch thirteen-year-olds put on The Wiz was very different from 750 obnoxious and entitled middle schoolers forced to watch a show. The bullying was bad before the kids saw parts of our play. When I imagined what it would be like after, I wanted to slide something else down my throat.16 There was no way I was going to say yes to this nonsense. The rest of the cast agreed with me: We were a hard pass.
“If you guys are too scared to go up in front of your own school,” the drama teacher scolded, “then we aren’t going up at all. I’ll cancel the play.”
We didn’t have a choice.
The special Thursday assembly rolled around and I was convinced it was the end of my existence on Earth.17 As the kids started to arrive, we could hear the jeers all the way backstage. “Doro-THEE!” Ben Garber yelled. “Nice TITTIES!”