I started working at Buffalo Wild Wings in August 2010. My best friend worked there, so it was very easy for me to get a job. For the first couple days of work, I was known as ‘the new Asian girl’. I didn’t mind that at all since I was the only one that had an Asian ethnic background there. My first nickname there was Lucy Liu, an actress with Chinese descent. After two weeks of working there, one of my coworkers asked what nationality I was. I said, “Filipino.”

I remember I came in to work on a Thursday in November at five o’clock. My work shift that night was to run expo. Expo means one runs food from the kitchen window to the tables and also takes care of packaging carry out. On Thursdays we have our sixty cent special on the boneless wings. Because of this deal, we are often very busy on those nights. On this night it was very, very busy. We had several parties with groups of ten or more, and, of course, they all want boneless wings. Carry out got particularly busy also. With all the food orders and the multiple food tickets that print in the kitchen window, sometimes there’s confusion. Many tables will order a lot of stuff, usually a lot of wings with different sauces. Whoever runs the kitchen window usually places all that’s in the order for a certain table on one tray. Sometimes if there is too much for one tray, even on the biggest tray we have, they place the rest on another tray. It’s his job to make sure the right stuff is with the right order, but it’s the servers and food runners (expo) to check before they leave the kitchen. At the time it was so busy, and there were too many orders in the window. Many of us just took the tray without checking. I brought one of the trays to the table, distributed the food and found out that I was missing a plate of asian zing boneless wings. I quickly walked over to the kitchen and asked for eight asian zing boneless wings to be cooked on the fly. One of the cooks replies, “Oh, you want the asian zing? We will give you the asian zing,” in a Chinese accent. I laughed it off and told him that Filipinos don’t have that kind of accent. That it is actually is very different. He asked, “So you don’t speak ‘ching-chang’ or ‘ching-chong’ or any of that stuff?” “Nope,” I said. The forgotten food was then made, and I brought it to the waiting table.

Later after things started slowing down, there was less rushing back and forth with food from the kitchen to the tables. I stayed in the kitchen restocking stuff unless an order or carry out was up in the window. The same cook that tried talking in a Chinese accent continuously teased me by talking with the accent. At one point I was standing by the window with my hands under the heat lamp to keep warm. On my nails I had some nail art that I did the day before. That one cook saw my nails and complimented me on them. He said, “It is because Asians are good with nails. They own so many nail salons.” I mentioned that that was a generalization, and that I didn’t know any Filipinos that own a nail salon.

A couple of generalizations that night were based on Asian stereotypes. I realized then that many aren’t familiar with how Filipinos are and the culture. Among many of the people I know that don’t come from Filipino descent, tell me that I am the only Filipino person they know. Hopefully after working there for a longer period of time, they will see that there is a difference and that not all stereotypes apply.