It's SantaCon Pub Crawl downtown tonight, with too many people dressed in red and white and not enough clothes. A "Santa" is going around our table, taking down our names and polling us to see if our friends have been naughty or nice. I'm disinterested and unamused at best, peeved and disgusted at worst. On Jesse's suggestion, I tell Santa my name is Brittany. I could have made the night a lot smoother by just letting him play out his little conversation, but my snark gets the better of me and I ask, "What if I don't believe in Santa?" Santa tries turning it into a real conversation but I give him little to work with. Our waitress overhears the conversation and pipes in, "What if she doesn't believe in Santa because of religious reasons?" Santa continues this topic and asks if that's my reason. "You're Asian. Well, are you Buddhist?"
I need someone to give me guidelines on stereotypes, racism, generalizations. Where is it okay? Where is it not? When will I stop being hypersensitive to all conversations regarding me as an Asian?
Is there something Santa could have said that wouldn't have raised my walls, defenses, arguments? It doesn't help that I was already wanting him to go away five minutes before he even talked to me, so that puts him at a bad place to begin with. Admittedly, there's little he could have said that would have made me interested to talk to him. It still wouldn't have hurt if he just asked if I...what? Was Buddhist? Was Christian? Am I just caught off guard because he had to point out the very true fact that I am Asian? Did it make me re-realize I was the only Asian of our group of 14?
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