You could find out, only if Albert Liao was willing to sell you one of his custom-designed Chink t-shirts.

Unfortunately only Chinese people are allowed to buy the t-shirts that come in a number of colours and colourful slogans like Chink Fat, Panda Love, Sun Yat Sen and Badass Chinaman, (featuring a picture of Bruce Lee).

The T's are being sold on Liao's web-site, www.chinkdesign.com.

"I first designed the T-shirts just to see how people would react," said Liao, who along with his brother began printing the shirts in the mid-90's.

He started selling them online last year.

"We decided that we wouldn't sell the shirts to non-Chinese people because they may cause some older people who have lived through racism a lot of pain and suffering."

It only seems fitting that prospective purchasers of 'prejudice-wear' face prejudice themselves, or at least a selective sizing up by Liao before being allowed in the door.

The fact is that more of Chink's potential customers have suffered the pain of rejection than the joy of acceptance.

Liao looks at the names of all potential customers that come with emails before clearing a sale. If the ethnicity is still ambiguous, he asks prospective buyers for their background before shipping out, or holding tight, the goods.

"I've turned away white people from buying shirts," he says. "Most people understand, but sometimes we do get some angry emails."

Born in Taiwan, Liao moved to Singapore at the age of 8, then to California at 11, and finally to New York at age 12. In 1997, the now 26-year-old moved to Vancouver in search of his piece of its laid-back westcoast lifestyle.

That easy-going culture has through its own non-questioning way fostered the propagation of Chink wear.

Unlike in New York, where Liao is often confronted on the streets for embodying offensiveness to a tee, his t-shirts have barely scratched the surface of people's consciousness in the Lower Mainland, nevermind putting a chink in their mental armour.

If anything locals look, blink once or twice, and then move on, according to Liao. Likewise, older Chinese-Canadians may bat an eyelid or two, but generally get on with their business unperturbed by the sight of Asian kids proudly brandishing Chinks across their chests.

"I think a lot of older people don't understand their kids anyway, and think their habits are weird," Liao says, adding however that his own parents have been very supportive of his current venture. "They usually don't say much at all." Strange habits is one theory. A lack of self-esteem is another.

Charles Lee, a community activist in Vancouver Chinatown and a former political candidate for a seat in Parliament, said he didn't endorse the T-shirts but understood where they came from.

"I think it is a case of using reverse psychology, when Chinese kids wear these shirts," he explained. "They are rebelling against stereotyping, and in a perverted way are expressing self-confidence. It is deeper than what is on the surface."

Though local outrage has been contained, that was not the case when Abercrombie & Fitch, a popular American clothing company, tried to use the same edgy psychology in its line of T-shirts that featured the 'Wong Brothers Laundry Service',  'Two Wongs Can Make it White'. The T-shirt had a caricature of two men with slanted eyes and conical hats next to the slogan.

Other T-shirts pulled from Abercrombie's shelves and website included 'Abercrombie & Fitch Buddha Bash', 'Get Your Buddha on the Floor' and 'Wok-N-Bowl, Let the Good Times Roll', 'Chinese Food and Bowling.'

For Liao, the Abercrombie debacle demonstrated corporate America's lack of awareness of the racism faced by Asians.

"It was a stupid thing to do," he said. "I don't think they [Abercrombie] did it maliciously, or that the company has a racism problem, they just didn't know any better."

A lesson to those seeking to spin gold from old stereotypes: just because the shoe fits, or in this case the t-shirt, it doesn't always give you the right to sell it.