No, We Have Not Had a Class Together
A new semester approaches, and with it come the hundred or more fresh classmates that share in the joy of a publicly funded education. While I always anticipate the fresh start of a new term and pat myself on the back for picking a concentration in which around eighty percent of my fellow English majors are young women, I also prepare myself for the two or three kids who inevitably ask me, "Hey, haven't we had a class before?" And always my reply remains, "No, we have not met before," to which I add "asshole" under my breath.
Allow me to defend my discontent with didactic discourse. When it comes to facial recognition, my memory is virtually flawless. If I have met a person before, I will remember that person's face (though names often escape me), or at least have the vague sense that I have met this person in the past. I do not, however, completely forget visages (though sometimes I will pretend to ignore someone to avoid the awkwardness of not perceiving whether I know them well enough to say hello). Furthermore, I have rarely had a class with a recurring person other than those that involve a natural progression through the curriculum, such as my classmates from Intermediate Fiction Writing who then continued on with me into Advanced Fiction Writing. Those familiar classmates, however, number less than twenty.
That being said, the only reason others think that they have had a class with me in the past is because they confuse me with some other Asian kid with whom they have previously shared a class, unconsciously and unconscionably playing into the stereotype that all Asians look alike. To be fair, they aren't completely sure that I am that other Asian student, so they preface their introduction with, "Hey, haven't we met before..." or "You look familiar..." Often when I correct them about our complete non-familiarity, they question my skepticism, which only infuriates me further. It is only the good nature of the inquirer that keeps me from verbally materializing my discontent and marching on the Lincoln Memorial.
Now, however, I wish to set the record straight. This website holds a fairly sizeable readership among my collegiate companions (numbering at least in the dozens), and hopefully, by demonstrating through visual comparison, that I am not, indeed, another Asian student at the University of North Carolina, or any other Asian for that matter, I can avoid the semi-perennial, subliminally racist assumptions of prior fellowship through viral propaganda. Without further ado:
 Me |
 Not Me |
 Me |
 Not Me |
 Me |
 Close, but Not Me |
 Stud |
 Not Me |
 Me |
 I Google Image searched myself and this registered pedophile, who is Not Me came up. |
To make matters more infuriating, I do not identify myself as Asian, both personally and socially. My mother is of Irish decent and my father Chinese—that makes me half-Irish, half-Chinese—not Asian or White, and though I identify with both backgrounds I do not delineate myself into one ethnicity or the other. Thus, as an excessively hyphenated Irish-Chinese-American, I find the generalizations applied to me more offensive than they might otherwise be considered because they are piled onto the labeling misassumption that I am of one ethnicity.
Many may accuse me of overreacting to this erroneous label and the stereotypes associated with it. To that I say, go back to your Klan rally, skinhead.
As it stands, my sister is the only other Irish-Chinese humanistic progression to my knowledge, and we stand proud in green-yellow solidarity.
