Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Once upon a time...

I was in the San Jose airport lobby carrying my then 2-year old daughter, when an old white lady came up to me and marveled: "You Oritentals sure have the cutest babies."

Now I had two possible responses floating in my head:
1) "She's cute cuz she's MY baby, not an 'Oriental' baby."
2) "Yeah, good thing. Otherwise she'd grow up to look like you..."

But I was such a wimp. All I did was say, "Thank you."

What would you have said? Is there a polite but snappy response to let her know that what she said was insulting? Are any of you still confronted with this kind of backhanded compliments? Share your thoughts...

NLUTE
Geez, its been over three months since I've written an installment in the Onigiriman saga, "Not Living Up To Expectation". I got to 1979 when I went to Japan and discovered that I was not Japanese... no wait. I already knew I wasn't Japanese, I discovered I was American... yeah. Anyway, as I've written before, the years 1977-80 are pretty much a blur. I think it was a combination of being excessively drunk, having virtually no direction or understanding of myself and doing absolutely nothing worthy or significant to premanently occupy a portion of my brain. When I think about it now, it was a pretty sad portion of my life... well maybe except for the singing contest...

Before school start next week, i will try to sort out some of the events and maybe put it down if possible... I guess it was too late for Piratechan... :(

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