PPE: Hello unstable internets and ninjas o_o Good day to all of you!
Tiru, virtually everywhere I go, one of the first things they ask me is: "So... where are you from?"
That's curiosity, not racism
Nah, it's what's after it that diverges from being curiosity.
(Also they never said that)
That said...it's always best to treat every interaction like other interactions :O meaning to not derive conclusions from 'common' perception. That's what bothered me when I was...talking about personal stuffs and how 'everyone saw me D:' back in my
other college, in which my GC helped me out by noting that sometimes we may see it as everything and everyone around us but a change of perspective may see it that they're just a minority impression.
Umph :< Either way, you're not really what they say you are, Vec! Either that or you're pretty surprising to them that they're interested in ya
(I've got a friend who is always asked if her hair is curly or not and she takes it in stride while joking around with them, even if the tone was all "@_@" x3)
And because the ex-girlfriend who looks just-like-Quistis-Trepe that I was talking about used to tell me that every single feature I had was ugly. I really miss her, but after saying a thing like that, I don't want to talk to her again.
Sometimes, people don't say their words inasmuch as they mean them, and will come off as really, really crude. Context-wise, moods and other stuffs into play, it's best to orient feelings towards others into specifics ._. People change too, leaning more for the better!
But umph .-. Hope you're doing swell there! (maybe she meant ugly as in in a constructive-but-rough way? or in a joking way? People told me stuffs similar to that before and I had a REAAAAAL hard time discerning if it was an honest joke, or a joke-at-my-expense, or they were just immature and bullying me <_< [which was how the first years of it was like so I guess that's why it became difficult to discern]...either way it happened, they're pretty likely to think about what they did and said in random intervals within a year and reflect on it. In general, with many people o_o)
However, I still don't like people telling folks I haven't met "Ooh, quick, guess ethnicity."
Maybe...mention it doesn't matter or close the topic if that gets brought up o_O (eg Mention it's complicated...or the topic annoys you or...mention why it bothers you after dropping a closing line)