A Boston protester thought he was heckling Mayor Michelle Wu. It was a different Asian American woman.

• A Boston protester thought he was heckling Mayor Michelle Wu at a press conference.
• It turns out, the man was yelling at a different Asian American woman.

A protester who showed up to a Boston press conference on Monday heckled and jeered an Asian American woman he thought was the city's mayor, Michelle Wu.

But the woman he yelled at was not Wu — Boston's first woman and person of color to be elected mayor.

It was actually a different Asian American woman: Beth Huang, the executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, MassLive reported.

According to the report, the voting rights press conference was held in the Boston Common across from the Massachusetts State House and featured a state representative trying to encourage Election Day registration for the state's communities of color.

The unidentified heckler accused the American Civil Liberties Union of not caring for minority communities and urged officials to look into misconduct by a former state drug chemist, the report said.

"You're a political puppet," the man said to Huang, believing he was taunting the mayor. "Why don't you look into it, Mayor Wu?"

According to MassLive, man added: "Look into that — you'll find the truth, Mayor Wu."

Huang later joked about the mix-up online.

"If only being a 5'4" Asian woman imbued in me the powers of being mayor of Boston," Huang wrote on Twitter. "I am not [Mayor Wu], but we both support voting rights!"

Wu responded to the tweet, saying: "We should make some good trouble with this."

The mayor's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

State Rep. Tram Nguyen chimed in on Huang's tweet, and said: "If I get a nickel for every time I get mistaken for [State Rep. Maria Robinson] & [Mayor Wu]..."

"We often say that the AAPI community is not a monolith. Didn't think we have to remind folks that not all AAPI women leaders are the same but here we are..." Nguyen wrote.

Since she was sworn into office in November of last year, Mayor Wu has said she's been the victim of racism during demonstrations against some of her policy decisions.

In a December interview with GBH News after she announced a new proof-of-vaccination requirement for Boston, Wu said, "over the last couple days ... there's been too much hate, hateful rhetoric, coming from, it seems like, all across the country to properly sift through what is actually coming from Boston residents."

Wu also told Boston Public Radio in December that she has experienced "hateful" and "racist" language during her term.

"I know I can count on more than one hand the number of women of color, elected officials, in Massachusetts who have experienced similar hatred, similar protests at events," she said. "We won't be intimidated from doing the right thing."

Reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans in the US have spiked in the year leading up to — and throughout — the pandemic, Insider's Emily Canal previously reported.