Beautiful

The Thai word for beautiful is "suay." For some reason, this makes me think of the English word "suave"--and I don't just think of the word that means cool and handsome, I think of the shampoo brand (derived from the first meaning, of course).

It's a strange experience to be told I'm beautiful as often as has been the case over the past eight months. And I do get it a lot. I think part of that is just being the only westerner living in a small town--I don't get nearly as many comments when I go to Bangkok or more touristy areas.

I didn't grow up believing I was beautiful. That's not as sad as it may sound--after all, I didn't believe I was ugly, either--and I wouldn't have believed anyone who said I was. If asked, I would have said my appearance rested firmly in the range labeled average. I think this opinion came down to two basic facts. First, for most of my teenaged years, I was overweight--not enough to be called fat by anyone (not even bullying cheerleaders--at least, not to my face), but enough that I didn't automatically fall into the American beauty standard of thinness. The second was that I wore glasses from age ten until my last year of high school. As far as I was concerned, that meant the likelihood of being called beautiful went down to almost nothing. I realize how silly it is now, of course, but I totally fell for the stereotype that people who wear glasses look smart, not beautiful. My vanity as a teenager centered on my intelligence, not my appearance. And as false as the stereotype is, I still got called smart a lot more often than I got called beautiful.

So being in Thailand, where I'm called beautiful an average of a few times a week, is a very different experience. I got called beautiful the other day when I was wearing my glasses, had no makeup on (I tried using makeup my first few days in Thailand, but the heat and humidity here kind of make it feel--and sometimes look--like your face is melting), and my hair was still wet from my morning shower. My reaction was something between an automatic "thank you" and "are you crazy?" It all seems to come down to skin tone, which is a much different standard of beauty than the ones I'm used to--and not one I'm all that comfortable with.

I have to laugh to myself sometimes at a few of my lower level classes--the ones with students who don't pay attention--because in each of the classes, there is at least one girl who will pull out tiny mirror and would spend the entire class gazing and primping, if I let them (I usually give them a chance to just put it away, but I start confiscating pretty quickly these days). Last week during an exercise about phone conversations, I used the names Snow White and Cinderella for the example conversation to make it a bit more interesting. When I chose two students to read the conversation, one a little darker-complexioned than the other (but not by much), a girl at the back of the class called out "Snow White and Snow Black!" In another class, where I had students writing sentences about themselves, I was walking around checking work and helping where needed, and I saw that one girl had written "I am very ugly" among the rest of her sentences. I told her the sentences were very good, but that she needed to change "ugly" to "beautiful" for it to be correct.

Every culture has its own ideals for beauty, I guess. It's only when we're removed from our own culture's ideals that we see what a flimsy thing it is to be called beautiful, and how ridiculous some of the standards are. The truth is, I don't think I've ever met someone who wasn't beautiful.