LOOK: Vietnamese woman dodged American bullies as a kid by pretending to be royal

For one Vietnamese immigrant in the United States, overcoming bullying 101 necessitated having to pretend to be royalty, to fool her tormentors.

“I remember when I was bullied a lot in elementary school for not really speaking English,” Tina (@babyvietcong) recounted via Twitter on Sept. 3, uploading a photo of herself in a royal costume. “I lied for a week about how I was actually royalty from Vietnam and used this picture for show and tell. Got these american hoes to shut up real quick and asked if I really came from famous people.”

Her tweet, which had gone viral, has garnered over 44,000 retweets, 200 comments and 180,500 likes, as of this writing.

https://twitter.com/babyvietcong/status/1036831173924859904

It turns out she was not alone in pretending to be part of a royal family to escape bullying — fellow Asian immigrants from China, South Korea and Bangladesh, used the same strategy.

These Twitter netizens took to the comment section of her post to share photos of their young selves, dressed in “royal” garbs.

https://twitter.com/paulkim_159/status/1037498164666748928

https://twitter.com/swiftsdonut/status/1037406996645855232

https://twitter.com/jobengal_/status/1037480436597968896

Others, who didn’t have photos of themselves wearing royal costumes, joined in on the fun, uploading funny photos of their childhood days coupled with equally humorous captions.

“I would definitely not repeat my childhood if given the chance,” Tina told AJ+ in a video uploaded by the online news channel on Facebook yesterday, Sept. 18. After immigrating to New Jersey when she was seven, she apparently became an outcast in school for not looking and talking the same way as the predominantly “white, suburban neighborhood.”

She was used to being laughed at and ignored by her classmates. However, things took a 180-degree turn when she used the royal costume photo during a show and tell — her classmates began noticing and talking to her.

“It was a funny tweet but the responses that I got from it was almost telling us the society that we live in where people really have to brace themselves to face similar issues or harassment,” she noted. “I do believe that this issue goes beyond just individual cases of bullying and that it originates from a deeper societal issue.” Kate Matriano/JB

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