Mistaken Identity

Yeah, yeah, I know- all white guys look the same.

My students and many people I have met in Taiwan and Korea all seem to have the same compulsion: to tell me that I look like someone else. In Korea I was consistently compared to David Beckham. Week after week we'd get new students and they all called me Beckham. I'm very flattered, but I don't see the resemblance- I'm much more handsome and toned than David Beckham. In Taiwan, it's been a mixed bag of comparisons. Maybe I've aged, but the first person I was compared to here was Richard Gere, who has to be close to 40 years older than me!! I've also been told I look like Heath Ledger, and just this last Thursday my boss saw an old picture of me with longer hair and said that I looked just like BEETHOVEN. Beethoven?!! Perhaps I need to update my style if I look that much like an 18th century composer.

Maybe the most flattering comparison I've heard is that I look like Melodie. Our boss has said this several times and she's even interrupted me in the middle of a conversation to tell me that she feels like she's looking into Mel's eyes when she talks to me. My eyes aren't shaped like little blue slits, but okay. She said that in Taiwan people believe that as couples age together they start to look more like each other and I think this is kind of cool. Cooler than looking like Richard Gere, anyway.

Just for the heck of it I submitted my picture to My Heritage, a website that compares your picture to a database of celebrity photos and guess who I look the most like? Mr. Jet Li. Maybe I've been in Asia too long.