As you can tell from my photograph, I look super white (Caucasian), which is what makes this story hilarious to me. I have a harder time convincing people that I am not completely Caucasian if anything. However, racism never makes sense and it pops its ugly head up anywhere it can.
The first time, and I think the only time I have personally experienced racism by white people, was the Summer of 2012. And of course, it occurred at a fancy resort hotel in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I need to give you the back story how I ended up at a resort hotel, so I'm going to chase bunny rabbits for a few moments (talk somewhat off topic).
My close friend had lost her husband that February (2012), and I stayed by her side for awhile to help her out. They had 3 children together, one of the children was still a baby. She received a sum of money from an insurance policy, and once she was doing better, she told me that she wanted to take her children to the beach. Her son had asked to go to the beach for his birthday. She asked me to come with her because she wanted to show me her appreciation of being there for her.
We were never fancy girls at all, so going to a resort hotel wasn't a norm for us. I remember one summer staying with her and her husband, and we scraped by and ate hotdogs and bologna the whole summer (I was always their third wheel, I even rode in the backseat of their decorated car when they left the church after their wedding). When this song came out, it was our theme song because of the verse "I'm from the ghetto homie, raised up on bread and bologna."
However, my friend really wanted to treat us all out to something nice after going through a very dark time in life. Unfortunately, she lost her dad 2 months after her husband died also. I thought of him as a father figure, so we really dealt with a lot of grief that year. Once the intensity of the grief lifted, it was time to do something positive. With that being said, we packed up our best clothes and threw the kids in the car and drove down to Myrtle Beach to have a good week.
Myrtle Beach is less than two hours from where we lived, and tends to be the place most people go to when they go to the beach. I have been more times than I can count since childhood. When I would go, I always stayed in South Myrtle Beach where the strip and cheaper hotels are located. This was my first time staying in North Myrtle Beach, which is where the more expensive resort hotels are, and it is more exclusive. I did not even realize there were different sections of Myrtle Beach until this visit.
My friend told me if I grabbed all the bags and took them to the room, she would get all of the kids out the car and take them up to the room. Fair deal! I grabbed a bell hop cart and placed our bags on it, and headed to the room. When I got in the elevator, there were three, white, young teenagers in the elevator. One female, and two males.
One of the males asked, "What floor are you going to?" As he reached towards the buttons to select one for me.
I responded, "umm, not sure, let me look at the sleeve on my key card." So, I looked down at the room number wrote on the sleeve, and it said 13XX (cannot remember the exact numbers). "It's on the 13th floor." I responded.
The guy pressed the 13 button for me, and by looking at the numbers is when I realized it was the top floor. Excited about staying somewhere kind of fancier than I was used to, I started to think about movies where the top floor usually held the 'penthouse suites.' So, I blurted out, "oh, I guess I'm on the top floor! How cool? Maybe we got the penthouse suite."
The two guys started to look at each other with smirks, and started laughing and saying things like...
"I got the penthouse suite once in Bangkok."
"Yeah, I got it once in Tokyo."
"Well I got the penthouse suite in "Beijing."
"Really, I got one in Philippines."
The elevator doors opened and I was thinking to myself, 'what's so funny, why are they calling out Asian places.' That is when it hit me, they could tell I was part Japanese. The doors were almost shut when I finally realized and blurted out, "you little racist bast****." I just laughed and laughed, shocked that anyone actually noticed for once that I am a quarter Japanese. I usually have to convince people I am, and show them pictures of my mother. But, the irony was that it took for me to be in some boujee resort hotel with stuck up rich kids for them to pick up on my squinty eyes and high cheek bones. At end of the day, I am comfortable and proud of who I am, and where I come from. This is why I can raise my glass, and laugh about the situation.
Nice looking pic of you and your friend Sarah
Thank you!
nice
Thanks!
I saw this post late. LOL It's a great story you have there. Never I imagined you have Japanese lineage. ;)
Thanks @puroypoi! Yeah, maybe one day I will write about it more. :)
@originalworks please verify my post as an original work
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Hah!! Obviously I'm not good at that because I can't tell!
It was crazy because as you can see, I had my hair highlighted blonde at the time... but like I said, I had to be in a highfalutin area in a resort hotel, and they could smell another ethnicity other than white like a drug dog on a bag of MJ. Not that I care that people can identify me as Asian, but I just find it so typical, but not typical since most people don't notice. I like my background though! ;)