snow white

I am really, really white.

Okay, that's not really "news" as such. I'm English, Russian and German, which means (1) I'm a tremendous asshole, and (2) I cannot display my legs in public without blinding all onlookers. I am only slightly exaggerating. The supernatural paleness of my skin has been the subject of much discussion since I started traveling. My host mother in Nicaragua observed that my feet were the color of milk. The chatty nurses at the Ministry of Health used to say that I made all their photos look overexposed. In Mexico, I was regularly stopped by old women as I walked through their little towns and informed, quite gravely, that mine were the whitest legs they'd ever seen.

Some people can pull off the pale look. Anne Hathaway, for example. Gorgeous! Or Christina Hendricks - phwoar. Their skin is like fine bone china, and those bitches are working it for all it's worth.

They also clearly sleep underground, carry parasols and have not seen the beach even once in the last twenty years. The rest of us must balance our desire to protect our delicate complexions with the fact that most of Planet Earth is, in fact, outside. As for me, the instant I expose my pasty white skin to direct sunlight, my look becomes less "porcelain" and more "cracked terracotta."

It's easy to avoid the sun in Cleveland, as it's cloudy, raining, snowing or sleeting approximately 361 days out of the year. But the minute I venture out of the overcast haven of the Midwest and actually encounter that big shiny thing in the sky, my defenseless skin loses its ever-loving mind.

"FUCK OH MY CHRIST WHAT THE HELL IS THAT," it says, cringing away from the sun's rays like a small animal cornered by a slavering beast.

"That's the sun," I say patiently, slopping on another liter of sunblock. "It keeps us alive. Seriously, we've been over this like a million times."

"OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," my skin wails, and abruptly bursts into flames.

So I spend most of my time abroad wearing a skin-suit the approximate hue and texture of a quality salmon fillet. I've built up a tolerance for the pain, but the sight of my sun-broiled flesh generally causes a great deal of alarm among my non-white associates. "What happened to you?" they demand. Invariably they reach out to touch, then hesitate when I flinch. "Does it hurt?" they ask, curious hands still hovering above my skin, as if warming by a fire.

"A little," I lie. "It's not as bad as it looks. Say, do you know where I can procure a large quantity of dry ice?"

Even when my skin's not falling off in sheets the size of playing cards, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I am evidently a rare mosquito delicacy, and my whiteness causes the flaming red bites to stand out like scarlet letters, drawing a lot of unwanted attention from every well-meaning grandma and taxi driver in a twelve-mile radius, each bursting with useful insights such as: "You know, you should really use repellent." And: "Have you considered pants?"

In some places, even my plain old unblemished skin is enough to draw a crowd. I used to dread walking through one of my "base cities" in Nicaragua, one of the only places I've ever felt distinctly uncomfortable about the nature of the cat-calls directed my way. This would be the town where, not thirty seconds after emerging from the Ministry of Health building, I was hailed by a group of young men. "Hello!" they chorused gaily, and then, when I didn't respond to their satisfaction, "You are a dirty fifty-cent whore." (Well, actually, they said it in Spanish, and they said "10-córdoba." Still, my going rate at the time was upwards of five dollars, so what the hell did they know.)

I've been called by a lot of nicknames. Chela was popular in Nicaragua, güera in Mexico. Both mean "white girl." More general terms like gringo/a and farang tend to mean this, too - while they technically mean American or foreigner, it's understood in many places that Americans are white. Just ask any Company volunteer or staff member of color; I guarantee they've had the following conversation more times than they can count.

LOCAL: So where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: California.
LOCAL: No, where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: Uh...I was born in New Jersey?
LOCAL: Look, where are your parents from?
VOLUNTEER: Annapolis.
LOCAL: And their parents?
VOLUNTEER: Same.
LOCAL: And their parents?
[15 minutes later.]
VOLUNTEER: Okay, fine, I think my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born in China.
LOCAL: A-ha! Just what I thought, chinita.

So, obviously, I could have it a lot worse. I know that. I understand that complaining about my pale skin is kind of like bitching about the heaviness of my golden mantle and the discomfort of my diamond-encrusted shoes. At home and abroad, my pinkish epidermis allows me an insane level of privilege of which I'm usually not even aware. In a lot of places, due in large part to some tricky cultural and socioeconomic issues -

[Dear M,
Don't you dare detour into a discussion of cultural hegemony. Don't do it! No one cares!
Kisses,
M]

- uhh, where was I. Oh, right: due in large part to all that, light skin is valued and sought after in many places in a way that'll give you the heebie-jeebies. You can't walk into a drugstore here in Thailand without seeing shelves upon shelves of supposedly skin-lightening products with names like "White Radiance" and "White Perfect." In fact, I have yet to find a moisturizer here that doesn't claim to bleach the user's complexion. Lots of the women at the shelter use these or similar products, and more than one person has poked at the pale skin above my tan lines and told me that my skin is beautiful. Even the men on the construction team hide their faces behind hot, heavy canvas veils, because dark skin marks a person as a laborer.

So I'm lucky, undeservedly privileged, because, for better or worse, I'm as white as it gets.

But seriously, you guys: who do I have to bribe, kill or screw to get a decent base tan?