A bit of backstory before I begin—I met my best friend, Li in first grade. She had just moved to America from China with her mom, Mai. Li was struggling with her English, so I helped her with it. Because I spent so much time with her, I picked up a good amount of Chinese. When Li and I started middle school, we both enrolled in Chinese classes, so I’m semi-fluent in Chinese. I’m full-blooded Irish, but I’m ‘black Irish’—I have a tanner complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes. Couple that with the fact that I speak Chinese, a lot of people assume I’m Asian.

Mai owns an art shop in our city’s ‘Little Asia’ district, so Li and I spend a lot of time in the shop helping her run the store. Most of the store’s customers are art lovers, friends of Mai’s, or Asian people. One particularly slow day, Mai, Li and I are in the shop, talking about school. Mai speaks English pretty well, but she prefers to speak Chinese if possible, so a lot of the conversations I have with her are in Chinese. We’re so absorbed in the conversation that we didn’t notice anyone come in until we hear a loud squeal.

We look up and notice three white girls, a little younger than Li and I, jumping up and down and squealing in excitement. Li asks “Can I help you find something?”

They stop their ruckus and suddenly look very fake-shy and giggle a little bit.

“Onegai, nii-chan…speak Nihongo for us desu!”

Li looks really confused and repeats “Can I help you find something?”

The girls look really disappointed. The one who asked us to speak Japanese pouts and says “No, we’ll just look around for now.”

Li and I continue talking, in English, while her mom goes behind the register just in case the girls decide to buy something. After a few minutes, we hear “OH MY KAMISAMA, THIS IS SO KAWAII DESU!!!”

The girls are all glomming on one of the prints that’s up for display, a picture of a cat. Mai has a very strict no-touching policy regarding the art, so she approaches the girls to tell them so. The screamiest of the group puts the art down and says “YOU ARE JUST AS KAWAII AS THE NEKO DRAWING DESU!” and pinches Mai’s cheeks.

Li and I were about to intervene, but Mai managed to get the girl off of her and walk away towards us. The screamiest girl follows Mai and, giggling a little bit, asks us “So, are you all Nihongo desu? Or do you just speak it?”

By this point, we’re all confused and really mad. “None of us speak Japanese.”

“Yes you do! I heard you speaking it when we came in!”

Li is really pissed, so she tells Screamy off. “First of all, none of us are Japanese, and none of us speak Japanese. We speak Chinese. I’m Chinese. My friend is white. My mom, who you just assaulted, is also Chinese. Which brings me to number two—you just came into my mother’s store, damaged her merchandise, and physically assaulted her. So, unless you want me to call the police and have you three removed from the building, I suggest you pay for the print and leave.”

Screamy is shocked. So shocked, in fact, that she sits down on the floor and starts bawling. Her two friends look at each other awkwardly and walk out. Screamy ended up having to call her parents, still blubbering, to ask for money to pay for the print she and her friends damaged. Her parents showed up twenty minutes later with the money, paid for the print, apologized to Mai, and took the three girls away. They never came back.