this post is going to be utterly useless if you're looking for something healthy for your brain. it's not even remotely interesting but i'm going to go ahead with it anyhow considering that it is the kind of thing my head is obsessed about with each passing day. ok, down to business. i get various remarks on what i look like. i get a lot of hong kong, singaporean, vietnamese, and filipino, with the first two being the most common. when i was out shopping with my friends in Beijing, more often than not we all would be asked to identify ourselves since obviously we were not 当地人 ("locals") and more importantly, the group would usually consist of more than one Asian ethnicities. one saleslady said i looked "asian american" - my natural response to which is wtf (except that it was that kind of shifty-eye kind of response. i'm not rude in general, mind you.) And this shoes saleslady made a guess with much certainty that i was from either "xinjiapo" (singapore) or "xianggang" (hong kong). one of the teachers in the program commented that my "style" (whatever she meant by that) was "very hong kong." A friend from WashU also said that i resembled one of her Singaporean friends back at WashU. aaand... my Chinese teacher at Brown had thought i was from Singapore until the end of the year when i had to explain (for the 439th time) that i am in fact from Thailand. And recently, a friend ran into this HK actor (on tv of course) and told me to google him. which i did. and oh shit. what horror. Tse Kwan Ho dude, you take the cake.
To look at the better side (not that there's any bad side to this in the first place), i can now cruise Asia freely feeling super assimiliated and accepted as such. oh who am i kidding. i love being a foreigner. like i said, it's not easy to be me.
I'll watch the Miss Universe 2008 pageant tomorrow morning live from Vietnam. I hope the panel will have eyes as trenchantly sharp as the Beijing salesladies and be able to tell China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia apart. man i am random.
China
Malaysia
Vietnam
Singapore
ChinaMalaysiaVietnamSingaporeand give it up to... THAILAND!
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2 comments:
i was watching this documentary the other day about the miss venezuela pageant and the girls who go to pageant school to train for it since, like, the early age of three. they take it really seriously over there it's crazy.
they're all really pretty, but alas, south america can claim another trophy - damn venezuela. i was rooting for colombia, although i caught the pageant when they were selecting the final five.
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