¡Chino Gay!

On a winter's night, I was walking in the University campus, heading to the Dorm, after a tiresome kind of translators conference, when a car drove pass me and one of the four passengers shouted out of the window "¡Chino Gay!" and then left the scene in laughters, leaving me perplexed beyond all cure. That was about a year ago.

I tried to figure out how the heck they knew about my sexual orientation within a glance (in the dark). Obviously, I was walking as normally as any man on earth did. Maybe my body-fit coat and my nerdy look somehow got their attention and automatically turned me into a quarry of their verbal abuse. Sigh.

That wasn't the only occasion. One night, I was waiting for Now at Princesa Cinema and it was getting colder, so I decided to fetch myself something to eat in McDonald's. While I was making the entrance, a big bald white man came walking towards me from the opposite direction, fixing his stare at me and, when approached, shouted "¡Chino!" at me before appearing into the crowds 0_O Another yet perplexing scene.

The same thing happened when I came back from a fiesta to the Dorm at about 3 o'clock in the morning. A group of youngsters on the other side of the road glared at me before baptising me (as always) as "¡Chino!".

Apart from the occasional naming (cruelly done on purpose), most of the people in Spain unintentionally (but always) mistake me and Now for chinese. "¿Chino, qué tal?" (What's up, chinese) "Oye, chino" (Listen, chinese) "Chinita" (Little chinese girl) " Mira mamá, chino" (Mom! Look at that, a chinese!) "Cuidado, que vas a pisar al chino" (Look out, you're going to step over the chinese guy).

All these actions lead to the sole conclusion that, despite the virtually obvious existance of numerous chinese convenient stores and restaurants, the Spaniards and Latinos never get used to seeing Asian people. And this conclusion logically leads to the fact that most of the Spaniards and Latinos know so little about how to distinguish the Asians...well...for most of them, there are two types of Asians, the chinese and the rest. If you're not from the first, you're from the second and that's it.

However, once I was saved from this tragic truth of life when an insane homeless alternatively called me "¡Coreano!" (Korean!). Well, at least, he did make an effort to get things out of the mainstream.