In Canada, which is as race conscious as the US, stereotyping is often considered a form of racism since assumptions are based on one's ethnicity.

Certain personal characteristics supported the stereotype. Through primary school and high school, I wore thick, plastic-framed glasses and silver braces lined my teeth. I was reserved and polite, played chess and wrote poetry.

Such factors somehow distorted people's perceptions about me. Classmates assumed I was a top student in every subject, and my sincere attempts to explain the reality were dismissed and misinterpreted as modesty.

Eventually, I gave up trying to convince them and rode on the wave of their illusions. Had I been a bit wiser, I would have predicted the inevitable outcome: such illusions would be shattered and I, who benefited from them superficially, would bear the consequences.

But a group of Hong Kong Chinese exchange students were the last people I expected to shatter them.

Although at first excited there would be others of my ethnic brethren attending the high school, they threatened all the aspects of Chineseness that schoolmates associated with me. They appeared smarter, more disciplined and hard-working.

Here were Chinese who could sleep through calculus classes, listen to their Walkmans during algebra and still hand in tests early and score top marks.

It bred resentment among other classmates who asked me questions that amounted to, 'Why don't you sleep through calculus? Why do you hand in your test when we do, and not before? Are you really Chinese or what?' I had not fully realised how much of my identity was derived from being Chinese, how skewed that definition of being Chinese was, or that being slightly different had always afforded me certain, trivial luxuries.

There also came another realisation, that the exchange students must have considered my lack of Chineseness part of my identity. I am not suggesting they thought deeply about it, only that they assumed it and accepted it.

At the same period in my life, racism in various forms, always unexpected and in isolated cases, became more alienating.

I had always dealt with name-calling as a child but I had then associated it with the name-calling all children experience.

As a teenager, I did not expect carloads of teenagers, males, to honk their horns to get my attention, mimicking the tonal inflections of the Chinese language and pulling on the outer edges of their eyes until they drove out of my field of vision.

Equally troubling and unexpected was a conversation with a Chinese employer with whom I worked part-time, who offered me a promotion I knew more senior colleagues had applied for.

The conversation could have been straight out of a cliche-laden movie, where the man who played the boss spoke extremely shoddy lines.

In English, he said things like: 'Stick with me and you'll go far,' and 'It's us against them.' These were only a few racist incidents, but enough to change my perception of all other people in the moment it happened.

So when I arrived in Hong Kong, there was an inexplicable thrill of being among the ethnic majority for once.

Trying to explain this to a friend back home who had visited Hong Kong once before, his response was: 'The Chinese can be racist too.' He missed my point completely. It was not about who is and is not racist.

The point was that here, I can live in a relative state of luxury since I am less likely to experience any racism at all.

The unfortunate side of course, as with anywhere, is that this state of comfort only exists because I am of the racial majority.

In a perfect world, my ethnicity, or anyone else's, would not matter at all.