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<#316 Spotlight>
Looking Good
 
By Robert David Grotjohn, Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature
 
This weekend, with a draft of this article already on my computer, I met with friends and family for dinner. In the group was an elementary-school girl whom I often see at such gatherings. Because I have been thinking about this article, I saw her with different eyes, or saw her eyes differently this time. I had never consciously noticed that she does not have double-folded eyelids. I thought that she is about to become a quite beautiful young woman, and that one of her most lovely features will be her eyes.
As the adults were chatting, she sat with us, drawing in her notebook. I saw that she is a very talented artist, but I also saw that no one in the drawings looked like her. All the female figures had very big, round eyes and v-shaped faces. She had clearly internalized the idea that attractive people look different from her. What will that do to her self-image? How long will it be until she feels pressured to change her eyes through cosmetic surgery? When will she begin to think that her beautiful Korean eyes are ugly? Who will encourage that feeling in her? When did being Korean start to mean being unattractive?
When I first came to live in Korea as a much younger man in 1981, a frequently-heard descriptive and derogatory term for white people was "kojaengi," which was usually translated as "big nose." Needless to say, western noses were not considered beautiful then. When I returned to live in Korea again in 2009, I noticed lots of western-style noses on Korean faces, lots of Koreans who looked more like kojaengi, nose-wise.
It used to think of cosmetic surgery as a procedure for aging movie stars, mostly female, or for people with disfigurements, congenital or accidental. These days, however, it seems to have become a more or less standard procedure for generally attractive, perfectly healthy young Korean people. Some estimates suggest that over half of college-age women in Korea have had some sort of cosmetic surgery. People get their eyes widened, their eyelids folded, their noses and breasts reshaped and enlarged, their jaws rebuilt, their faces reshaped. Why this rage for aesthetic medical procedures?
Perhaps, as Korea Times columnist Jon Heur argued in a 2009 column, Koreans are just not very good-looking people in their natural state. Heur compares the "heavenly beauty" of Korean (female) television and movie stars to the "incredibly plain" appearance of normal Korean women. He notes that surgically-enhanced "perfectly featured mothers" are "saddled with ugly-faced offspring." For him, "plain" shifts easily to "ugly," and ugly children become a kind of social burden. I am reminded of the student who saved her money from her part-time job to get double-eyelid surgery because her father often mocked her, asking how she could possibly see out of her narrow eyes.
Perhaps Heur was attempting irony, but it read more like what W. E. B. Du Bois identified as a kind of "double consciousness" in which non-white people measure themselves against white standards and find themselves lacking, inferior. It is an undeserved double-consciousness. I tested Heur's theory of natural Korean plainness by looking through my old photographs of Korean friends and students from the 1980s. Those were some good-looking people, just as good-looking as today's students, and they were good-looking Koreans not imitation Caucasians. A more prominent bridge on one's nose may be better in preventing one's glasses from sliding down one's face, but it does not make a person more beautiful, in my opinion, and sometimes those "cute" pointy noses are, well, just pointy. One danger of cosmetic surgery seems to be that some of the surgeons just are not very good at it. Too often, I see a nose or eyes or a jaw that doesn't even look natural much less movie-star beautiful.
I generally believe in "live-and-let-live," and I really have no particular problem with cosmetic surgery. If someone wants to change his or her appearance, that should be his or her own business. I do wonder about a society that puts so much pressure on people to conform to external standards of beauty, however. And that is not an exclusively Korean concern. The images of beauty that some Koreans internalize come from the West, and those images of beauty are also problematic for western women (and men). In the U.S., where I am from, those artificial standards of beauty too often lead to severe life-threatening diseases like bulimia and anorexia. If cosmetic surgery can give a person the self-confidence to avoid such problems, then he or she should have it.
It is easy to tell people that they should be happy with themselves as they are, that true beauty is inner beauty, but just telling someone to be happy cannot actually make them happy, not in a world that values external appearance so highly. We all make concessions to that world—I hate shaving every morning, but I do it because the professional world expects it. People who are considered good-looking, especially women, have more opportunities for success in the work world than do people who are considered unattractive, and these are challenging times to find work in Korea. I understand why someone would alter his or her looks for this practical purpose.
Cosmetic surgery is not just good for an individual's economic prospects it is also good for the Korean economy as a whole. People come from all over Asia as aesthetic-medical tourists. Come to Seoul, fix your eyes, go shopping in Myeongdong. That's not just good for the surgeons but for hotels and restaurants and merchants of all kinds. I am not sure that is good for the soul of the Korean people, however.
On the other hand, western advertising and popular culture seem to have decided what is good for the Korean appearance, and I am pretty sure another westerner (me) is not the one to decide what is good for the Korean soul. Heur wrote that "it is not uncommon for foreigners to notice that beautiful mothers are often accompanied by their rather not-so-beautiful children," grounding his perception as a Korean on what he thought about how westerners think about Koreans' appearance. Maybe more Koreans should think their own thoughts (just like more Americans should). Maybe all those thoughts will not be the same, and maybe there will be more desired variety in eyes and noses, traditional and modern, natural and enhanced. Maybe then my friend's daughter will see very clearly from her beautiful natural eyes, and she will see that those eyes are, indeed, beautiful.
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