In which I probably use way too many paranthetical statements

My sister remarked when coming home from Korea that she will freak out when suddenly, rather than surrounded by asian people, she's surrounded by white people instead.

I laughed, as I thought such a sentiment unusual, but I seem to be suffering from the same malady as I walk through BYU campus on my first day of school for the fall semester. There are a lot of white people! They are everywhere!

After a brief respite from being the minority for so long, coming back to such a status can be somewhat disorienting and nauseating. Wandering around campus, I look upon a sea of blondes (fake blondes outnumbering real blondes by about 3:1) and other assortments of caucasians, and suddenly I felt incredibly claustrophobic. And while many white people comment that all asian people look the same, I say, "Look at yourself!" Asians may certainly not possess a diverse genetic history, and thus end up with similar facial features and ink black hair and nothing else, but white people, despite the fact that their gene pool resembles the buffet line at Golden Corral, all still look the same. For us Asians, we can't help but look somewhat similar, and so we dye our hair (ironically, usually to a blondish color) and dress funny, but for white people, looking the same is a matter of choice. For the most part, they all look the same, act the same, dress the same, all trying to conform to the latest fashion trends. Despite their diverse pallete of humanity, they all seem to possess some innate desire to copy each other. I can't tell where one fake blond starts and the other ends.

Luckily, I am taking a Korean class, where ironically, the TAs and professor are white, but I'm sure our class consists of about 45% of the Asian population at BYU (the other 47% taking Chinese, and the last 8% taking Japanese, since everyone knows that the only people who take Japanese classes are Japanese people and those who wish they were Japanese, with the latter vastly more populous than the former demographic). It is somewhat comforting to sit down in a room and find yourself surrounded mostly by people who grew up eating kimchi or other strange, exotic Asian foods and shackled to their desks by their parents so that they could do problems out of their parents' old college text books rather than play with their friends during the summer.

The other twist to this story is that I'm dating a white girl, but she is not stereotypically white, per say. Home schooled in Utah, the fourth of nine kids (all named in alphabetical order) and possessing a surprisingly independent, rebellious streak for a Utah child, she is a minority among her people when she says things like, "I really don't like green Jello" and wears European style berets (my brother, when meeting her for the first time, insists she has Eastern European slavic decent and calls her "Tanya." Her brother Ephraim has been dubbed "Pavlo"). Thus, she's somewhat iconoclastic herself, which helps me carry on my self-proclaimed title of "misguided activist."

Still, her existence in my life weakens my arguments and undermines any chance I have of becoming some kind of civic leader for my demographic and people (i.e. angry, bored Korean-American college students). How can I rail against the overwhelmingly caucasian numbers at BYU when I myself am not only dating one, but one who claims Provo/Lehi, Utah as her home? But I suppose there is a time where you hang up the hat of pointlessly fighting against "the establishment" in a half-serious manner for love. You really can't get anymore Bohemian than that. They ought to write a play about us.