My Side Of The Story: The Dunyos

I celebrated my sixteenth birthday soon afterwards; they even threw me a party with a cake and everything. By working with the tutor over summer, I managed to make up for all the credit I lost and I actually passed tenth grade (whoop dee doo). I passed my time doing tattoos on myself (Yes, on myself. I still have them) and writing songs-by then I'd become so obsessed I'd written around three hundred.

Those were some nice, peaceful days. But everything comes to a hault. Nothing good lasts forever. I think the Dunyos, being new foster parents, thought of it as this nice, easy thing where you could just take in a kid and everything would be peachy. They didn't consider that the kid was an individual with their own problems who had a life before them. I don't think they envisioned the struggles that would come with it.

Especially dealing with a big-headed idiot like me. Especially with the attitude I had.

There is a funny thing that happened before we moved; I cut my hair until I was almost bald. I tried to give myself a trim and when I looked in the mirror, it was uneven. So I snipped a bit off, looked in the mirror, and it was uneven again. I should've known to stop then, but I kept going and it got to the point where my hair was just ridiculous. So I cut it all off and had to wear a bandana around my head for the longest time.

The Dunyos' faces were priceless. So were the peoples' reactions at church.

When it came time for school to start again, they considered my history of skipping and decided to send me to Foundation School; a level 5 school like the one RICA had but there was no residential program. They figured that having smaller classrooms and being able to receive more attention would help me, and Lord knows it did. It didn't look or feel like a school at all. It felt more like walking into an office building or just taking private lessons.

And once again, if you look down on things like this, you're disgusting. These kids get thrown into these situations for things that have nothing to do with their intellect whatsoever such as aggressive behavior, fighting, self-injury, problems attending, and trauma. Many of them are much smarter than you ignorant assholes.

I braced myself when I walked in there for I saw them stare at me when I walked in with a black family for the interview. Shit like that was so fucking common.

Anytime I'd go to a restauraunt or anything, people would be shocked that me and the black family behind me were there together. They didn't think it was possible that an Asian person (or in their minds, automatically Chinese) could have been there with a black family. We had to be separate parties! There was no way on Earth we could've been there together! Just like to this day, if I'm eating at a Chinese restauraunt or something, they automatically assume I work there.

The weirdest thing got me respect. On my first day, I got into an argument with some girl and got sent to the quiet room (a seclusion room where they send kids that are acting out or being violent to calm down) because I was yelling really loud. I don't know why they felt it necessary to send me there since all I was doing was yelling, but then again, I'm well aware by now that they always abuse their authority and send kids to seclusion for no adequate reason (other than just being mad at them).

But anyway, when I got out of the quiet room, people were talking about me. Apparently they'd heard me yelling throughout the hallway.

"That's what's up!" A boy actually high-fived me after school. "That's what I would've done if someone pissed me off!"

Are you serious? Something like that gets me respect?

I'd seen too much evidence that if you wanna be treated well, you have to-usually literally-fight for it. People test you. If you want people to shut up and treat you like a human being, you have to shut them up yourself. And that really affected me. But at the same time, there are consequences for that as well. Depending on what you had to do to shut them up, there are dire consequences.

Around that time I started having revenge fantasies. I thought about the people that used to push me around, including my father and my stepmom. How I'd love to throw them on their knees, make them grovel on the ground, reverse our positions and put them back in their places so that they learned their lessons and never repeated their actions ever again. Then they'd apologize and they'd never even dream of treating me the way they did previously.

Now I think more of the consequences of my actions. I have so much more to lose now as an adult than I did as a teenager. And now I know that not everything is a power struggle, and that the other person may have a legitimate reason to be upset and not be trying to test me.

But to this day, I still do think the same way to a certain extent. In some situations, the only way to ensure that you get treated like a human being is to make sure that whoever is pissing you off knows better than to do it again and to make sure the people around them know better than to ever try it.

After eight months, I fucked up once again. My outbursts were getting out of hand and the Dunyos sent a thirty-days notice to the agency, saying that I needed to be out. I don't remember what the argument was over. All I know is that she raised her voice at me, and I didn't believe that "children shouldn't talk back".

I lost my cool again. And I was sent to live temporarily with the Kellers, who I had stayed with before while the Dunyos took a break, while they looked for another placement for me.

God bless the Dunyos. Even if things didn't work out, they were good people.