🥃 Born Without a Heart
by Faouzia
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I have always been stubborn and vengeful.
Ever since I was a little kid, everything they did wrongly to me, I would paid them back ten times worse, because that's how much of a grudge-holding brat I was.
Eomma, Ananda Hong, who raised me all on her own until I was 9 years old, ever since my father refused to even meet me when they signed the settlement that he would pay monthly after he willingly handed my full guardianship for her, all because his family refused to have a "yellow Asian member" and whatever racist shit they used up as an excuse for him being absent, used to think I was an evil kid.
Her parents, Carola Smith and Josh Hong, cut her out after she became a single eomma, and only allowed her to visit them if she didn't take me with her, because they said they would only accept a true grandchild and not a bastard, they also thought I was evil. But they didn't even knew me, and their harsh judgement hurt eomma a damn lot, and she did her best not to show it, but I could see it on her.
She got pregnant with me when she was 18, she had just gotten into Harvard, and to her parents, being pregnant of me jeopardized her future, so she stayed in New Zealand, because of me, but moved from Auckland to Queenstown. When I turned 5 years old, she began to study again, as she was working as a hotel manager, and she got accepted into Harvard again, which made her parents offer to pay for her tuition because they couldn't lose the opportunity to brag about having a daughter in Harvard.
I was 6 years old when we moved to Cambridge, MA, in the United States, as she rented a loft to live with me near the Harvard's campus, where she was studying Law. She put me in a boarding elementary school on the area, so she would be able to study and only pick me up on the weekends, which was a big change to me, since until then I was being homeschooled, and I didn't like it, but I understood it. Eomma was 24 years old then, and she was an stellar student and did great in college.
But I was... problematic.
As a kid early diagnosed with some big level of ADHD and dyslexia, plus bad close sight that made me use corrective glasses like Harry Potter's, I had a hard time during classes when it came to reading and focusing. But since I had been early diagnosed with all that, the school was capable of doing their best to help me thrive in school, and the teachers all handled me audiobook versions of all the material, and that helped me study a lot. For their credit, the teachers were great, especially the History, P.E., and the Math teachers, Mrs. Hayek, Mr. Kishimoto, and Mr. Russo who were my favorites.
Okay, they were also the prettiest and youngest teachers and that helped a lot concentrating on their classes, I won't lie.
So, for eomma's sake, I wasn't problematic about my grades in school, in fact, thanks to how they helped me out with the audiobooks and making the classes more interactive, as well as sitting me on the chair in front of the teacher's and in the front roll, I was one of the top students in everything, especially P.E.
However, I was picked on for not having a paternal figure, for being the daughter of a single woman and out of a wedlock, for using glasses, for having ADHD, definitely for having Dyslexia and struggling to read, for looking east-Asian, having Korean heritage, being a foreigner, and being an accelerated student by 3 years even though I was different from them, which made me the youngest in my class. So, yes, those were a lot of reasons why they bullied me. In fact, the whole class initially did.
Until they learned I was not a pushover by any means, and I fought back because I was in Taekwondo class for a reason, as eomma imagined I would get picked on. You could say my vocabulary isn't very clean either, I would curse and beat them back when they messed with me, even though I was younger and smaller than all of them. I would grab the girls' hairs and slap their faces, kick the boys in the face and break their noses, or throw something hard on them, like the time I broke my Minnie mug on the head of the "King" of my class on 7th Grade.
