How I Got Owned by a Dim Sum Cart Lady in Front of My Boyfriend (A Tragedy in Mandarin)

REMIXED. ORIGINAL PUBLISH DATE: 08/16/2012.

3:47 AM, Tropical Chinese Restaurant, Southeast Miami

I’d been ping-ponging between San Francisco and Miami for this long-distance relationship thing (because apparently I hate myself), and look—I’d made my peace with being the token Asian guy everywhere we went. You develop this sixth sense for it. The slight head-tilt when people register your face. The mental filing system clicking: Asian boyfriend, noted.

But then my boyfriend mentioned dim sum at Tropical Chinese, some spot in Southeast Miami, and I perked up like a golden retriever hearing the word “park.”

Dim sum. In Miami. Served by actual Chinese people speaking actual Chinese.

After months of trailing behind my Cuban boyfriend to hole-in-the-wall spots while everyone around me machine-guns Spanish at approximately seven thousand words per minute—and me standing there with my two years of “Lupita es alta” high school Spanish like some kind of linguistic toddler—I was ready to flip the entire script.

I had this whole fantasy worked…