Since I’ve come to Stanford, nobody can seem to recognize me. What I look like, how I speak, even my name. During the first few weeks of autumn quarter, a couple of girls in my dorm complex told me that people often call them by my name — girls who are like me in that they are Asian but unlike me in ethnicity, dress, mannerisms, academic interests, hobbies and all other facets that compose the complexity of an identity. Girls who don’t even look like me. The boy who lives down the hall asks one of them about the homework in a class we share; a girl in lecture has been greeting the other with my name for the past week. These patterns are as recurrent as they are unsettling.

I went to a small high school where everyone knew everyone else, where my identity was crafted around my interests rather than my appearance. I wrote poetry, performed in dance concerts and hung out with people who were largely not Korean and often pushed my Asianness from the forefront of my consciousness, making myself independent and recognizable as hell. When I first heard that my Stanford peers were mistaking other people for me, I initially brushed it off as a natural result of the newness of the beginning of college, hoping the state of familiarity I used to know would be reestablished with time.

Perhaps that process of recognition is still underway — there’s a certain novelty to this university that hasn’t faded yet — a sheen that tints everything and everyone in it with a kind of foreignness. Yet I still experience this quasi-invisibility in places reputed to be personal: Another Asian friend of mine told me last week that someone in my section has been calling her “Maddie” for the past month; I was recently tagged as a different Asian peer in a Facebook photo of my dorm mates in their Halloween costumes.

And while these incidents, however small, do hurt me on a personal level, I think the implications behind them — the subtle and deeply-rooted origins of racial stereotyping and microaggression — are even more troubling. They reflect the kind of mentality that perpetuates the silencing of racial minorities, the kind that is dangerous because it is unintentional. They reflect the prejudiced ideology of Asian uniformity, the stereotypes of Asian-Americans as homogenous in that they like all math and science and do well in school and look the same.

The ways in which this silencing now manifests itself are subtle yet pervasive: Calling someone the wrong name, asking where someone is really from. They imply an unbelonging. For Asian-Americans, this perhaps unknowing unwillingness of others to distinguish between us is most often attributed to the notion that all Asians look alike, that it is easier for Asians to recognize other Asians, that this interchangeability is a question of proximity. However, having grown up in largely white institutions in which I was often one of very few people of color in any given room, I have difficulty believing that my ability to distinguish between my fellow Asian-Americans directly corresponds to past exposure or some kind of inherent facility.

I understand that these incidents often seem insignificant or accidental and that those who misname Asian-Americans — especially when they genuinely mistake one for another — do so unintentionally. Certainly there are problems of more immediate gravity and overt prejudice that also deserve attention and representation. Yet whenever Asian-Americans are mistaken for someone else, we are implicitly told that we are not complete individuals. That we do not warrant the effort it requires to get to know us or to at least regard us more than cursorily to see that the features of our appearance are as diverse as they are distinguishable. Whenever my non-Korean peers tell me that they were called my name, I can’t help but feel both the messy lumping together of all Asian cultures and the weight of invisibility. And isn’t this aching sense of dehumanization and standardization, on however microcosmic a level, enough to warrant writing about?

With all of the rhetoric about making Stanford feel like home, I am surprised at how foreign I still feel. While there is liberation in the relative anonymity of walking to class in Main Quad or reading in the peace of the library, there are certain spaces in which I wish I could hold recognition: My dorm, my SLE section. And I’m still not sure how to get there on my own, how crafting an identity unimpeded by stereotype can occur without the help of my peers and friends. I want so badly to be able to call Stanford my home. And I’m sure I will, but certain things have to happen first: Recognizing the subtle ways in which we perpetuate racial silencing, learning the complexities etched into skin. Saying my name and having it sound like my own.

Contact Maddie Kim at mkim16 ‘at’ stanford.edu.