Blonde, blue-eyed and baffled

The way they see me (blonde and blue-eyed)
The way I am (none of it), except for golden highlights in my "central European" nondescript not-blonde yet not quite brown hair . BTW, I learned to assume this "cute" pose from my hawkwan girls in Bucheon.

Am I blonde enough? Are my eyes blue enough and big enough? According to my little middle school girls, you bet (the proof is in the photo).

Today with my middle school girls I had an eye-opening experience that proved how the power of personal perception oftentimes wins over what we actually see in reality.

I was teaching "there is/there are" construction and its accompanying interrogative and negative forms. To practice, I was asking questions like: "Is there a teacher/dinosaur/elephant/or "are there boys/men/ frogs" in this classroom. Girls dutifuly responded: "Yes, there is/there isn't" and the like. Then I asked: "Are there any blonde people in this classroom?", thinking they would answer positively - me, the teacher. However, they said 'no there aren't." When I asked what colour was my hair, they responded with either " yellow" or "gold." When I asked who's blonde among famous Western people, they said Brittney Spears and Cameron Diaz. I realized then that in their vocabulary blonde must mean platinum and a bit on the sexy wild-haired side. Then I asked, "Are there any blue-eyed people in this classroom?" To my astonishment they all said "Bianca" (my eyes are of the dark brown almost black kind, see the unenhanced photo) . When I laughed and said: :"no, no, I have dark eyes like you," many screamed "no, no, no, Bianca Canadian, blue eyes!" I walked around showing the girls my dark eyes as a proof. One of the girls said: "Teacher, you black contact lenses?" When I answered negatively, they asked "how teacher has black eyes." I realized that they must think all Westerners, or more precisely English speakers, have blue eyes. Such is the power of stereotyping and marketing blue-eyed and blonde people as the epitome of "Westerness." My girls whom I taught for almost a year now haven't noticed that my eyes are not blue, and even when I claimed to have dark eyes just like they, some of them thought I'd put in dark contact lenses. Then some asked: 'but teacher Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, they have blue eyes." I agreed,then asked how about Julia Roberts, Jim Carry, Catherine Zeta Jones, Austin Powers [they didn't know who Mike Meyers is], Brittney Spears . At the mention of B. Spears all hell broke loose: "Brittney has blue eyes," they all claimed, and no matter how hard I tried to persuade them that her eyes were as blue as chocolate, they couldn't accept it. Finally, I went on the Internet and showed them a couple of pictures where it is very clear that she's as brown-eyed as any of them. My little girls were flabbergasted! Their whole idea of what a Westerner should look like was shattered. Most of them didn't know that Caucasian eyes come in all sorts of colours and shapes, even the eyes of English speakers.

Inevitably, talking about looks we came to the topic of double lids. They said they envied my big eyes, which came as another ( I must say pleasant) surprise as my eyes are not big at all, on the contrary. When I claimed to have small eyes, they all vehemently disagreed. Then, one student said:"Bianca Teacher beautiful nose." What! She can't mean this balbous Roman pride of nasality that I've objected to all of my life. But, she did, and others agreed.

It was a very interesting experience, indeed. Not only mine, but also the girls' eyes were open. Many of them realized for the first time that "Western" - read American - is not necessarily all about blonde and blue eyed people, as much as this is the preferred look among advertisers who elevate the WASP-y look above all others. This whole affair has prompted me to think more about the ways in which I possibly stereotype and put "Far-East Asians" in the same box. I'm still thinking, and when I come to some kind of conclusion, I'll certainly blog about it.