The other day I was chatting with a mom I know, and she told me something that made my blood run cold.
Her older daughter is a grade above Niuniu — eighth grade. Her younger one is the same age as Niumei and they’re good friends, so we know the family well.
Depression, already on medication? That sounded serious. I asked what happened.
She sighed. Bullying, at school. It had been going on a long time and she never told them — they only found out recently, when they noticed she wasn’t herself.
And the cause of the whole disaster was straight out of an American teen drama: her daughter was part of a popular-girls friend group. She liked a boy, and unluckily another girl in the group liked the same boy.
So that girl ran the standard Mean Girl playbook: start the rumors, split the group, take the boy, freeze her out completely.
Her daughter was devastated, and stayed in a dark place for a long time.
At dinner I brought it up with Niuniu, carefully feeling my way in: “Does anything like that happen in your grade?”
She lifted her chin. “Obviously! That’s classic popular-girl drama.”
“Really? Who are the popular girls? What are they like? Tell me everything.”
I poured her a glass of the soda I don’t normally allow. Satisfied, Niuniu put down her chopsticks and gave me a proper briefing on what exactly the Popular Girls of American middle school are, as a species.
It’s more like: everyone knows who you are.
And to belong to the circle, you need certain qualifying traits. The standard spec sheet:
First, appearance. You must be blonde, and you must be white.
“White washed” means you’re not white, but you’ve been whitened — your look and your lifestyle line up with the typical white kid.
And you have to appear in packs of several similar girls:
Second, core business. You must flirt with boys, constantly.
In Chinese the word lands closer to “teasing and being teased.” I nearly spat out my dinner.
…… I enjoyed Euphoria as much as anyone, but it is hard to connect the scruffy kid in front of me with the word flirt.
Wait — no. Have you forgotten? I said to myself: back in middle school there were girls who, while the rest of us were dusty little test-takers, were already wearing lipstick and blush and tight jeans, roughhousing with boys, sneaking out on dates.
I’m surprised because I forgot all that — and because Niu-ma was never a popular girl.
In fairness, the girls don’t necessarily want anything from the boys. Flirting is a peacock display of social status: a girl the boys notice ranks higher among the girls too. Normal. Perfectly normal.
Niuniu has never been impressed by the boys at school — too short, she says, and roughly as intelligent as a golden retriever. So far I haven’t heard of a single crush or entanglement. A straight-arrow mom raising a straight-arrow kid.
Then Niuniu moved on to the org chart. Popular girls are not one solid block; each has her own clique. Her grade has about ten popular-girl cliques of five or six people each.
Quick math: a grade of 300-odd kids contains 50 or 60 popular girls. One in three girls. Denser than software engineers on the streets of Seattle.
And between them, beef erupts daily, large and small — you wore a color that clashed with hers; she posted a Snapchat photo without retouching you; I invited you to my party and not her…… plus the eternal classic, fighting over a boy.
“So……” I asked. “Do you want to be a Popular Girl?”
“No!” She shook her head like a rattle drum, her face saying absolutely not necessary. Why not? “No reason. Just not interested.”
What Niuniu is obsessed with these days is anime, games and drawing. She likes Asian millennial-style outfits, doesn’t do sports, doesn’t follow celebrities, feels nothing about boys. …… Genuinely does not meet the spec.
Not being top-tier doesn’t mean no social life, though. She has a few steady friends, all fairly quiet kids; they eat together and go out once in a while. That’s enough.
And this isn’t sour grapes. The University of Virginia ran a hardcore ten-year study and found that the middle-schoolers who ruled the school — the cool, mean, top-tier kids — were mostly not doing well by 23. Their relationships at real workplaces failed more often, and they were more prone to psychological problems.
The reason is simple: status built on cliques, trends and attention from boys is a currency that doesn’t circulate in the adult world. By the time they get to college and work and find that the real hard currency is GPA, actual skills, an internship résumé and the ability to make money — that’s a dimensional strike from reality.
…… It seems that whether you were the school’s reigning top-tier or a total nobody, decades later most of us converge on the same place: ordinary tired mothers doing laundry, cooking dinner, hustling through life.
If you could go back to your teens right now — would you want one turn as one of those shining, all-powerful, endlessly dramatic popular girls?