I DON'T look Chinese?

For the first time in my quickly accelerating life, I was told by that I didn't look Chinese. The guy, a Belgian masseur, thought I was fully Western!? Now, the Chinese part only accounts for a quarter of my mongrel blood but it's pretty dominant - I have a wide nose, "almond" eyes (i.e. they close when I smile) and a pretty large forehead (Chinese say, "Large forehead mean large wealth". Yeah. I wish.) Has living in London for 6 years actually affected the way I look or have my increasingly Western mannerisms fooled people into thinking I'm a different colour? The masseur (we'll call him Jacques) said I had Western features. This could be due to the fact that I was face down on the massage table and he only had a view of my large Western-style behind. And I do have pasty white skin, thanks to the British non-summer, or as Jacques so eloquently phrased it, "you're not yellow". Hmm...thanks?

Our dear, agile-fingered friend Jacques might be forgiven for being so ridiculously mistaken as most of my London friends are white middle class meaning that my accent and speech has become pretty Anglicised. Each time I go back to Bangkok people are schocked at how British I've become, as one American friend once said, "Talking to you is like listening to the BBC".

I have therefore made a vow to start watching Thai films without the subtitles in an attempt to reverse the Westernisation process, especially since my boyfriend found a blonde hair in my head the other day. It could have been a white hair but we'll leave my irrational fear of aging in a city where the old and disabled are ignored for another post.