Asian Invasion

My apartment building is chock full of Asians. This is because I reside in the part of campus where many of U of I's engineering majors live and thrive, and my school will be damned if any white person is allowed to engineer anything. The closest thing you'll get to a white person in my building is some Italian chick downstairs named Olivia.

But Asians obviously aren't just limited to the confines of my building. They're everywhere. Open the window curtain in my room to look outside and what you'll see are ASIANS WALKING DOWN THE STREET. BY THE DOZENS. WITHOUT ANY REGARD TO LIFE WHATSOEVER.

This is not something I'm accustomed to. My teenage years were spent at Waubonsie Valley High School amongst kids who looked like they failed auditions for Dawson's Creek. The guys I went to school with liked girls who wore Abercrombie & Fitch, and the girls were all madly in love with Dave Matthews. Not too many Asians around at all, where I grew up.

The case was also the same for me at Northern Illinois University, where the only yellow-skinned people I ever had the pleasure of bumping into were drunk frat boys who colored themselves all over with highlighter markers because they wanted to see if they could glow in the dark. Either that, or they were just trying to look like a character from The Simpsons.

Because of the lack of Asians I came across in high school and undergrad, it was pretty easy to annoint myself as The Greatest Asian in the History of the Universe. I might have been exaggerating. I was more like The Greatest Asian in the History of NIU. That's not saying much though. It's like being a high school valedictorian in a class of 12 people.

There's an ancient Vietnamese proverb that goes, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Well frankly, I had been living in the land of the blind all my life.

Things however, are a lot different in Champaign, or shall I say, "The Land of Normal Two-eyed People". In fact, 12 percent of U of I's students are Asian. In a school with a total enrollment of 38,000, that's about 5,000 Asians. FIVE THOUSAND! That's enough to make a small city.

Five thousand.

Someone will have to lead them. Might as well be me.