Number of weeks on the job: 2
Number of times I’ve been taken for the other two female Chinese employees: 2
(One of those employees is definitely in her thirties. The other employee is about 5 feet tall. I am 24 and 5′ 4″. I guess they got the female part right…?)

I spent a summer in England (That’s right. I did my study abroad in high school, bitches!) where I roomed with a White girl from North Carolina. We lived together well and got along wonderfully. Toward the end of our stay, we had one of those inevitable “OMG we’re about to leave!” dinner conversations, and she said, “You know what? To me you look like Mulan.”

Pause.

Bless the Southern Belle, for she meant to compliment me. I felt flattered, but moreso, I thought “Umm, you trippin’.” (I don’t look like a 2D animated character. Mulan is prettier. And skinnier.)

I know that, being from the Bay, I am lucky to be surrounded by “diversity.” Critics of what I’ll loosely refer to as “American race studies” like to attack alleged meccas of diversity, often touting that these special places aren’t truly diverse, aren’t equally mixed up or representative of every social and economic class, aren’t anything more than coincidental smatterings of enclaves. The error in this line of thinking is that “diversity” is not meant to promise equal stratification of every background possible. Not only is there no ideal example of that, but that’s simply just not possible. The whole entire world is not an equally balanced place, so seeking that in a single city or district is simply an uninformed pursuit. Diversity, for my purposes, means “well mixed up.”

One thing is true about the Bay Area and its diversity, however. We got a lotta Asians. Bongo noticed it when he moved here from the East Coast over a year ago. “You know, there are a lot of Asians in the Bay Area,” he said to me. And coming from a White man who didn’t formally study Ethnic Studies or Sociology, that says a lot simply because such statements aren’t necessarily the easiest to say. Especially to someone outside of your racial background.

So since I’m a native to this diverse (up for debate) town, I’m used to the mix-ups. The, “Oh, you look just like [Korean Girl],” or, “Are you and [Japanese Friend] related?” While I know I definitely don’t resemble any famous actresses (I’ll try to save the Asian Americans in the media for another blog.), I’m pretty sure one can only safely say I look just like me. Five out of five people think I don’t look like your Korean Girl acquaintance and I’m not related to your Japanese Friend. It varies from Asian to Asian, and luckily I’m always slightly amused when people try to guess my ethnicity – But try that game on a truly Angry Little Asian Girl, and you might get your head bitten off.

In being used to being mistaken for oh-so-many variations of black hair with brown eyes, why am I annoyed by the whole “All Asians look the same” theory? Why does it bug me, and why is it the root of a facetious (and highly entertaining!) website?

The simple answer for why it bugs me is because the more that statement is uttered and heard, the more it is made acceptable, and by repetition, erroneously perceived as true. Asians don’t all look the same. I don’t have the squinty eyes you made on the kindergarten playground and I know Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Pilipino who can say the same thing. I once got a makeover from a Vietnamese American woman who worked at the Lancome counter, and she told me in a Vietnamese accent that “people like us” have to make our eyes look bigger. My Eurasian friend sitting next to me and I exchanged looks. Was this woman nuts? My eyes were about three times the height of hers.

She then chose to swab jade green eyeshadow on my upper and lower lids, making me look like a Cirque du Soleil reject and affirming that her opinion was nothing worth taking seriously. Good thing it was free.

What Vietnamese Lancome Lady and Every Other Non-Thinker is guilty of is oversimplifying. They don’t see me when they look at my face, they see Asian. And then they stop. In a larger sense, the quick-to-judge’s immediate categorization of me shows that my depth does not matter. My “layers,” as Shrek would say, have no bearings on why I should be remembered or even met. (Yes, this is very reminiscent of the “You best learn my name” post.) People just want to put me in a box, get the label right, and be done with it. Neither my personality nor my person deserve any understanding of specifics. I am usually ascribed a box to fit into and nothing more. Never mind that I look nothing like Brooklyn or Schwertlilie or Poofy Fairy – all Chinese and Taiwanese American girls. The fact that we have the same general complexion of fair skin and dark hair and eyes seems to discount all other distinguishing factors that separate us from each other.

To be fair, it’s not just Asians who “all look the same.” Blacks all look the same, too. In terms of degree of racial threat, we’re not at all close, but at least we can sympathize with each other for being mistaken for every other person of similar “color.”

Color, in my hypothesis, has everything to do with it. The usual Punnett square that gets assigned to the members of different ethnic groups seems to determine how much a stranger can retain about your appearance. Disregarding anomalies, biologically you’re not going to find a blonde Asian or blonde African. But you will find a blonde Caucasian. That Caucasian may have a sister who is a brunette, a brother who is a redhead, a father with blue eyes, and a mother with hazel. Asians, Africans, and Latinos, though, for some reason, just don’t have expansive palettes to be made of. We may vary in darkness of shade, but our hair and eyes are usually the same from one face to the next.

In my years of being mistaken as every Asian girl on the block, I have come to believe that the stranger you encounter on the street or at a party is only capable of remembering the palette of your face and hair when they meet you. If you just so happen to be of Asian or African descent, you are simply labeled “the Asian guy” or “the Black guy with glasses.” Maybe you’re the “‘Mexican’ girl.” If you’re Caucasian, though, you get more descriptive tags to go with your occupation of the stranger’s short-term memory, “the redhead Business major,” “the one with braces,” “with freckles, short, wears a lot of dresses.” – Yes, this is just the aesthetic tip of the iceberg of the world of “Double Consciousness.”

It’s a lot about exposure. If you don’t grow up in a community with different pockets of peoples with different appearances, that which is different to you is simply categorized as that, “different” – be it Spanish, Indian, or Something with an Accent. It’s not that “All Asians look the same,” it’s that to the perceiver, we look alike. That perceiver probably hasn’t encountered many variations of black hair with almond brown eyes, and that category in his mind is not entirely refined. It cannot break down further into more specific descriptive categories because he doesn’t have the experience to note those differences. Not to dismiss the ones who are really trying, but some perceivers simply don’t have the tools to distinguish “foreign” face from foreign face. If you don’t use it, you absolutely lose it. Some people will go their entire lives never exercising this part of their mental process at all.

I, for one, still can’t tell most of the reality TV show blondes apart. They keep popping up all over, or at least that’s what people tell me. I secretly believe they’re all inbred cousins of one another, or the same girl with a fabulous wig stylist. (Kidding, but would I really be that far off? Hmm…)

I also mix up Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch…

The girl below is actually an “Average” face I made combining all the Asian women at Face Research. Interesting, isn’t it?

Editor’s Note: I’m searching for a website that hosted a gallery of portraits of people from different races, all saved in black and white and edited to have the same grey skin tone. Can anyone find it for me? (This is probably circa 2006 and very much unfindable…)