{look upon my works, ye mighty}

You who wear my skin so carelessly/I am not the girl you were afraid to become.

I had a convo with Savior the other day about why I'm not attracted to Sri Lankan guys and basically, it came down to the fact that I'm not fond of the Sri Lankan culture. I don't like the way that girls are treated (we might be the first country to have a female Prime Minister but the guys are still arrogant assholes), and I don't like the double standards concerning female purity versus male purity at all.

If you tell me you know a nice Sri Lankan guy, my first assumption is going to be that he's either a traditionalist on the lookout for a girl he can show off to his parents as the femme he's going to marry, or that he thinks that Westernized Sri Lankan girls are easy, shameless whores. That's rather unfair of me because really, they could be Western-raised as well and not culturally Sri Lankan, but guys get doted on so much in Sri Lankan society that I don't think they have the same impetus to distance themselves from it as girls do.

See, if you're a girl, you're supposed to wear nice clothes that don't show flesh, be polite to your elders, not swear, get good grades and never, ever disgrace the family. Boys can mess up and all that's going to happen is that people will tut, shake their heads and say that boys will boys, ane, what's a mother to do? (Ane, incidentally, is an exclaimation that can mean nearly anything since it is basically just a space-filler, but usually signifies despair. Sinhala is great for space fillers.)

Being a girl in a traditional Sinhalese family sucks. It means that when I go to Sri Lanka and stay with my father's side of the family, they take all my shorts, put them to be washed, and don't give them back until I'm about to leave. That forces me to wear long skirts in the meantime, when I hate skirts, and especially hate the cheap polyster, pleated type that's appropriate for girls of my age. If I have to wear skirts, I want them to be flouncy and playful and cotton! And preferably make my legs look good instead of covering them up.

But at the same time, being in Sri Lanka for me means that guys will stare at me. All the time. It's not like 'Oh, she's so pretty, I want to check her out' but rather, just staring like they have every right to and I'm not even human. It feels invasive and what I actually tend to be wearing is a pair of jeans that go down to my ankles and a sleeveless top. Only skin that's exposed are my arms and my face and some of my neck. It really doesn't warrant the kind of attention that I tend to get.

I tried talking to my mother and father about it in the car one day, and my father said I was just imagining it or that they were staring at me because I look Western-rich and fair (fair in the sense of lighter skin color than people who actually live in Sri Lanka and are exposed to constant sunshine). My mother agreed with me, surprisingly, and said that the daughter of a friend of hers had said something similar about Sri Lankan men making her feel threatened just by looking at her.

I really hate that.

It's my body. Sri Lanka is my country too. I have the right to walk down the streets or sit in a van without getting stared at by every passing male. I have the right to sit in a car without guys trying to talk to me from buses, and yes, a guy actually did lean out of a bus window and shout at me while I was in a car, trying to get my attention. And I was only thirteen or something at the time!

...I was even younger, maybe seven, when my mother tried to get me to go out with her in the dark so that she could buy something for her mother. I was terrified of the dark, but she said that she needed me to come with her so that she'd be safe. I went with her, but I remember clinging to her hand all the while and wondering what exactly I was supposed to do if we were attacked. I was seven and tiny. These days, I could pull out kickass self-defense skills but back then, all she did was scare me by saying that even the neighbourhood we lived in wasn't safe for a woman to walk during the night on her own.

Nothing happened, thankfully, but I still remember very clearly how I felt -- it was a combination of fear, helplessness and anger that I was directing at my mother just because I didn't know enough back then to understand that her fears were justified and that it really did help to have a small child who could at least be a witness or scream for help. I understand it now, but that's at least partly because an aunt of mine was recently attacked in broad daylight while walking home from the grocery store.

A man assaulted her, tried to pull off her gold chains and this happened right outside her house. Her family was in the house, and she was screaming, but they didn't hear her because they had the TV on. Some guys who worked as mechanics a few houses down heard the screaming and came to rescue her, chasing the guy off and then following him. A crowd of people apparently swarmed him as the two guys were yelling 'THIEF THIEF', and then they beat him up, and took him to the police station where he got beat up some more, with my aunt being told to not say she got the chain back because the police wanted to get heavy charges laid against the guy because this wasn't his first offense.

She ended up in hospital and needed surgery. She couldn't talk for ages; he had knocked her unconscious to stop her screaming and her head was bleeding.

This happened right outside her house.

The thought of ever going back to Sri Lanka terrifies me sometimes.

The district of Colombo that my father's side of the family lives in isn't as good as the distract my mother's side of the family inhabits (my father's from a lower-caste, oh noes!), but it really just re-emphasized the fact that Sri Lanka is not a good country in which to be a woman. And although there are good guys, like the two men that saved her, Sri Lankan men, overall, do nothing for me between the sexism and distrust of Westernized women.

I feel like a bad patriot. Or more accurate, I feel like a bad Asian chick but honestly, all those complaints (usually from Asian guys) about why Asian chicks prefer white guys? They're not necessarily trading up or trying to get rich quick, thanks. They might just like guys raised in a Western culture that they empathize with better than they like guys raised in a straitlaced society that they are trying to escape.

Is it possible to love your country without loving its culture? Captain America got blasted in the Civil War comics for not knowing what MySpace is, but I don't think that I need to love MySpace to love the ideals of America, even if I don't like seeing them be ignored. Sri Lankans are supposed to love cricket just because we won the World Cup back in '96, but I refused to watch it and read instead. As for Austria, I hated taking German classes and I still don't like the language.

They called it being a global citizen at the international high school that I attended but mostly, it feels like I don't belong anywhere.

My identity is fluid/I am a citizen of the Net.