Three True Stories of Workplace Bullying, Resilience and Growth

In 2024, K-pop idol Hanni from NewJeans gave a tearful court testimony on workplace bullying. She alleged that her agency deliberately undermined her, and her manager had instructed other staff members to intentionally “ignore her.”

When Hanni's story made headlines, I had just resigned from a company in Japan. I was surprised to find the similarities in our experiences, for a woman in that company had deliberately ignored me. Hanni’s story made me realize what I had undergone was wrong, and the term for it is workplace bullying.

For those who, like me, are unfamiliar with this term, workplace bullying refers to repeated, aggressive behaviors intended to intimidate, humiliate, or undermine an employee. It is, in essence, a misuse or abuse of power that erodes a person’s dignity at work. It often persists for months, leaving the target feeling "defenseless and unjustly treated.”

Some bullying is overt – intimidation; humiliation; insults; pranks and jokes; hostile body language; impossible demands; baiting/provoking behavior; smear campaign; mobbing; stalking/gang stalking; scapegoating, etc.

Others are covert, taking place in darker corners: silent treatment; gossiping and spreading rumors; isolation and ostracism; withholding resources; micromanagement; assigning the target undesirable work; rejecting the target’s ideas; removing or changing the target’s job responsibilities; false claims of insubordination; stonewalling; blocking growth, development and advancement; using “feedback” as punishment etc.

After the resignation, I started a year-long digital nomad life, and I heard about more and more real-life stories of workplace bullying. I began to realize how staggeringly prevalent this phenomenon is. Yet, more often than not, those stories get hidden in the closet because victims don’t have the terms to name what happened to them; they have been gaslighted into thinking it is all their fault; they worry that coming out will deter their future employers.

That’s precisely how workplace bullies gain their ground.

That’s also why I’m going to share three real stories about workplace bullying, happening in Thailand, China, and Japan (my own). They are stories of pain, but also of courage, dignity, and hope.

1. Mew’s Story: Under the Lens of Medical Anthropology

In 2020, a massive shooting happened at Terminal 21 Korat Shopping Center, Thailand. It killed 26, making it the second deadliest mass killing in Thailand.

The perpetrator, an outraged army officer, was reported to have experienced hierarchical pressure, exploitation, and bullying in his professional environment. His pent-up rage erupted into a ruthless killing that shocked a country known for its warm smiles and mild temperament.

Mew (a pseudonym to protect his privacy) was there when it happened.

He survived this incident, but it left him with PTSD symptoms – and his entanglement with this incident went far deeper.

Like the perpetrator, he also encountered workplace bullying.

A decade ago, just after graduating, he joined a prestigious government research institute as a promising researcher. But it didn’t take him long to realize that something was off. The professor routinely used humiliation as a way to manage his people. The work environment grew even more toxic when a new project manager joined. She colluded with the head to secure her power. Then she demanded overwork, spread rumors, and ridiculed people in public. Everyone left, except Mew and his partner.

That was when he became the main target of relentless and unreasonable bullying:

Unfair workloads, verbal insults, and public shamings.

He was asked to work during holidays, trapped with false urgencies, while his family had to wait in vain.

Once, his supervisors asked him to confront a server in a restaurant, for no reason other than to satisfy their cruelty. Mew felt as if he were “a puppet to demonstrate their power”.

When he tried to resist, they began spreading rumors about him, ensuring that no one in the office believed him.

“No matter how carefully I worked, my efforts were belittled, appropriated, or twisted into evidence of my supposed weakness.”

Mew was diagnosed with depression shortly after.

But the breaking point came during a conference in Vietnam, when a senior official criticized his supervisor; she turned her anger on him in front of everyone.

At that very moment, Mew felt something inside him had collapsed.

He submitted his resignation. But his superiors took their last chance to abuse their power and prolong his suffering. They demanded a three-month notice period, the maximum as prescribed by law in Thailand. They searched his desk and found bottles of antidepressants. They used them to spread the rumor that Mew was mentally unstable, making him an object of ridicule again.

I met Mew at an informal event in Chiang Mai. Like many Thais, he has a gentle smile and a soft-spoken voice. He gave out an air of reliability and put one immediately at ease. But what struck me most was that he is a well-articulate and logical speaker. He often pauses before he speaks, and he talks in a steady and structured manner. I could not link the image his bullies created — unstable and incompetent — with the actual person I was interacting with — intelligent, friendly, and self-assured. But I guess that’s what bullies do–distorting facts so that they can destroy the person’s sense of self. It also made me grow afraid of the influence held by those in power. If I were in Mew’s office, would I still be able to feel the same and trust him? Or would I be one of the apathetic crowd, silently watching, if not becoming part of the complicit, so as not to be bullied myself?

This piece of traumatic experience somehow changed Mew’s life–he grew interested in medical anthropology. He wanted to make sense of this piece of experience through the lens of how social-cultural contexts shape mental health experiences of a society:

In Thai culture, “hierarchy and seniority play a strong role”. Challenging the behaviors of people in power is usually deemed disrespectful. In a sense, this cultural norm discourages open and equal conversations, while at the same time helping foster workplace bullying.

Moreover, “there is a cultural emphasis on avoiding conflict and maintaining kreng jai (เกรงใจ), a sense of deference and consideration for others that can unintentionally perpetuate toxic dynamics.” Mew told me, “ In my case, even when I wanted to speak out, I worried that I might be judged as overly sensitive or disruptive, rather than being understood as someone in genuine distress. The cultural framing often shifted attention away from the harm being done and placed responsibility on the victim to ‘adjust’ or remain quiet.”

What a group does to an individual could sometimes, sadly, reverberate back onto the collective, like a vicious cycle.

Reflecting on the Korat mass shooting, Mew told me how it reveals a worrying trend in Thailand(and beyond) – those who have been exploited, bullied, and mistreated in schools, workplaces, and organizations may sometimes seek their revenge on the innocent public.

To research more on the correlation between the prevalence of workplace bullying and the rise of random mass killings is one of his major goals as a medical anthropologist.

2. Sensen’s story: The Courage to Tell the Truth

I met Sensen in a weekly online reading class, where he had an unassuming and quiet presence.

Sensen’s real name is Zhenglong Yang.

He worked as a television host at Hainan TV and CCTV for over ten years. He also hosted national film festivals, interviewing renowned directors like Zhangke Jia and Ye Lou.

But I only found out later when the news came out that he got a full scholarship to the MFA program at the University of Texas at Austin.

On social media, he often shared snippets of his reading and writing life: heaps of books, a cup of coffee, and a laptop — his daily routine for writing.

He left his glamorous job at 33, just one year after he decided to pick up English. From 32 to 35, he spent three years reading short stories and novels in English, looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary, one by one.

When his debut story came out, I remember secretly reading it in the office. In front of me were metallic skyscrapers with a snatch of Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden tucked away. It was a cloudy day as usual. His words, beautifully written, transported me to another world, where there were still other shapes of life, bigger, with more dignity and meaning.

Last July, I came across one of his vlogs on Xiaohongshu. In it, he talked about his previous experiences at the TV station. He spoke about his burnout and how he had come to hate reading scripts that felt like propaganda in front of the camera. After a legitimate day-off request was rejected, he got shut out by one of the leaders at the station. He became invisible to him, was ignored whenever they met in the office, and no longer received any job opportunities.

When Sensen was preparing to move to the US, he was suddenly contacted by his superior for a shooting project. “It is a very precious opportunity. You should cherish it,” his superior told him. But when he agreed to go, he was suddenly told they had chosen another host because the event organizer didn’t think “he was up to their standards.”

Sensen told me that before he left his job, he candidly listed all their abuses of power in a phone call with one of his superiors.

“Many people didn’t understand me. Including my parents. In state-owned enterprises, everyone is expected to ingratiate themselves with their superiors.”

“But I won’t. I don’t care about what others think about me.”

He used the isolation to read and write, which are much more meaningful to him than standing before a camera and telling lies.

At the end of another vlog, where he shared his day as an MFA writer, he was walking on an empty pedestrian path in Texas, and the evening sun was against his face. That could be what someone who stayed true to themself looked like.

I want to be that kind of person.

I thought to myself at the time. One month later, I submitted my resignation.

Courage is contagious. Sensen embodies the kind of person who stands up to injustice and abuse of power, and inspired by him, I quit my job, canceled my apartment, sold furniture and appliances that were less than six months old, hauling three giant suitcases all the way from Tokyo to Bangkok, saying goodbye to a life that had felt like a prison, that I had never liked but had never dared to quit.

This year, Sensen won the PEN America/Robert J. Dau prize with his debut short story, the very one I was reading in the office. I wasn’t the least surprised by the news, and look forward to reading more of his stories in the future.

3. My Story: The Russian Nesting Dolls

When I came across sets of Russian nesting dolls in a souvenir shop in Tallinn, Estonia, I was suddenly reminded of my previous workplace in Tokyo, Japan, tens of thousands of miles away.

1) Outside

The direct reason for my resignation was a woman on my team. She presented herself as the glue of the team, suggesting off-work team activities and organizing birthdays for team members. That was why it took me quite a while to realize the animosity behind her interactions with me.

She brought books to the office and proudly offered them to everyone on the team except me. When I carelessly commented on one of the books, she curtly replied that she needed to return it to the library soon.

She also ignored me when I greeted her, especially in places where no one could see us. Once, she glared at me with great malice at the entrance of the washroom.

A study by Williams and Nida (2011) shows that being ignored actually causes “social pain”, which shares common neural pathways to physical pain. During that time, when I was in the office, sometimes tears would suddenly and involuntarily come down my face.

When I left the company, that woman got everyone’s farewell messages to me in an album with photos of team activities.

On the last day, she acted as if we had been on good terms all the time.

She asked me what memories there I would take with me.

For one moment, I couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or cruelty.

2) Middle

In my adolescence, I was isolated in my class and labeled “the awkward nerd”.

It was an experience that made me always feel like an outsider in China, and I decided to move to Japan as soon as international travel resumed after COVID.

But it turned out that what one was trying to escape from in life would always show up in different forms.

I still remember those nights after work, during online therapy sessions, when I often burst into tears, telling my therapist how everything that happened at work reminded me of those dark days.

That woman was close to the team manager. Her relentless animosity towards me started several weeks after the manager began picking up on me and undermining me as someone weak, incompetent, and diffident.

Once the manager asked me, in a rising tone, “Do you know where the Yukong River is?” She is from Canada, and the context for this incident is that I was asked to click the “save” button for hundreds of city webpage listings so that customers could choose their city when checking out. It was actually a system bug and had no meaning at all since it was intended for Chinese-language consumers. To be honest, no Chinese-speaking consumers even know the existence of this website.

The manager said I wasn’t “assertive” enough during a one-to-one performance review, without providing any context about what “assertiveness” means here or how it affected my work. So it somehow merely felt like she was using this chance to stigmatize my shyness and introversion. In fact, one covert form of workplace bullying is to use those so-called feedback sessions “not to coach or develop but to humiliate and shame Targets under a veneer of professionalism”.

Later, after I left this job, I had a meetup with a project manager from a much bigger company and asked him what he thought about soft skills, including assertiveness. He thought for a few seconds and replied:

“I don’t think they are really skills.”

Another time, sitting right across from me, she told the company co-owner that they should not hire a candidate because she looked like an introvert. I still remember how ashamed I felt when hearing her words, as an introvert.

One covert bullying technique is to withhold resources. For example, there was another team member who applied and got her 振替休日 (substitute holiday), but when I asked to use mine, the manager said she needed time to think and get back to me. Unfortunately, I never received a response.

There was a company brainstorming meeting, and all employees were invited. When I was going, in raised eyebrows and an accusing tone, she asked me: “Why are you going? Have you finished this month’s translations?”

When I left the company, her farewell message was: Be more confident; you are so talented.

It ended up in the trash bin, for her information.

3) Innermost

That was actually my first job in Japan.

The timing seemed like a godsend–I was nearing the end of my Japanese language school program.

I wanted the job so much that I decided to ignore several red flags before joining. On Glassdoor, a negative review about the company mentioned that the “boss” was cheap and liked to micromanage. At the same time, in a public interview, the boss claimed that an ex-intern had spoken negatively about him and stolen his business ideas by starting a similar business in their home country. It seemed he was referring to that same intern.

It shocked me to see an employer saying bad things about their previous employees in public, because the power imbalance – he with the media resources – would make such an act quite distasteful.

But I joined anyway, because it felt overly dramatic to trust that slight, uneasy feeling in my gut and ignore the company’s media features and personal awards won by its owners.

However, on the first day at work, I downed a full glass of beer in the evening, after I had a meeting with the “boss” and got told my monthly KPI.

Later, when I was translating website descriptions about how many school meals this company donated to impoverished children in Indonesia, I couldn’t help but feel how jarring everything was. How could someone be a philanthropist while at the same time exploiting their own employees?

This sickly feeling grew even stronger when he later asked me to negotiate the workload with outsourced freelance translators hired at 5 USD/hour. In an overbearing manner, he told me to ask them to produce even more work in an hour. I noticed a glint of satisfaction in his eyes as he saw me grow uncomfortable with this request, as well as the way he told me to do so.

The company was not doing well. Its main target customers are English-speaking audiences. I was working for their Chinese website, which had only managed to secure one order ever since the launch of the Chinese version.

After I resigned, a colleague mentioned that the boss might have already wanted to sack me because of the poor company performance. I didn’t really know because I didn’t get many chances to talk with him at work. I also didn’t really care. It was not the most well-paying job anyway.

One year later, when I finally spoke up about the unfair and dehumanizing treatment I got at this company on LinkedIn (mainly about my direct manager), I got a friend request from the boss: “Hi Qing! How are you doing?”

I didn’t accept it. Because I suddenly remembered when I resigned, he acted as if I didn’t exist: no message; in fact, he didn’t even show up that day.

According to sources online, Japanese companies traditionally use oidashibeya to strip any unwanted employees of their status and ties with colleagues and interesting work. In the US, making someone’s job so unpleasant or humiliating that they feel they have no choice but to quit is termed “constructive dismissal” and is illegal.

One month before I resigned, the boss declared that my sole and annual KPI was to translate the entire website, which consisted of over 1000 experience pages and more than 2000 restaurant pages, with both numbers increasing substantially daily. One colleague told me he didn’t understand why the company did that, because the tasks were very repetitive and boring, and it seemed they didn’t want me to develop or grow.

So that day, when I got the friend request from the boss on LinkedIn, it suddenly dawned on me that the whole thing was nothing but layer after layer of ass-kissing, only motivated by the desire to climb higher in a company that sacked most of its employees half a year later after I left.

That woman, the manager, and finally the boss. The Russian Nesting Doll of workplace bullying.

In the end, I didn’t even know whether I was feeling resentment or pure sympathy.

4) Post-Bullying Stress and Growth

Leaving only helps me get away from the toxicity physically.

Mentally, I was still struggling to recover from its aftermath. I became hypervigilant and distrustful of others. It was as if a chasm had formed between me and the rest of the world. Whenever I spoke, I became cautious of what I said and what I did, for fear it would be distorted.

It is also easier for me to take offence and be swept away by sudden bursts of anger, the scale of which more often than not is disproportionate to the incident itself. I have to remind myself that the past is the past constantly.

But at the same time, this period of adversity also helped me to grow. For example, I began to notice how much kindness I was surrounded by.

In that very workplace, there was a Japanese colleague who believed in me at a time when I couldn’t believe in myself. She saw potential in me at a time when I was mistreated, undermined, and isolated. I couldn’t imagine any greater form of kindness a human being can extend to another human being. When I was leaving Japan, she took a one-hour morning train to see me and gave me a Starbucks “Been There Series” Thermo Bottle.

The message on the box reminds me that what happened to me was nothing but a premature attempt to navigate a foreign workplace that turned out to be the opposite of everything it claimed to be. I have tried. I have been there.

This gift is the only thing I took related to that company when I left Japan.

When I was leaving the neighborhood for Narita Airport, the staff at a restaurant I often visited for lunch and dinner made me a cup of coffee as a farewell gift. We had never talked before, and I had thought they didn’t know me. But it turned out they had been secretly paying attention to me all the time. When I finished the coffee, they told me to take care of myself and wished me a safe trip to Thailand.

There was also a lot of kindness I received from others on the road, as I left Japan and set out on a digital nomad journey in Southeast Asia: smiles that brightened my day, food bought by strangers, and help that was always ready and generous.

Alongside the above, there was also a friend who listened patiently and assured me I could find a workplace that fits me; a remote, Singapore-based team that trusted me and my judgments unconditionally.

No one ever blamed me for being isolated and mistreated – that I was inexperienced, weak, or oversensitive. In a way, I think I am fortunate to have those people in my life.

I guess c’est la vie. Even during the darkest times, there are still many good things happening and to be grateful for. It really depends on where you look.

4. The Finale

Stories have power. By telling, reading, and sharing it. I would not have been able to make the change, had I not heard about Sensen’s story on Xiaohongshu. Likewise, nor could I admit that I suffered from workplace bullying, had I not met Mew in Chiang Mai and gotten to know his story of healing.

I hope by sharing these stories, those who are suffering from workplace bullying would be able to burn their life script, and become their own (s)hero.

I’d like to end this article with Mew’s acknowledgement and encouragement, as written in his manuscript sent to me.

“I want to sincerely thank my friend for taking the time to listen, understand, and document my experiences. Your curiosity and care have allowed me to reflect deeply on a difficult chapter of my life and transform it into insights that may help others.
To anyone currently facing workplace bullying, I want to say: you are not alone, and the situation is not your fault. It is okay to seek support, set boundaries, and take steps to protect your well-being. Even in the hardest moments, resilience can be nurtured, and there is hope for a future where your voice is heard, respected, and valued.”