FUNNYACCENT: Mistaken I-Den-TIty

While waiting for the women and their kids to get ready for family night, a co-worker asked me what do I do to keep fit.
"I run."
"You do? Do you run everyday?"
"No, three or four times a week, depends on the weather."
"How long you been running?"
"Long time, since I was in high school."
"No wonder you're so fit and small, I never met an overweight Chinese women."
"What is Chinese women got to do with me"?
"I thought you were Chinese?"
"I told you the first time we were introduced, I am a Malay woman from Malaysia."
"Oh........I'm sorry, yes, you must've told me."

This is not the first time I am mistaken for a Chinese. With my brown complexion, I hardly pass as a Chinese. But people are repeatedly mistaken me as a Chinese.

"Uh....uh.... you don't look Chinese at all." My Singaporean-Indonesian friend Trisca told me one day when our sweat........errr...perspire dripping on the floo in spinning class a few years back.
"You have double eye lids and mine is only single." She pointed her shapely finger to her eye-lids.

Once, when I was still at Bunker Hill College, I was in Sociology class. We were watching a documentary film, The Human Odyssey. The film was shot at different parts of the world. At one scene, it was about an ethnic group of Tujia farmers in Hunan Province, located near YangTze River.

A Haitian girl sitting in front of me, turned around and asked me, "Do you understand what they are talking about?"
"No, I don't"
"But they are Chinese."
"Which I am not."
She returned her attention back to the screen.

The next scene was about a famous Masai warrior tribe in Kenya. I did something very immatured. Something I shoul've not done as a grown woman.
I tapped her shoulder. She turned around and I asked her. "Please tell me what they are saying?"
Her expression changed in an instant. Faster than a lightning.
"Those are nomad people from Africa."She snapped at me. Her voice had double edge razors, sharp enough to slice anything near her.