Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Conversations from the house

Roommate: So how many Asians were at in your year at school?
Me: Five.
Roommate: (not listening) No no, **** is a competitive school. I'm not talking about Asian Americans, how many Asian nationals were there at your school?
Me: Five. (to demonstrate) There was me, Miri ***, Hyun ****, Michelle ***, and Meng **. Five.
(silence)

2 comments:

Magniloquence said...

Yep.

We had at least two in my year. Whassername from mainland China, and the other one, who might've been born here but might not've been... the bio major? And you had (in your year? the year before you?) that guy from our floor, with the floppy hair... he was adopted, but I don't remember if he was adopted from within the country or adopted from another country.

(I actually remember two of their names, but the internet is a wee tiny place sometimes.)

I remember having the same conversation (minus the 'asians as indicators of a school's selectivity' undertone) about black people ... and then realizing that at least I could count them, and I could only turn up two latinos period. I'm sure there were more of both... at least one person of each group that I'm blanking out on... but that's kind of a silly quibble, isn't it?

It was the funniest thing, I thought, that in my year we had more Bulgarians than blacks and latinos combined. (By one person, but still.)

Anonymous said...

yeah, technically i have dual nationality but that is supposedly not allowed in this country.

i remember one time when Meng and I were standing on the land bridge talking and a rather opportunistic photographer came up and said he wanted to take a photo of us happy smiling minorities for the Reed webpage.

i felt secretly special.

-Michelle