Streotype: Ji Sun N

Streotype, in my own definition, refers to the act of creating or having a prejudice against a person or even a large group of people; so to speak, labeling others. A widely-used website of Dictonary.com defines this term as ,"a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group." I have experienced and seen the discrepancies in streotypes for different countries such as Korea and the United States. I have a lot of experieces of being labeled by others for not my own eccentricity but for the general misconceptions that society created towards people who they consider are "my kind of people or association."
In America, I was judged or labeled the most for my race. Most of my American friends consider Asian as "geeky" or "nerdy." They believe that Asian are not very affiliating or socially active thus, do not try to accept them into their groups. Therefore, when my American friends got to know me better they asked, "How come you are so cool? Aren't you suppose to be some kind of bookworm?" They are basically appalled by Asians coming up and talking to them first or being involved in school sports. Some places in the States may not be as strange to Asian as other parts of the country but my private school consisted of only ten or less Korean students so it took a while for asian students to break out of the misconception. Based on my observation, this kind of racial misconceptions towards Asian seemed to be even stronger for males than females. Since not until recently, most foreign movies portray asian character as a skinny boy with big glasses and a tucked y-shirt. However, I believe that the streptype of Asian changed a lot within a couple years. Now that a lot of Korean students go to expensive private schools in America for education, foreigners image of weak Asian is vanishing year by year.
Ironically, I do judge people or race when I hate that happening to myself. I used to judge China and Chinese people a lot. I used to belive that they are dirty, loud, and very cheap. This misconception developed when I was going to middle school in the States. My Korean friends used to tease them and even had a name for Chinese, "Zzang-gae." Although, I never had any direct relationship or incidents with any of the Chinese friends at school, I just naturally got influenced and dissolved into the atmosphere.
Streotype has always played a detrimental role in my life: it was never beneficial in building relationship with new and different people. After tranfering to four different schools, I have met a lot of people. I used to hold myself back from a certain cliche because of the streotype people including myself had on them. However, for nine out of time times, it made it clear that those labels are not true. For example, there are some geeky and nerdy Asian out there but that does not mean that all of us are like that. As I mentioned eariler, I used to avoid Chinese people but I got to know this one very cool Chinese girl who proved me wrong and made me realize just how ill-minded and unfair it is to judge people without even trying to get to know them. I missed out on a lot of opportunities to get close to some very amazing people because I let myself believe to strongly for those general judgements. Thus, I really want to let other people know that everyone is different in their own ways. Now, I really do not have much streotyping habit left in me and it has been a lot easier to form relationship.