Everyone seems to think they know something about me based on my looks

This is sick! Few weeks ago, my boyfriend had someone going up to him at uni asking him if his girlfriend was an Indian...and once a Thai woman in China quickly brought up the topic of Aborigines in Tasmania as soon as I was introduced to her by a white friend who said, "we're from Tasmania". Sick! Am i simply getting more tanned than ever?? Sigh. For more of such sick examples, Read on...

• My teacher in Tasmania once told me that I have interesting facial features and he wondered where I came from, 3 yrs later he was still asking about it but by asking who my ancestors were.
• A librarian at the university told me something about my features too saying that they are rather outstanding, which was why he could recognize me in whatever I wear.
• But a friend told me a couple of times that my appearance changes when I wear different things. He said I transformed into something else with what I put on.
• My Sustainable Cities tutor has asked me again and again and recently stressing on where I had originally come from.
• My lecturer who once taught in a university in Singapore was surprised to learn that I had come from Singapore and soon he asked me again of my origin.
• A Mexican friend had an idea of what a Singaporean looks like drawing from my facial appearance and ended up saying that the Mongolians selling veggie at Sal’s are Singaporeans.
• A dentist in Australia thought I came from where she had come from: Vietnam
• In China, people make guesses of where I come from: 10 times of Thailand, 5 times of China, 1 x America, 1 x Canada, 1 x Malaysia
• In Melbourne, some people asked me, “Are you from where we are from?” So I replied, “Where are you from?” They answered, “Myanmar”
• A Singaporean Malay guy I met at a party in Tasmania was shocked to know that I’m just another Malay, all the while thinking I was probably from somewhere else in Southeast Asia
• My boyfriend who once saw me walking with another Malay girl shrieked, “Hey! You look so Malay!” but upon seeing my two sisters, said I could pass off as an adopted child. *Okay, this is a bad analogy*
• A girl from The Netherlands said many times to me that I look so Indonesian.
  

I learn that as we leave our small world and meet new people particularly people from places we do not come from, different people somehow see (literally) us differently (in this sense appearance-wise); some will see us as individuals - accepting our looks and our origin as two different things - but most will actually see us as collective group of people, drawn from our facial features, impulsively linking us to assumed societies and biased cultural background knowledge that they may possess. In that i discover too that as much as my facial features indicate where i should necessarily belong, it also tells me that it is to a large extent that i can manipulate the world by just my facial appearance.