The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I knew from the time I was a young girl that I was destined to be a writer. I'm incredibly stubborn. The more someone tells me I can't do something, the harder I work to prove them wrong. My father's nickname for me when I was growing up was 'Hardhead.'
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
I was a total bad girl growing up.
I've been called 'hardheaded,' 'obstinate,' 'unreasonable,' etc.
I was a hard rocker when I was in high school.
My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.
As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.
Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test, and there were a thousand ways to fail, a thousand ways to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else's standards of what was accepted, of what was normal.
Well, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.
I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood.
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