My quest for a safer skin colour

This pandemic has revealed the valour and goodness of mankind - we have all read about the amazing sacrifices of very brave people from healthcare workers who willingly exposed themselves to danger to a priest in Italy who died after he passed up his right to a ventilator in favour of a young patient who had no ventilator. Sadly, the pandemic has also showed up the worst of human racism. There have been numerous reports of attacks on ethnic Chinese people or people who look Chinese. 

It is easy to understand why such racist attacks are happening. Everyone knows Communist China is solely responsible for this pandemic. It's one thing to be the source of the pandemic; it's quite another thing to behave abominably. China tried very hard in the early months to put the blame for the coronavirus on the US and later, it even tried to put the blame on Italy as the origin of the virus. China had a massive coverup when it first detected the outbreak. It punished severely the whistleblowers, it encouraged its citizens to go abroad but at home, it locked down Wuhan so that a resident of Wuhan (the epicentre of the viral outbreak) could not leave Wuhan for other parts of China but he could fly all over the world, spreading the virus everywhere. China accused countries that sought to close its borders to Chinese tourists of 'hostile behaviour towards China'. I remember that because my country didn't dare to offend China and did not close its border to China until the US did so and we followed immediately after. 

And what is more, China very cleverly identified itself with the rest of the ethnic Chinese people everywhere and did not hesitate to play the race card and brand as racists those who called the virus the 'Wuhan virus'. Of course governments in the West, ever sensitive to any charge of racism however ill-founded it may be, complied with China's demands. The effect of all this is that ethnic Chinese people are seen as indivisibly one and the same as that rogue state China, which is of course nonsense. Many of us hate Communist China with a passion. But I have been called a racist for calling the coronavirus 'Wuhan virus'!!!  Because most people in the West don't understand Chinese, they do not know that Taiwan continues to call it the 'Wuhan virus' and the 'Wuhan pneumonia' to this very day. See the website I screenshot today from the Taiwan government's CDC. The words I've circled in red read 'Wuhan pneumonia':

Even now, China continues to behave like the thug that it is. It's been more than a year since China covered up the pandemic from the world but its behaviour continues to stink. It has unleashed a whole string of economic sanctions against Australia for asking the UN to trace the origin of the virus. 

All this has an extremely negative impact on those of us who are ethnic Chinese or who look Chinese even though we have nothing to do with China. There have been many reports of violence against Oriental looking people. That means fair-skinned Asians. If you are ethnic Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you are now the target of increased racially motivated violence because of China's evil excesses. 

My friend and I who are planning to travel again as soon as the pandemic is over are thinking of telling everyone we meet that we're Thai or Vietnamese (2 Asian racial groups Europeans are familiar with). But that's not easy to pull off. For an East Asian to pose as a non-Oriental Asian, one has to be much darker in complexion. Without a sufficiently dark complexion, an Asian is easily thought of as Chinese and the problem with xenophobes is they won't stop to ask you if you're Chinese before they land a punch on your face.

I view ethnicity as an artificial construct and I certainly don't want to get into trouble because of that.

Although I have been sunning myself regularly, I don't think I have achieved the same sort of tan that I had last year after a series of nude hiking in Austria and Germany. Just look at this photo taken on 31 July 2019:

Except for my feet which didn't get the sun because of my boots,
the rest of my body is deeply tanned.

I think I can pass off as a Pacific Islander or a Thai or a Malay with this tan. That's the beauty of nude hiking - you get a complete tan except for your feet unless you go about barefoot which I can't.

Here's a pic I took this afternoon, almost a year and a half after my nude hiking last year.  Even though the tropical sun has done its work, I doubt very much I can pass myself off for a Thai or a Malay. This is not a safe skin colour for me to go tramping round the globe in when you consider the current climate when some people may confuse their understandable anti-China sentiment with their anti-Chinese racism.