Bing Qi Ling
Chloe Wang (7th Grade)
“Bing qi ling,” said Paul, one of the boys in my math class. Paul and his friends like to scream random things from TikTok memes, such as the one John Cena had started. John Cena was holding an ice cream cone, and making jokes about China’s social credit system.
Paul has a talent where he can twist anything that you can say, into something that is really inappropriate. When Mr. Lynch, our science teacher, was speaking about how gravitational potential energy changes when the balls are at different heights. Paul called out from the back of the room.
“How much gravitational potential energy would there be if I put my balls at the height of two meters?” he smirked. His friends laughed. Mr. Lynch rolled his eyes, and continued his lecture.
Paul also likes to mock the school assemblies by doing exactly what the speaker asks us not to do. For example, during a recent assembly on microaggressions, Ms. Berenson, one of our counselors, explained how certain words and comments could make others feel uncomfortable. Paul immediately decided to go on an insulting rampage, and he decided to insult just about every single ethnicity, sexuality, and every aspect of your personality, pretty much just all the things that make you, you.
With me, it started with math homework. Because I could speak Mandarin, Paul and his friends in my class decided that I must be good at math. Despite my repeated protests, they would crowd around my desk while the teacher was out getting coffee, and copy off of my homework.
Paul and his minions would also tease me. They would do this by repeating John Cena’s “bing qi ling” meme. The boys found it to be funny. Especially saying it towards the people in my class who could speak Mandarin. They would say “bing qi ling” repeatedly, randomly shouting out and interrupting the class by calling out “bing qi ling”, randomly screeching it across the hallway, then laughing, randomly whispering it to each other, then chuckling.
“Stop saying bing qi ling!” I would say to them, sometimes even yell, but they would just snicker, and continue saying bing qi ling.
I decided I should stop them.
I knew I shouldn’t say anything insulting because I might get into trouble. Then an idea hit me. If I say random things, in a bunch of different languages, really aggressively, would they feel insulted? Even though I didn’t say anything bad? I decided to try out this theory, and started to learn German.
I chose German, specifically because I read on a website that German was (apparently) a really aggressive language. Hey, if I yelled, “butterfly hospital” in a really aggressive way in German, it wasn’t insulting someone right? I decided to hop onto Duolingo, where they teach you the most random phrases in different languages, such as mashed potatoes. I tested out my new strategy two days later.
“Bing qi ling!” John shouted,
“ICH SPIELE SCHACH!" I screamed back, on the top of my lungs, making sure it sounded extra aggressive, as if I were insulting someone. (‘ich spiele schach’ means ‘I play chess' in German) It worked! John, Paul and their obnoxious minions were stumped by that simple phrase, and finally, finally, FINALLY, they stopped saying ‘bing qi ling’.
During the following indoor recess, Instead of writing the answers on my math homework, I wrote in capital letters, ‘DAS WETTER HEUTE IST GUT, UND ICH SCHWIMME’ which means ‘the weather is good, and I swim’ in German.
It worked again. The boys finally stopped copying off of me, and when the occasional “bing qi ling” slips out of their mouths, I mutter things like, mashed potatoes taste good, or other random phrases. Of course, I make sure they sound SUPER aggressive.
I was excited to share my findings with my friends: when you have to stop the bullying, one way that may work is to make bullies super confused, such as by saying random phrases in another language. You can then watch them frantically trying to hop onto Google Translate on their computers to find out what you just said.
More importantly, I believe it was my fighting back that surprised Paul and his friends. By sounding super aggressive, I showed them that I was not afraid of them. If that trick of using a different language stops working, and if the teasing and copying off resumes, I will certainly find another way.