Living with roommates is basically a gamble where you pray the person on the lease is not secretly unhinged. When you throw a roommate’s significant other into the mix, the odds of a peaceful living situation drop to absolute zero. But one couple on Reddit recently experienced a level of performative wokeness from their roommate’s girlfriend that belongs in a comedy sketch, and her wildly offensive cultural assumptions have the internet completely dying of laughter.
The Original Poster is a twenty five year old woman who is married to her twenty eight year old husband. They are both ethnically Chinese and originally hail from a Southeast Asian country, but currently live overseas. They share a rented house with her husband’s old college friend. During the lockdown era, the friend moved his girlfriend Anna into the house. The landlord approved, she pays her share of the bills, and everything seemed totally fine at first. But the Original Poster noted one very important detail for context. Anna and her boyfriend are not Asian.
Anna seemed nice initially, but about a month into living together, she started acting incredibly weird. It began with unsolicited religious commentary. She randomly told the couple that they were free to practice their real religion in the house. According to Anna’s wild assumptions, their real religion was obviously Buddhism. The couple actually comes from Christian families and explained this to her. Instead of accepting reality, Anna bought a Buddha statue and incense that gave the wife massive migraines, insisting she did not mind if they wanted to worship.
The bizarre cultural policing did not stop at religion. Anna soon decided to tackle their language choices. She overheard the husband’s family speaking a mix of English and Cantonese on the phone. She then generously gave the couple permission to speak their real language in the house. The wife politely explained that while she understands Cantonese, she cannot actually speak it, and her own father is only comfortable speaking English. Anna was somehow deeply disappointed and accused the wife of throwing her heritage away.
If telling a Chinese woman she is abandoning her heritage was not bad enough, the grocery shopping took things to a whole new level of offensive stereotyping. Anna went to the store and bought a bunch of raw internal organs for the couple to cook. Neither of them eat internal organs. When they explained this, Anna got upset again, claiming she read there were lots of nice recipes that could remind them of home. The husband pointed out he had never eaten organs in his life. Anna had to throw the meat away and was incredibly salty about it.
The absolute peak of this absurd performance art happened right around Chinese New Year. Anna took it upon herself to buy festive decorations for the house. The wife was totally fine with the concept until she saw what Anna actually purchased. She had ordered hell notes and was literally pasting them all over the living room walls. For those who do not know, hell notes are specific paper offerings strictly meant to be burned for deceased ancestors. Anna was accidentally turning their rented house into a literal funeral parlor.
The wife immediately told her to stop pasting funeral money on the walls because it was entirely weirding her out. But Anna was not done celebrating death. She also ordered custom banners featuring a botched version of the couple’s English names. The real kicker is that she ordered them on solid white banners, which is yet another symbol explicitly used for deceased people in Chinese culture. The wife begged her to take them down. Upset that her funeral aesthetic was rejected, Anna pivoted and bought Japanese kabuki masks to celebrate the Chinese holiday.
When the wife gently pointed out that kabuki masks are Japanese and not Chinese, Anna completely lost her mind. She snapped and started yelling at the wife, demanding she help with the decorations instead of just critiquing her hard work. The wife calmly stated a few obvious facts. Anna never asked for help, the wife does not even celebrate the holiday in a big way, and once again, Anna literally never asked.
Things got incredibly heated when the wife demanded to know why Anna was so fixated on them. Anna claimed she just wanted to surprise them because they have been so deeply colonized that they forgot their own roots. Yes, a white roommate looked an Asian couple in the eye and told them they were too colonized to understand their own culture. The wife finally delivered the reality check of the century. She told Anna that she needs to stop forcing stereotypes down their throats, and she is not being woke when she is getting absolutely everything wrong.
Unsurprisingly, the girl who loves to play the savior immediately burst into tears. She dragged her boyfriend into the argument to defend her honor. While the boyfriend understood why the couple was annoyed, he had the nerve to suggest the wife could have been nicer about it. But you do not need to be nice to someone who covers your house in funeral banners and calls you colonized.
The husband is fully standing by his wife, leaving the house in a state of tense awkwardness. But the internet is giving the wife a standing ovation. You cannot act like a progressive ally while actively stereotyping the very people you claim to support. Anna needs to pack up her incense, take down her hell notes, and mind her own business.