"More discrimination!" I cried.

Before I go on, let me state for the record where my bias lies. I am a Chinese-American woman who stands a vertically-challenged 5'1". I have short, straight black hair, no eyelids and look like the stereotypical Asian, whatever that means.

I felt an acute sense of rejection when I learned that AAA had deserted me and all those Asian students whose rights they purport to promote--the simple majority of us who will never, even with spike heels, make the 5'6" minimum; who spend hours at the mall looking for clothes that won't make us look like little girls playing dress-up in mom's clothes; who deal with jeans and slacks rolled up into jumbo doughnuts around our ankles; who scour "petite" departments for clothes that are vaguely fashionable and aren't designed for middle-aged country club women who have just begun to lose inches to osteoporosis; who didn't work hard enough to earn a sewing badge in Girl Scouts and learn to sew our own adequately proportioned clothes.

It was then that I realized the crusade to reject the stereotypes placed upon us by Western-society had gone too far. It had led us to reject ourselves.

Once upon a time, I too wanted to take the road less travelled. I wanted to venture "off the beaten path" and avoid stereotypedom. I wanted to go to Yale.

My parents, however, refused to understand why I would even consider attending another college when the best university in the world (everyone in the Asian-American community knows that Harvard is #1 da xue) had offered me a place in the class of 1994. Asian-American students never reject an offer from Harvard, they insisted. In fact, they threatened to refuse to pay for another college, even one that was, in the eyes of most Americans, equal to, if not better than, this school in Massachusetts.

Two years ago, after pre-frosh weekend, I made two decisions. I would cave in to parental pressure and go to Harvard, and that would be the last stereotypical Asian American act I would ever commit in my life. From then on, I was going to avoid any action that would could label me a stereotypical Asian American.

For instance, I vowed not to live in Quincy House. Not only is this house an architectural monstrosity, but I had learned that its house stereotype was not based on the interests of its residents, like in Adams or Kirkland, but on their race. Quincy, prefrosh in the know at the Asian American Association meeting that weekend told me, was called the "Asian House" because of the disproportionate percentage of Asian students in residence there.

If I was going to be an unoriginal Asian American student and go to #1 da xue, I wasn't, at least, going to follow them all to "Chinatown on the Charles."

TODAY, I am an Asian-American East Asian Studies Concentrator--the proidentity concentration for Harvard Asian Americans--living in Quincy House (I allowed my roommates to place it on our non-ordered choice house lottery form, never realizing that cruel fate would deprive me of wood panelling or sunny suites facing the river.)

So, I've given up. I've come to terms with the fact that no matter how diligently I try or hope or think about being an Asian original, I will never escape stereotype-dom. And I don't want to, if I must reject myself--my interests, my looks, my body, to effect such an escape.

AAA should realize that it's not physical characteristics that create a damaging stereotype. It's not even the existence of a stereotype that is damaging. It would be more worthwhile if they would fight against the pressure that many Asian Americans feel to deny their real interests and avoid choosing stereotypical educational and career paths simply because they are afraid of being labeled as "typical."

We have to realize that people can't change either the way they look or their academic interests. AAA is missing the point by sponsoring a fashion show that conforms, perhaps inadvertently, to "western" standards of beauty when the Asian American body is different.

I commend AAA for attempting to encourage Asian American students to "consider a field they have never considered before" by putting together this fashion show.

But if AAA really wanted to do a positive thing for Asian Americans, they shouldn't mount a fashion show where the majority of the Asians in the audience will never fit into the clothes being modeled.

Expressing culture is supposed to celebrate differences, not try to diminish them.