Friday, April 6, 2007

The Asian Chick

I went to college with a ton of Asians.

I mean like a wildly disproportionate amount of Asians.

This wasn't really a positive or a negative; it was just something that struck me as different. I grew up in a town that was whiter than loose-leaf and the change in atmosphere was conspicuous.

I took particular note of the cliquishness with which many Asian students seemed to socialize (In retrospect I imagine they thought the same thing of many of the white males at Hopkins but hindsight is always 20/20). It bothered me for a variety of reasons, most notably that I found myself attracted to a number of my Asian classmates.

As time passed I found my inability to crack the impenetrable shield of the Asian clique to be quite disheartening. I went through three full academic years and a trip to Tokyo -between freshman and sophomore year - without ever hooking up with a single Asian female (the trip to Tokyo is the only time I will ever regret hooking up with a 19 year old blond chick from North Carolina, without a doubt).

By the fall of senior year, I was fairly well convinced that my attraction to Asian women was forever to go unrequited, and then out of nowhere, it happened. I met a real cute girl on the dance floor of my fraternity house one Saturday evening. She was from Hong Kong and we ended up spending the evening with one another, drinking wine and discussing our philosophical and theological influences (David Hume and Thomas Aquinas primarily) then passed out in a blaze of passion.

When we woke the next morning, she reminded me that she went to the University of Rochester (a fact that she apparently had informed me of the evening prior but that I had inexplicably forgotten) and that she had to be on her way. Heartbroken, I walked her to her car, wished her the best in all her future endeavors, told her to call me if she was ever back in Baltimore and bid her farewell.

That Monday I had class from 6:30 to 9:30 in the evening. The class was Business Ethics (not an oxy moron I learned) and the professor was a bit of a stickler, so I made certain to turn off my cell phone ringer before class. The three hour class passed slowly but uneventfully and on the walk home I pulled out my phone to check for missed calls/messages.

I would be lying if I didn't say that I was surprised to see five missed calls from the same unknown area code within a half an hour time span. Confused, I decided to wait a day to return the calls.

When I phoned on Tuesday, AC apologized for the flurry of calls from the night before and informed me that she would be returning to Baltimore that very weekend. This was highly unusual as Rochester is at least a 6 hour drive from Baltimore. I told her we could hang out Friday night but Saturday was my sister’s birthday so I would be spending it with her and her friends (quick thinking bullshit).

AC arrived at my place at around 8 on Friday evening in good spirits and full of enthusiasm for an evening out on the town. Unfortunately, that town was DC. She and her friends had made plans to go see Tiesto (a famous trance DJ) spin at a club in DC called the Nation. This would have been fine except she wanted me to go with them. By this point in my college career I had already gone through a club-scene-phase and was not interested in that type of nonsense but her continual coaxing finally got me to cave.

Her 3 friends arrived at my house at around 10:30 and the five of us walked to her car. The AC-mobile was a black Volkswagan Beetle with standard transmission. Unfortunately, she and I had both drank too much to drive and her friends (two girls and a guy) didn't have any experience driving standard. The guy ended up giving it a try but right when we got to one of the really shady neighborhoods in Baltimore he burned the clutch. So There I was, with 3 Asian women (all about 5'4) and one Asian dude (somewhere around 5'8) in the middle of East Baltimore standing next to a broken down Volkswagen Beetle. This was a nightmare

.I called Hopkins security and upon hearing of our location they dispatched a security van immediately. Thankfully the van arrived in short order and we headed back to my house for the evening.

The following morning we woke up around noon, an hour before the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame were to play Florida State. ND was something like 7-0 at the time and I was really fired up for the game. AC said she understood that I wanted to watch the game but asked if she could make breakfast for the two of us. Not one to deny home cooked meals I agreed and we went to the supermarket to buy food.

She collected a good $35 worth of food and when we got to the checkout counter there was a wordless showdown as the cashier rang up the total. Finally she reached into her purse and pulled out a credit card (this seems somewhat crass to me now considering the night before her car had incurred several thousand dollars worth of damage, but I had planned on spending about $5 on breakfast and was dumbfounded by the amount of food she had purchased).

We went back to my apartment and I set her up with the supplies to cook the vegetable soup she had planned. Coincidentally, the only pot we had that was large enough to cook the soup was a wok. When my roommate awoke, several minutes after she began cooking, he stepped out of his room to see a diminutive Asian woman cooking on a wok in our kitchen. The look on his face as he stepped into the common room could not be accurately described even if I devoted another 5,000 word post to it, it was truly magical.

We had the soup (which was actually quite good), watched the game (ND won) and then prepared for AC's departure. Unfortunately, when AC called her friend she failed to answer the phone call. This meant that she had nowhere to go until her friend called her back. This meant that she was going to have to stay at my apartment until her friend called her back. This meant that I was going to have to get prepared to go out for my sister’s imaginary birthday until her friend called her back. This meant that after a shower, a button down and a nice pair of pants I was going to walk up two flights of stairs and wait in a friend’s apartment until AC left my apartment.

I was up there for like an hour and a half. Every 30 minutes or so I sent a friend down to see if she had left yet, it was ridiculous. Finally she departed and I felt as though I had gotten my life back. I spent the evening bar hopping downtown with a couple friends and then returned to the local Hopkins bar for a night cap whereupon I re-encountered AC.

She had been talking to a friend of mine (Bretters) and they seemed to be hitting it off. I said hi then got involved in several other conversations. About 30 mins later Bretters came up to me and asked what the deal was with AC. I told him that we had hooked up but if she wanted to go home with him, who was I to stand in the way of true love. Bretters, being the drunken retard that he is went back up to AC and asked if she wanted to leave. She replied that she was with me, to which he said, “Oh no, I just talked to GG, he said he was cool with it,” this did not go over well with AC.

The tears flowed like water through the Yangtze. I was completely baffled by this outporing of emotion from a girl I had met one week prior and spent a total of 15 hours with. I walked her back to my apartment, explained to her the misunderstanding and eventually calmed her down enough to go to sleep (I refused her attempts to re-engage our passion). The next day, we shared an awkward wakeup, talked things out a bit more and then I took her to the bus station for her return trip to Rochester, never to see her again.

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