Yesterday, a girl came up to me after class and said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you ever since the first day of class… I can’t believe how much you look like Lisa Ling. You look exactly like her! And you shouldn’t take that as an insult—she’s really pretty. It’s a compliment!”

I do not look like Lisa Ling. Besides the fact that we are both Chinese, we don’t bear any resemblance to one another: she has bigger eyes, she has a longer, slimmer face, she has discernible cheekbones… This is the first time someone has compared me to Lisa Ling, but I have also been told that I look like Lucy Liu and, on the rare inexplicable occasion, Jackie Chan. I have also been told I look like other Asian friends of mine whom I look nothing like. They tell us what we could be twins, sisters, alien doppelgängers from bizarro world who have come to invade the planet and consume the world’s supply of rice.

Last year, a guy whom I’d met once in the past approached me in the hall and said, “Congratulations on your moot!” (Moots are these fake trials law students can try out for to get extra credits, or for bragging rights if they’re big enough douche-bags.) Thinking he was referring to a moot I had helped organize recently, I replied, “Thanks!”

“It must have been cool to visit Oxford,” he added. Wait a minute, I didn’t go to Oxford… At that point, I realized that he thought I was this other female Chinese student who had just returned from England. “Hmm, I don’t think I’m the person you think I am,” I informed him.

“Yes, you are! You just gave that speech during lunch about the Oxford moot.”

“No,” I said through gritted teeth. I know who I am, dipshit. “You’re thinking of Anna. That’s not me.”

“Ohhh,” he whispered to himself. Suddenly, he looked embarrassed. “I got you two mixed up. It’s not because you guys are… Well, you know… Because you’re both… You two really look alike.”

No. We. Don’t. Fuckwad. I have shorter hair and she weighs fifty pounds more than I do. I laughed a bit, partly because of the stupid mistake, but mostly because I felt disturbed by the whole conversation and wanted to lighten things up. As short as the encounter was, it hit a nerve.

I don’t know how to react when people automatically tell me I look like [insert other Asian person here]. I feel that if I take offence to it, I’m overreacting to a harmless comparison and becoming one of those ultra left-wing wankers in my social justice class whom I despise. But if I think nothing of it, I feel that I’m becoming compliant to the racial stereotype that all Asian people look identical.

Is it wrong to think that the generalization might be somewhat true? That small eyes, black hair, and “yellow” skin are enough to reasonably make a person think that you are someone else with those same attributes? Or maybe we should tell that person that it’s wrong and maybe they should actually see a person, rather than simply a colour or ethnicity.

I think a lot of Asians, and minorities in general, are afraid of feeling annoyed or angry at these kinds of experiences, because we don’t want to create a problem that might not even be there. We don’t want to be responsible for instigating our own discrimination. We’re just like everyone else. Why make ourselves stand out as being seen differently by others when we want to be treated the same? Talking about it might exacerbate the issue.

I don’t know, I talk myself in circles sometimes. I just don’t want to be simplified to small eyes, black hair, and yellow skin. I don’t want to boil down to static generalities.