""I knew what she was doing," recalls Munn, who is now 45 and a mother of two. "She was trying to make the teacher like me so that I'd become a favorite. But when I saw it, I thought, 'Oh, my mom doesn't have power.' Because if my mom had power, she wouldn't care if the teacher thought I was her favorite - I could just be one of the kids.""
""Maybe it meant that I couldn't succeed," she recalls thinking. "Like I didn't have it in me - without her telling this fib to my teacher - to become a favorite on my own.""
Olivia Munn remembers a third-grade incident in which her mother told a teacher that Olivia loved her hair and often requested a fishtail braid, a fabrication meant to curry favor. Olivia actually disliked braids and having her hair touched, and the lie caused shock, disorientation, and self-doubt about her own ability to be liked. Her mother fled Saigon in 1975 and consistently sought protection from authority figures, a pattern shaped by refugee experience and later marriage to a strict military man. The moment remained vivid and revealing about family dynamics and power perceptions.
Read at Bustle
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