I started working in the restaurant industry in 1997 and have made a career of it ever since. In the first few restaurants that I worked in, I noticed how much I was considered an outsider since I have an accent, but not a European one. In most restaurants that I worked in, the managers preferred to hire white Americans — those were the people who they thought were able to entertain guests in conversation. Many of my managers assumed that all immigrants, just because we were not from here, were not able to entertain guests, that we did not know the food, that we could not do a good job.

In one of the restaurants that I worked at, I believe the manager thought I was from the Middle East. He used to watch me extra closely, always observing my every move. He made me cut my mustache, and never gave me the opportunity to deal directly with guests even though I had adequate knowledge and ability of the food and service industry. Only the servers were able to deal with guests. This is the type of clear racial and ethnic discrimination that we face as immigrants.

In most places that I worked, it was very hard for me to get a promotion. They really do not see your talent and upgrade it properly, unless you were very close with the manager. Even the employee handbook had nothing about the proper way to get a promotion from, say, a busser to a runner or a runner to a waiter. One time when I asked for a promotion, the manager told me that I didn't have any experience to deal with the guests, even though I had been working there for years. Instead, he would only give me a back waiter job on a rotating and on-call basis. But this is not so surprising since the managers and the waiters were all white — I could not be selected or picked because I was not white enough. All the bussers were Bengali and Latino — and I was the only one from Nepal. This is the very common, yet hidden and untold story and pain of people of color.