At my present workplace, I get a brief 30-minute break to get in all my lunchin'. It sort of blows ace. Basically, after taking one of these three murderous old, rickety elevators (which, by the way I'm now convinced I will be killed in. These things creak all the time and they drop and jolt up and then hover right above where they should stop at a floor and then they drop and let us out. We all get in each morning, looking like we've come to terms with our deaths. The elevators have supplanted a stroke and spontaneous combustion as the most probable way I will expire) downstairs and then walking the three minutes or so to the food court, I have about 20 minutes to stuff my face.
Today I was so hungry, I hit the Vietnamese joint in our lobby. I'd never been before and I was happy to see the huge helpings in front of the sporadically seated clientele.
And it was there that I would become the receptacle for some racism that I almost completely didn't tune into. (I would say reverse-racism, but honestly that's the stupidest term I've ever heard of. Wouldn't reverse-racism mean something that was the complete opposite of racist? The way the term reverse-racism has survived almost makes it seem like white people were so confident with their racist prowess that they took pride in the term 'racist' and if anyone was racist toward them, it could not be real 'racism,' but instead something else. "Hey, that was racist. You're being 'racist!' But you can't be racist. That's our word! You're being racist to the racist. That's like... reverse-racism or something." How arrogant to think that someone can't actually be racist to you, but only reverse-racist.)
...anyways...
I sat down at the counter and the lady slid me a menu. I was in my own zone and probably looked a little self-important or something, only because I was so zonked from work that I sort of just floated downstairs into a chair without really acknowledging anybody. The ladies spoke Vietnamese amongst each other and with the smiling dude behind the grill. Numbly, I ordered the vermicelli, which brought a laugh from the lady as she looked at the guy and nodded and said "B1," which just so happened to be the number of my order. The man laughed.
They laughed for a while and then they said something back and forth to each other. They kept laughing. Weird. They were having a grand old laugh, really.
I snapped out of it and turned to the girl.
"Did you guess that I was going to order the vermicelli?" I asked.
"Yes, B1. Vermicelli," she continued laughing and then the dude at the counter laughed too and nodded at me.
Of course the whiteboy would order the vermicelli.
I never realized white people had their own food stereotypes. (Next time you're with a white person at a Vietnamese restaurant, see if they order the vermicelli.) I laughed along with them, feeling only about 5 percent the self-consciousness Dave Chappelle felt after ordering the chicken in 'Killing them Softly.'
The vermicelli was delicious by the way.
2 comments:
Interesting observation about the phrase "reverse racism". You're right, of course.
Order the soup next time, white boy
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