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„I lived in Vietnam until the age of four. When we came here, my parents didn’t have any money or contacts and so we lived in many different flophouses. With wage workers from Ukraine and with men who drank a lot. I remember that I got very startled one night because somebody started to bang heavily on our doors. I was scared, hugging my mom. My father went to open the door and found that it was a police control – they were probably searching for illegal immigrants. It was not a good place for a child. I felt strong fear after such events. I was little, very sensitive and in a new environment. I was feeling cold all the time and I used to wake up crying. Since my parents didn’t have money for us to move somewhere else, and since they wanted me to learn Czech, they decided to put me in care of foster parents. And so I was growing up on a farm near Mělník, with my ‚auntie‘ and ‚grandma’. I have many nice memories when I used to take care of our dog and chicken but my aunt used to smoke a lot and so when I slept at her place, it was a smoke-filled room. And she also used to invite guys over, even when I was around. After some time I didn’t want to be there anymore. When my brother was born, my parents couldn’t afford to pay foster parents for me and so I returned back home and I took care of him. I was already attending school back then and so at the fourth grade I transferred to a new school. Once again I was among completely new people. On the first day, our teacher told me to sit down next to a girl with whom we became best friends. But I didn’t know that she was very unpopular among other kids at our class. I can say that they used to bully her. And since I was friends with her, they started bullying me as well. They used to call us names, threw our stuff out of a window or into a toilet bowl. In my case they also started to focus on me being Vietnamese. For example, we played tag during PE class and when I touched someone, he or she said: ‚Ugh! She touched me!‘ Other times I was just passing somebody in the hall and unintentionally grazed him and it was the same story: ‚Yuck!‘ The kids started to wipe their hands into each other clothes or they ran to wash their hands in a sink. I felt inferior. Dirty. I thought that my skin wasn’t clean – because it was different then theirs. It was darker, not white. It was a terrible feeling. I told it to our teachers and to mom and dad but everybody used to say: ‚They’re just kids, they’ll grow out of it!‘ But it went on for a several more years. Until one day when I felt so bad that I refused to go to the school.“