Listings unexpectedly descends the star(*) character

Question

Using the Fontspec package in XeLaTeX, I declared a new mono font(Menlo) as the font for the listings package. But the package unexpectedly descends the star(*) character, which is weird. How to figure it out? Consider the following example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{listings}
\newfontfamily\menlo{Menlo}
\begin{document}
\begin{itemize}
\item \begin{lstlisting}[basicstyle=\menlo]
select * from instructor
\end{lstlisting}
\item \menlo select * from instructor
\end{itemize}
\end{document}