Friday, October 14, 2016

Do all Asians look the same?

This has happened to me a lot over the course of my life and I thought I should discuss this.

DO ALL ASIANS LOOK THE SAME TO A NON-ASIAN PERSON?

I swear, I've gotten called so many names of my Asian classmates. I'll share two stories.

The first one happened to me in high school. By my CHINESE teacher, which was weird. There was this one girl, Shannon, who sat in front of me, and me, Jenny. Keep in mind, we're both Chinese. I would always get called Shannon all the time, and she would get called Jenny. And this is also in a room that is 90% Asian. I mean, we didn't look alike AT ALL. I had glasses and she didn't. I mean, we were kinda the same height, and she had glasses that she wore sometimes.

The next one happened to me also in high school. By my biology teacher. Me and my friend both had to retake the first semester of biology because of this teacher who was infamous at my high school for being boring and hard. We used the sit in the back of the classroom, and always next to each other, and we were both Asian (I think she was Vietnamese or something?) So the teacher (I wasn't sure if she was Middle Eastern or what; I don't wanna assume things) used to mix up our names a lot, which wasn't a big deal, since we'd always be sitting next to each other.

The last one actually happened today. My TA for my creative writing class (check out Edgar Gomez) asked the class if anyone had brought a hard copy of our assignments, and I was the only one who raised my hand, and he ended up calling me Tiffany (this other girl in my class who was Korean - I think - and we sat next to each other on the first day), and I had to awkwardly correct him, but he was cool about it.  And I look NOTHING like this girl - Tiffany had brown hair, no glasses, and was a bit shorter than I was. Although we sort of had similar length hair.

All of this got me thinking...do All Asians really look that similar to non-Asians or do they just associate Asians as one broad category and tend to call us names that are given to other Asians because we are of the same group? Does it have to do with our facial structure?

No comments:

Post a Comment