This image depicts Hai and Melanie at the Blue Ox Coffee Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The image was taken by Wing Young Huie in 2012 as part of her "We are the Others" album. The image shows Hai standing inside of Melanie's coffee shop that stands across the street from his barber shop. The interaction between them was the first time they had spoken to each other, but Melanie had seen Hai many times before and had already made many assumptions about him. She had believed that he was Vietnamese and had moved to her street in the United States to get away from the atrocities of the Vietnam war and he then has to see a man stabbed to death just a few steps from his store.
When first looking at the image and the text that explains the image, we can see that the majority see others who are not like them, Hai being of a different ethnicity, and we alienate them. We allow our imagination to make up stories or assumptions that puts distance between each other. Then, when we examine deeper into the image/text we see that the minority, Hai, are more connected into our society than we know. For example, Hai went over to Melanie's store and bought a cup of coffee one day when she was not there to support his neighbor store. This shows that he wants the community around him to thrive and he is not as disjointed from society as people think the minority is just because they are different.
Margarette Atwood and Wing Young Huie present the concept of "othering" through image and imagery. They both try to depict the concept of "othering" by putting an image in the audiences head that will show that their is a difference between classes to emphasize how this physical difference alienates people or groups. Atwood does this through imagery of describing the handmaids as wearing red dresses. This alienates the other women in the society, such as the wives, because they are visually different than the handmaid class and that alienates the wives from the handmaids and presents a mental/physical gap making all the women who are not the handmaids to be the "others" to the handmaids. Huie also uses image to depict the gap between groups and people creating the "othering" by showing the contrasting difference in physical appearance between the coffee shop owner and the barber. The barber is classified as the other because he is alienated by not being the same ethnicity and being an immigrant in Minnesota. This result of "othering" in the image is seen when Hai holds a sign that does not have proper grammar and Melanie seems to have a condescending look behind him. This is similar to Atwood because the "othering" in The Handmaid's Tale creates negative feelings between the classes with gaps between them due to the "othering"
