Chapter 2

As you know, I was a sheltered young boy. My parents tried their very best to raise me, knowing that I was special and unique. Of course, they failed in protecting me, but can they be faulted for being inexperienced and ignorant of the best ways to raise a child? I suppose this ignorance has corrupted me in some form, but I don't think it's entirely fair to blame them for it. After all, hindsight is 20/20 and Epimetheus can hardly be faulted for trying to give a positive trait to all he saw; they were all his precious children and he wanted the best for them.

This ignorance led them to enroll me in the charter school Edison PPL. It was a school designed to conform inner city youths to private school norms and to further disseminate the values of the liberal education system into the masses. It had a school anthem, uniforms for the children, and was the greatest example of the values in which Minnesota so highly believes in.

Edison PPL is not around anymore. It was shut down within its fourth year.

To say that the Romans built their city on the Tiber within a year is folly. Much the same, man cannot so easily molded from a crude barbarian into a charismatic statesman. Edison PPL was a school where gang violence occured at the elementary school level, where many of the students would line up to take their medications all at once, and where the teachers would not hesitate to abuse their authority in the name of petty rivalry. Children in the years above me were regularly taken away in police cars and graffiti was known to adorn some of the walls and buildings. It would be false to say that I belonged here. I stuck out like red on white, and while this is a wonderful combination of colors, as evidenced by the Hinomaru or your sister's first period, to an autistic and abused half-Japanese boy, this could only mean tragedy.

To start with, most of my classmates were black or hispanic. There were white students, of course, but they were fairly rare and not of a high economic class either. As a result, though they stuck out, they were more accustomed to the mores of my urbanized peers. I was a shy and awkward child and my mother had raised me to love the Japanese nation. My status as a half-Japanese boy made me different and my protected upbringing meant that I knew nothing in the ways of sex, violence, or drugs. For the majority of my time there, my peers ridiculed and bullied me. My classmates would chant 'blow up Japan' nigh every day and my teacher did not do anything because she was young, black, and probably hated white people. I was also ridiculed for picking my nose, which I had not yet learned was frowned upon. I was seven and did not know better, but after repeated beatings and incidents, where my peers would stick their boogers some place else (often near me to frame me or on me to bully me), I learned my lesson.

I suppose that the repeated taunting for my heritage instilled within me a sense of pride that I carry with me to this day. You cannot beat the blood from an Irishman after all, so is it possible to do beat it out of a culturally superior Japanese from the Far East? Likely not. But this did not come without its gripes. An incident I remember distinctly is my mother packing me a lunch of riceballs and little sausage octopuses. My classmate, whose name I do not remember, but whose bald, caramel head I remember clearly, asked me what I was eating. Now, he had bullied me before, but what did I know? My parents had raised me to love everyone. I had not a single hostile bone in my body. I told him. His response? To shout to the cafeteria that I was eating cinnamon rice balls and laugh at me. I was different. Anything I did made me a devil in the eyes of other people. Needless to say, he would continue to bully me throughout the year.

Another thing that made me different was that I was completely a virgin to the world of sex. My peers were not; they would show their privates to each other and one of my classmates, a girl named Chyna, was berated by our teacher for masturbating and laughing at her vagina in class. To remind everyone of the age of my peers, it was 1999, and wrestling was in vogue. Star Wars Episode I: the Phantom Menace had just come out in theatres. Everyone loved these things. This is because we were children of 7-8. But despite this, little penises and little vaginas would be flashed at each other and the idea of 'humpy, humpy time' was used as a way of getting your friends to run away from you. So my refusal and ignorance of this further increased my isolation; would it surprise you to know that when my classmate, another bully of African-American descent, insulted me as a 'sexy bitch', I told my teacher on him to which the rest of my class laughed? I was utterly alone.

Of course, I did have friends at first. Two black boys, a Denzel and a Marvin. I'm not sure what happened to them. I guess they stopped hanging out with me because I was awkward and had no other friends. My loneliness was so profound that the school had to assign me a lunch buddy, generally reserved for the special education kids. Now, I would become one of these at a later time, but then, I was completely undiagnosed and just very stupid.

I grew very depressed because of how lonely and miserable I was. It was here that I learned how desirable death was; I tried to kill myself twice. I was seven. The first time was merely walking in front of a car, but I walked away because I was scared. The second time I tried to hang myself with my pillow's casing, but all I succeeded in doing was giving myself rope burns on my neck. This was a good thing though; some of my bullies stopped harassing me after that. But the seed that would grow into the flower of suicide ideation had been planted and I can safely say that this was where it started.

My teachers were very incompetent. They liked to make a habit of singling me out, not least because I was stupid, but also because I had no friends and no one believed me when I tried to tell the truth. I blame myself for a lot of this; I was very stupid. To say that many of my punishments were unjustified though is also true. For example, one of the office ladies, an elderly black woman, would regularly tell me that I was stupid and that I deserved to be suspended. I interpreted this as me actually being suspended, so despite being dropped off at school, I waited around in the cold of winter, thinking I was not allowed at school, almost freezing myself to death! Some other students had to let me in. I was very stupid. Another time, I was very stupid, so when some cameras came to school, I tried to get on TV and abused my bathroom pass privilege to do this. We also had a field-trip that day, so to punish me, my teacher forbade me from going and I was placed in the same room as the special education kids for a day. It was horrible and I didn't even eat lunch nor did I get my money for the field trip back! I was very stupid. Of course, I acted out a lot and cried and said mean things, because I was stupid, but my teachers were not very forgiving and I feel that they should have more mercy for an autistic and stupid boy. But I was very stupid, so I probably deserved a lot of it.

It was here though that my gifted intelligence became noticed though; I often read in class. My choices were always non-fiction books too, mostly because I was fascinated by the world around me. Which makes it even more tragic that one of my teachers praised my curiousity to the rest of the class, after which they beat me and dunked my backpack in a toilet. I lost my favorite blastoise keychain that way. It was tragic.

It doesn't help that my homelife was not very pleasant either. Jabari was, and still is to my knowledge, a fat, black asshole. But he was my only friend and so I would play with him often. Unfortunately, he had a habit of using this to hurt or take advantage of me; for example, I won a rare Mewtwo card from a birthday party and he swindled me into trading it for a common Pikachu. I never got it back because even after my mother scolded me for doing it and tried to get it back, he had already traded it to Nathaniel next door. Another time was when he tied me up and got the other neighborhood kids to beat me. I don't know why; I think we were playing an espionage-themed game and I was a captured spy because I was stupid. I guess I'm still stupid because I haven't gone back to Minneapolis to take my revenge on these people. But I digress.

My temper tantrums increased in severity and often I would tell my mother that I hated my life. It probably took a toll on her mental health; she was already depressed and homesick and me in my stupidity probably did not help. But somehow, I survived. As a child, I learned very little from the experience. I was pure and wanted only to play and have fun. Looking back though, it gave me my first taste of racial issues. Reflecting on my traumas has made me very jaded and I think that it is probably better if we kill the poor. While I do not think that race or biology is a significant factor in someone's ability to prosper, I also feel that culture and socioeconomic status is very important in determining how someone lives their life. Therefore, it is unfortunate that African-American culture seems to prize crime as a way of life instead of earning one's wages through legitimate means. I cannot do anything though, as because of what every leftist since the age of 16 has told me, I am white and my opinion does not matter.

At least I had survived. We would move out to my current location in the following year. It was a much nicer area, located in the suburbs of St. Paul instead of the ghettos of Minneapolis. No longer would I have to live in squalor and poverty. But my life would not get happier. At least those few years after were a brief respite before I was placed in the Alternative Education System.