Pet Peeve

I'm not normally someone who gets rankled or annoyed easily. Generally, especially if you're a stranger, it will take quite a bit to irritate me (it's my eager-to-please personality trait). However, if you do this, you will really annoy me:

Me: I'd like to check out these books.
Circulation Worker: Okay. *checks out books* Here, I put the China book right on top for you. (yes, this is yet another book on China. I'm on a China book kick) Shay-Shay (or something like that, I don't speak Chinese).
Me: *looks askance at him*
CW: You're not Chinese?
Me: No.
CW: What? Korean?
Me: Yes.
CW: Kamsamnida (not sure how to spell the transliteration of that).
Me: *smiles awkwardly and walks away*

Now, I know that this guy is just trying to be friendly. I saw him playfully teasing a little girl about Caroline's age. He's an older guy and just wants to have fun with the patrons. I'm okay with that. I really resent when assumptions are made about me that aren't true. I particularly dislike when people start speaking a different language to me, assuming that I understand what they're saying. This has plagued me my entire life. I know a very little Korean (thanks John Lee!), so I know what they say most of the time, it just makes me uncomfortable.

I can't even count the number of times this has happened to me, by all races of people. It's normally older people who do this, although I have had a few Koreans just a little older than me come up to me and start speaking Korean, having never met me before. I've been told I just look very Korean and so they assume that I speak the language. It's even worse when I see the pitying look after I tell them I was adopted and don't speak Korean.

Partially, it adds to feeling like I don't really belong anywhere. Strangers look at me and think that I should be someone I'm not, and, as an adopted child, there sometimes is that sense that you're living a life that you aren't really supposed to have. Now, I know and am confident that that is not true, that God has purpose and plans for my life, which included being adopted by the parents that I had, meeting Chris and living in Chicago, etc. But, when people say those kinds of things, it rears all of those uncertain and insecure feelings that I felt as a child like when people would yell out "Hey Chinese girl!", which did happen a few times when I was in middle school/high school. That's confusing and hurtful when you're young and trying to get through puberty and identity issues.

Strangely enough, there has only been 1 incident since moving on the west side where people have called me Chinese. In my previous experiences, it was always the black kids who called me "Chinese girl" -- and I braced myself for more of that when we moved. But I can only recall one time that that happened to me down here and it was fairly recently as I was moving my car (it was a street cleaning day) and a guy was walking down the street with a shopping cart -- and he said "Hey Chinese!" I looked at him and then went inside my house. I think he was trying to flirt with me or something, which obviously I was not going to do! And it was a terrible pickup line in any case...