Middle school allowed me to integrate with kids who were much more well-off economically. Middle-class and even upper-class kids instead of only poor kids like the schools from my neighborhood.
Middle school out of the ghetto
Got accepted to the highly-respected Madison Middle School.
I applied to Madison Middle School because an elementary school friend of mine was going there. It was one of the middle schools in the LAUSD inner-city district with a big MAGNET program…as in, many gifted kids. My parents loved what they saw when they visited the school. Much nicer neighborhood than ours, had white kids, nice lawn and grass, and boasted of many of its students going on to do big things in life. I got in easily because of my super high test scores.
Madison Middle School had lots of white kids, and rich kids.
That’s the first thing I noticed right away. I wasn’t in the ghetto anymore. Sure…we still had problem kids and some were in gangs but they were few and far between. Almost all kids were nice and well-behaved, and liked being in school, and wanted to go to college. I also noticed the kids were taller and better-looking too. It’s a wider range of all races represented instead of 95% hispanic like the schools in my neighborhood.
And you can tell they had parents that made money. The houses in the neighborhood looked nice. The kids who didn’t live in the neighborhood, their parents picked them up in nicer cars. They also seemed to have an allowance that could actually buy stuff. When I asked my parents for an allowance, they simply said “no”. These kids would also have fancier toys and video games…which of course, my parents also refused to match.
And when these kids did sports…my parents refused to pay for me to be in any sports. Besides, they didn’t feel that I as a little Asian kid would do any good against the bigger white, black, and hispanic kids. My job as an Asian was to focus on studying.
Madison also had a great education program.
Many well-trained and enthusiastic teachers who’ve taught the brightest students in the district and even some former celebrities. (It’s Los Angeles, btw…not hard for your teacher to have taught famous movie stars, athletes, and musicians, etc. My brother’s 8th-grade teacher used to tell him, “Leonardo DiCaprio used to sit right in your seat. Making trouble just like you!”)
But these teachers have also had an easier job. First off, they had students were better socialized and cultured to respect education and authority figures. Students that are fascinated to learn. Classrooms are not as packed. There’s also more materials: books, calculators, computers, and hands-on learning objects.
Madison’s amazing music program.
Our music program was run by Lonnie Bissell, a highly HIGHLY respected music teacher/director….who literally ran a music talent factory out of our middle school. She knew how to teach so perfectly. It’s like we couldn’t make mistakes. Playing music for her was always fun and never work. She never made anybody practice…she simply inspired us.
Due to her reputation…many talented child musicians would apply or get transferred into our school just so they could be trained by her. And having so much talent to play around…of course everyone gets better. Our drum teacher (if you’re old enough to know)…was actually the original “Beach Boys” band drummer.
I was a violinist. And you wouldn’t believe how good we all got in such a short period. She used to tell us all the time about how proud she was of her older kids (7th & 8th graders) who she took to competition and won 1st place every year. She has won consistently…with both our orchestra & band…every single year for like probably 20 years or more. Afterwards…many of them getting approached by high schools with famous music programs, and later going on to get music scholarships.
The biggest downside of Madison was the bus ride.
The school was far away from our house. It’s only 30 minutes by car but 1.5 hours by school bus. This meant I had to wake up at 6am every morning and walk to my bus stop, to get to school before it starts. If I ever woke up late or messed up the alarm, I’d have to go wake my father and make him angrily drive me to school. Because it was the furthest away from school…my stop was the first one picked up, and last one dropped off.
The bus ride was absolutely brutal for me about 1.5hrs to school. And 1.5-2hrs home depending on traffic. I wasn’t able to get the proper sleep unless I went to sleep super early (which is really hard in our noisy household). And in the winter, it was pitch dark when I was walking to the bus stop. It just took so many hours out of my day that could have been used for studying or playing. I remember sometimes I would fall asleep on the bus ride home and miss my stop and the driver wouldn’t notice me until he had already arrived at the bus station. Then he’d have to go drive me back and drop me off. Hahaha.
I was also falling asleep en route to school and arriving to school exhausted (sometimes falling asleep in class) whereas my friends had more of a full night of sleep to focus better in class. I’m not here to make excuses but looking back, I do see where I had so many disadvantages working against me.
Adjusting to middle school social life
Being small (short), shy and low self-esteem (with unsexy Asian bowl haircut & cheap clothes)
These kids were too classy to bully me, but I did get teased a lot. Which for me was totally ok. They were still much nicer than the poor kids in the ghetto that were more bullying, racist, and likely to try and start fights with you. These classy kids were definitely more of my vibe.
On the bus rides home though…I did get bullied and harassed a lot. That’s because our buses combine students from 2 other schools. One of them being Millikan Middle School, a known rival of Madison…and with more ghetto kids who especially hated the MAGNET kids.
I now have to explain a term we used to say in the MAGNET program. The MAGNET kids often referred to the non-MAGNET kids as “the regulars”. And it’s pretty funny. You would here things like:
- “Oh hurry up and run to the lunch lines before the regulars get there!”
- “Eddie got into a fight a regular today.”
- “We had a basketball game against the regulars, and we beat them!”
- “Lisa likes a regular boy.”
- “Some regulars called me a puto today.” (insult in Spanish)
It’s your typical class warfare in the public education system. MAGNET kids look down on the regulars as being less intelligent, poorer, meaner, and coming from worse off families. Regulars hate the MAGNET kids for being rich, spoiled, and getting access to all the school’s best equipment. For example…a classroom for MAGNET kids might have a computer for every kid, whereas the regulars only get 2 computers per class or even worse…they have none and they have to go to a computer lab (which is shared with hundreds more “regulars”).
At Madison, we had enough MAGNET kids that the regulars didn’t mess with us. We were a big enough group. But on the buses, all the Millikan kids that got on hated us. And if we weren’t sitting together, they would do all kinds of stuff.
- Yelling racist slurs. Calling me “chink” or “chinito” or making mock Asian language sounds.
- Throwing trash at me from all directions, then laughing when I turned around.
- Kicking the back of my seat.
I don’t know why but I never told on them or complained to the bus driver. I just took it. I didn’t try to say anything or fight back. There was too many of them. I just ignored them. I would take my back off the back of the seat and sit uncomfortably for the whole ride. Or the best thing…was just to run to the bus as fast as I can when school ended so I can get a seat up front and away from all the troublemakers in the back.
Best friend Steve Hwang.
This was a kid (or Korean immigrant parents) who shared many classes with me (was also a violinist in the school orchestra). We easily became best friends because we had so many things in common.
- We were both Asian.
- We both had 2 younger brothers. It’s funny but a couple months each year…Steve, Chris, and Francis were exactly one year older than Johnny, Brian, and Harry. It was easy for our families to play together and match up perfectly for games.
- We both liked playing with the same stuff, video games and sports, and other similar interests.
But what Steve also had (that I didn’t know at the time) was 2 dysfunctional parents in an unhappy marriage. So subconsciously, we probably deeply understood each other because we had the same family dynamics at home.
Steve’s mother, I forgot what she did…but was also a “super mom” like mine. Had to raise 3 rowdy boys who needed a lot of attention and supervision, on top of having a job. Steve’s father was a pastor at church…an annoying Mr. Know it All who treated his wife like a 2nd class citizen. They fought often, but not to the degree as my parents.
I even slept over at Steve’s house a couple times on Saturday nights and then went with him to Korean church the next day on Sunday. I also started trying to learn some Korean. They put me in the same classes as the little kids.
Race wars at school
Although the students weren’t generally racist…there was indeed a strong element of xenophobia due to race. For example in my ghetto school…there was more outward racism because kids were less educated. But they didn’t actually fight it out much because the Mexicans were the biggest group and no other races or ethnicities had enough numbers to challenge them.
But at Madison, you had many races and their sub-groups formed by each ethnicity.
- Whites – American whites, Russians, Armenians.
- Blacks – American blacks, blacks from Africa.
- Hispanics – Mexicans, Salvadoreans, Colombians, etc.
- Asians – Chinese, Filipinos, Cambodians/Viets/Thai’s, Koreans.
Sometimes you had wars between the main race colors. And other times wars between their sub-groups (like for examples different types of Asians warring with each other). The warring could be something as simple as talking trash and then becoming a fight at school. To actually trying to stab or shoot each other after school (very rare).
The worst is when the warring groups are no longer targeting each other personally (attacking the people they initially fought with)…but rather trying to attack ANYONE of the “enemy group”. So imagine a Mexican group now attacking any and all Armenians they saw, and then the Armenians doing vice versa. When this happened…the school would start splitting kids during break kids. Like splitting all Armenian kids to stay on the top level of the playing field, and all Mexicans to the bottom level.
Barely maintaining grades
Madison classes were much harder!
These are no longer the easy classes that you had in your ghetto elementary school. These required so much more studying and dedication. But instead I had less time and less sleep because of the long school bus rides. And not only that but the homework is also harder to the point that my parents couldn’t help me anymore.
But nonetheless, I really made the effort. I tried hard and mostly got A’s and B’s in important classes, and then only C’s in less important classes and PE (physical education, gym class). Which was “OK” for my parents. My dad really wanted me to be a straight A student. He accused me of being lazy when I didn’t put up straight A’s. He’d say, “I know you’re really intelligent and not trying to your maximum capacity. (I didn’t help my case either by still bringing home nationwide standardized test scores showing my math and reading skills in really high percentiles.)
There was probably truth to what he said but also, I just didn’t feel rewarded by my school efforts. Nothing I ever did was good enough. No matter how hard I tried, all I would hear was…“My friends’ kids have straight A’s. All your cousins have straight A’s.” Blah blah blah. I also felt it unfair since some of my friends received money for good grades…like $50 for every A, $40 for every B, etc. Or at least something! And on top of it…my dad loved randomly bringing home really difficult college-level books like physics, chemistry, or calculus for me to “play with on my free time”. Haaaa….he literally thought that’s how you encourage your child to be a genius, leave thick academic books around while you leave the house to hang with the boys or cheat on your wife.
I just felt unloved, unsupported, unhelped, unrewarded, unmotivated. And I was growing more and more into my rebellious self. Wanting to do my own thing. Playing with things I wanted to play with. Which wasn’t doing homework.
Avoiding my bad neighborhood
Hanging out with MAGNET kids.
Going to a school outside of my neighborhood meant I was making more friends outside of my neighborhood and not playing so much with the kids in my neighborhood. This was both a PRO and a CON.
The advantages were that I was hanging out with better kids, and exposed to their better parents who were better role models. They also had more money and tend to do more fun things.
The disadvantages were that I wasn’t making friends in the neighborhood. And me being a kid of adolescent age (10-19)…there were lots of street kids, bullies and troublemakers in the neighborhood and since I didn’t go to school in the area, I didn’t have any friends or allies to stay safe with. I often had to keep track of which streets and which houses I could walk past. Or else I’d run into trouble kids. The worst would be if they tried to take your bike or backpack, or whatever you had on you. On the playgrounds…you might also be more susceptible to rough play.
I still had some friends in the neighborhood that I knew from elementary school, but that was only a few. And also some nice neighbors kids, but by and large me and my brothers were outnumbered. Also we stood out easily since we were one of the few Asian kids in the midst of a predominantly hispanic neighborhood.
Exposure to neighborhood gang life.
The older I got, the more I started to understand that gangs and bad characters were here. There was often parties every night that often ended in shootouts (gangs get drunk and start fighting with guns). You just got so used to them that you don’t even skip a beat when you hear gunshots. You kept right on playing your video games or your basketball games. Nobody ducks or looks for cover. It was also really common that kids in your neighborhood either had older siblings, cousins, or parents/uncles that were in gangs or just got out of prison. It seemed EVERYBODY had a gang connect. (Except for us.)
I remember we used to have this funny game at elementary school where whenever we heard a gunshot, we would immediately fall over as if we were the one who got shot. Some of us were really good actors and flopped over perfectly at any point during the day.
- Imagine us playing basketball, a gunshot is heard and one of the players who was running with the ball immediately falls to the ground in dramatic fashion.
- Or during class if a gunshot was heard, a kid would fall out of his chair and onto the ground.
- And on and on. And we would all cheer the really good funny ones.
Our neighborhood was also the kind where the cops never come when you call them at night. (Our neighborhood is too dangerous and scary for them.) So they just wait until the next morning, when they come to pick up the bodies. On Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes they might park their cars a block away to attempt deter criminal behavior. On really bad neighborhoods with lots of gang or drug-dealing activity…they even post signs that it’s illegal to drive slowly (as that’s what gangs and drug-dealers do).
Drive-by shootings was a very real thing.
Most people only see it in movies but it happens in real life and quite often. Drive-bys are the easiest way to cause damage without any retribution. Just drive by your enemies house and spray. It’s ideal since gangsters like to sit outside in the porch and “run the neighborhood”…usually means bullying kids that pass by, selling drugs, also hollering at pretty girls. So they’re easy targets for a rival gang to just drive by and fire at them.
But some drive-bys also happen when nobodies outside. They just wait to see if the lights are on in the house at night and they spray blindly into the house. Very often, they don’t kill the intended target (who might already be around town with friends elsewhere). They kill a family member instead…like sibling, parent, aunt/uncle, grandparent, etc. Or an innocent bystander who happened to be walking nearby the house and got hit by a stray bullet.
Usually drive-bys are then retaliated against. And as they too are likely to hit unintended targets, it becomes a never-ending cycle of revenge. The only way it ends is one side dies or goes to jail. Basically peace is found by death or jail. Nobody really comes to a truce (although it does rarely happen). I often remember friends coming to school crying about how their friends or family member died in a drive-by shooting.
And IF they ever arrest the people doing the drive-by, it’s always the same thing. The adults are driving (the 18 or 21 year old), and a minor is shooting (a 15 year old). This is because a minor can’t be tried as an adult. He might only have to do a short amount of time in juvenile detention (kids jail) and not like real adult prison. So they always let the kid hold the gun. Besides…they initiate many kids like this, trying to get them to “prove they’re a real man” or how tough they are. And the kids are eager to gain respect and street cred by getting their first kills on the street.