Beauty

Buckle your seat belt - here's a not-as-light-hearted-as-usual post...

I teach teenage girls.  I remember being a teenage girl (it wasn't all that long ago after all) and the inevitable stresses that go with it.  That was in small town Iowa where appearances are important, but not as important as your character and work ethic.  In Korea, where image and physical appearance mean everything, those stresses are magnified.  In a big, big way.  It breaks my heart to see this stress play out on an everyday basis, but it is a reality of Korea.  Plain and simple.  In Korea, beauty means being slim and having big eyes, a small face, and pale skin.  If someone doesn't fit that bill, what do they do?  They make themselves fit that bill.  Diets (one of my girls told me that "diets are every girl's forever homework" - which simultaneously made me laugh and broke my heart), skin whitening serum, face wash, etc., and in many cases, plastic surgery, both seemingly minor and major procedures.

There is an obsession with eyes especially.  Yesterday, one of my students, who has told me on multiple occasions that she has a complex over her sparse eyebrows, got them tattooed.  For some reason, when she told me she was going ahead with the procedure this weekend, I was shocked and oddly terrified for her.  Since I have tattoos, I wasn't concerned for the pain she would endure (it's not as bad as you might think...); I think I was more weirded out by the fact that she was A) tattooing her FACE and 2) she's only 15 years old and if the vanity-related insecurities are being bowed to now, how much else will she seek to fix before she is satisfied?  I just hope that this minor procedure doesn't open the door to more serious surgeries down the road...  I'm such a worrier.

A more popular topic: I had never noticed this before coming to Korea, but "Western" eyes have a crease between the eye lid and the brow bone, often referred to in English as a double eye lid or eye line.  Many Asians don't have such a crease, which creates a constant source of envy among Korean girls.  There are even products that are sold in beauty stores to create the crease - plastic, shiny band-aid type stickers to create the illusion, and even crazier - glue.  When those products don't create the desired effect, girls turn to (guess what?) a surgical procedure in which a slit is cut above the eye lid to produce a scar that creates the illusion of the double eye lid or eye line.  Several of my students have had this procedure done and for me, the jury is still out.  The girls (and many teachers) who have had it done don't look much different to me, but if it gets rid of that complex of theirs, then, whatever.  But, seeing fresh surgeries was enough to turn me off any kind of cosmetic surgery.  Girls came back to school from winter vacation - and summer vacation will likely produce the same results - with these painful looking, nasty, red puffy injuries on their eyes that looked like they were on the receiving end of a broken beer bottle.  Sometimes they don't heal properly and, like one of my third grade students, infection spreads to their eye.  To take a beautiful Korean eye and try to morph it into a more Western ideal not only freaks me out a little, but it tugs at my heartstrings in a big way. 

So anyway, this topic is never far from my mind as I watch these young women come into their own and negotiate who they are and what is important to them.  Dionne and I have talked about it on several occasions but it wasn't until YouJong told me about her eyebrow procedure and I watched the video posted below that I really thought about how high-stakes beauty is in this culture.  Korea is a beautiful, majestic place, but it certainly isn't without its flaws.  I guess this is the one that continually sneaks into my thoughts...

I came across this documentary project that was initially about Korean education but, once filming began, morphed into something much more - a study of Korean "hahn" and all this complicated concept entails.  (Follow the link above to get a full explanation of hahn.)  I cannot wait for this documentary to be released.  I think this project is not only eye opening (no pun intended :) ), intriguing and interesting but also a really important dialogue for the way we see ourselves - Korean or not.  Enjoy.