Rachel Young

tuesday, october 9, 2001

I'm going to see her perform tonight. I'm excited.

My employers are featured in the special issue of Darwin as a winner of The Darwin Fittest 50 Awards for 2001. Funny thing is I know one of the founders is going to take a look at her picture in the magazine and absolutely hate it! Ah. The price of fame and fortune.

. . . . . . . . . .

There’s this great little deli a couple doors down from my office. They’ve always got a great soup of the day, but I haven’t been too impressed with their pasta selection. Well, today as I’m standing in line to pay for my chicken rice soup and spinach potato pot pie (too much spinach and not enough potatoes), the cashier (an adorable, young foreign woman with dark hair and dark eyes) greets me with a big smile and says, “Arigato. How are you doing today?”

I’m not offended, but I always find it somewhat amusing how someone will automatically assume your ethnicity to be associated with the one word they probably know in another language. I’m sure if she knew “ahn-nyung ha-sae-yo”, she would have greeted every Asian person with that instead. I smile and shake my head. “No, I’m not Japanese.”

“No?” she responds with shock. She continues to say with a slight accent, “You look very much like Japanese. Where you from?”

“I was born in Korea,” I answer wondering how many Japanese people she personally knows to make this grand assumption that I look like one. “Where are you from?” I ask her. She’s polite about it, so I will be, too.

“Egypt. I am Egyptian.”

I could have mistaken her for Greek or Arabian. And then I start to wonder if she’s faced any kind of discrimination in the past few weeks, but it’s not something I’m going to ask her.

I pay for my lunch and thank her.

Later a coworker asks me if I’m Chinese. “I’m sorry. I can never tell the difference,” she apologizes. How are you supposed to? I know I wouldn’t be able to if I wasn’t Asian, and even so I still have a hard time. I tell her I’m Korean, and she comments I’m pretty tall for an Asian girl. She’s 5’10” without heels, and I’m wearing my boots today so I stand at the same height.

“Yeah. It sucks though. Because all the nice Asian boys are shorter than me,” I tell her (not that height really makes that much of a difference, but I prefer not to tower over my man). So she and I start a brief exchange about the pros and cons of being a “tall” woman (of course tall is a relative term). And then she asks me about my culture and language, which she thinks is "pretty neat".

Funny how I never really stop to think how different I look from a good percentage of the nation’s population until someone points it out to me. Yeah, so what if I've got dark hair, high cheekbones, a round nose and small eyes? Big deal. But you know what? I couldn't imagine what it would be like to step outside into a world where everyone looked just like me (ooh, very scary thought). That would be really weird, and I wouldn't like it very much. What would the world be without diversity and a splash of color?

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