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Makeup and clothes also have a weird and unpleasant racial aspect for me. In Singapore, I was in a career once where people often wanted to put me on tv / magazines (long story). So when people handled my clothes and makeup I hated the experience but didn’t protest too much. They always put me in super femme clothes, and makeup was.. let’s just say the platonic ideal of makeup in Singapore media was ‘ghostly white’. I didn’t want to look like that.

I would often request that makeup artistes there respect my desire to keep my natural color (I’m a little darker than most Chinese women there want to be), and it was always a painful experience. I was Chinese too, but I didn’t want to be *that* kind of Chinese woman with the nice femme clothes and white and whiter makeup. It was hard. (I have a photo of me on a Vogue-like magazine.. it makes me cringe a lot)