Until very recently, Asian American women have been virtually ignored by the U.S. beauty industry. Although a few Asian American beauty icons were recognized in the cinema of the 1920s and ’30s, even those who managed to find some success in the United States tended to be pigeon-holed into certain stereotypes. Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, managed to break into films in her late teens. In 1922, at the age of 17, she won the lead role in the first color feature to be made in Hollywood, The Toll of the Sea. In it, Wong played Lotus Flower, a young woman who rescues a white man from the sea. In a Madame Butterfly, Pucciniesque turn, the two fall in love and he promises to take her home with him. But his xenophobic friends prevent him from doing so, and the Asian woman is left behind. When they meet years later, too much has changed for them to ever reunite. By 1924, Wong had appeared in enough films to be recognized internationally and be revered as a style icon. She continued to star in major films, including Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich, but Wong was frustrated with the stereotypical roles—either Dragon Lady or Butterfly— she was offered in Hollywood.
She received her most devastating blow when studio heads refused her the role of O-Lan in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth; it was offered instead to Luise Rainer, a white woman who played the lead in yellow face.
Other Asian American women found some success, including Nancy Kwan, a biracial actress, whose first role was as a Hong Kong prostitute who mesmerized a white artist in Richard Quine’s 1961 film adaptation of The World of Suzie Wong. In 1962, Kwan played Linda Low, a manipulative and seductive Chinese American showgirl involved in a complicated arrangement of affiances and affairs in Henry Koster’s Flower Drum Song. Her roles in these two movies solidified her status as a sex symbol, and her Vidal Sassoon asymmetrical bob helped make her a style icon for the 20th century. Asian American women became increasingly visible in the 1990s and 2000s, with Margaret Cho, Tamlyn Tomita, Connie Chung, Ming-Na Wen, Lucy Liu, Parminder Nagra, Sandra Oh, Lisa Ling, Padma Lakshmi, Vanessa Hudgens, and others earning more lead roles, more prime-time specials, and more minutes in front of the camera than before.
Growing Visibility And Markets
The relative lack of Asian Americans on television and in film and the selection of those who are fortunate enough to appear are linked to the conceptions of beauty and aesthetics in the United States. The overwhelming cultural imperative to define beauty as something that is inherently Caucasian and therefore out of reach for most people of color has informed the advertising campaigns of the beauty industry, the development of goods and products, and the availability and popularity of treatments and surgeries that physically alter the human body. Most recently, the beauty industry has begun to recognize the incredible consumer voice and buying power of the Asian American public, and a concerted effort has been made on the part of certain cosmetics giants to tap into a large and profitable market.
Skin-lightening creams are among the most popular cosmetic and skin-care product purchases in East Asia. The contrast between pale skin, dark hair, and red lips is an aesthetic that has historically permeated Asian art and aesthetics. From the white makeup of the Geisha to the use of nightingale droppings to clarify skin, Asian women have valued a lighter skin tone as a sign of social status and beauty. Since the 1970s, Asian beauty companies have been producing products that promise to fulfill this desire for paler, fairer complexions. While the products were geared for the Asian market, as recognition of the growing Asian American demographic grew, the number of products offering brightening increased in the United States.
Susan Yee, the founder and president of Zhen cosmetics, was one of the first entrepreneurs to create a line of cosmetics designed to fit the needs of the women with skin with yellow undertones. In 1994, Yee and her sisters developed beauty products that they thought would best complement Asian American women—and they soon became popular via word of mouth among young Asian Americans who were frustrated with unflattering makeovers at department stores, where the sales staff did not know how to enhance East Asian features such as the single-lid eye.
Cosmetic Surgery
The perception that Asian features are unattractive and unappealing has led to an increase in cosmetic surgery procedures that specifically target Asian Americans and, in particular, Asian American women. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted that in 2004–5, Asian American plastic surgery patients increased by 58 percent. As an Asiancemagazine.com article cited, in 2006, Asian Americans accounted for 6 percent of all cosmetic surgery patients in the United States. Among the most popular surgical procedures requested by Asian Americans were rhinoplasty, breast augmentation, and eyelid surgery. An entire website, Asiancosmeticsurgery.com, is dedicated to the various procedures that might fix specific Asian American features. It has been noted that the idea that Asian Americans traditionally asked for procedures that would make them look more Caucasian made the discussion of plastic surgery taboo. The eyelid surgery, blepharoplasty, by which a single lid eye is made more Caucasian by stitching a double lid crease permanently into the eyelid, is the number one plastic surgery procedure in Asia and is fast growing in the United States. In 2000, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reported that 125,000 blepharoplasty procedures were performed in the United States. As plastic surgeons have become more aware of the changing demography of their patient groups, some have become more sensitive to Asian American concerns and more open to tailoring procedures specifically to Asian Americans. For example, plastic surgeons use Botox injections to reduce wrinkles in many Caucasian women—in East Asian women, the same injections can be used to relax the masseter muscle of the jaw, thus creating a more streamlined jawline and reducing the lower half of the face. As well, plastic surgeons have become more aware of sensitive skin, scarring, and hyperpigmentation, especially among South Asians.
While in the United States, Asian Americans are discussing the meaning behind these physical transformations, the masking of ethnicity, the whitening of race; in Asia, the stigma of being labeled a sell-out is not as pronounced. With the increased awareness of the concerns and desires of Asians, plastic surgery procedures have also become more radical and more controversial. Most at issue is a newly developed Korean procedure to reduce the size and thickness of Asian women’s legs. The term Daikon legs, a reference to a long, thick radish popular in Asian kitchens, describes a perceived aesthetic problem for Asian women by which they look shorter and more obese because of their thick legs. In an attempt to create longer, more Western legs, Asian women are having muscle fiber removed from their calves according to the patient’s desired calf shape, reducing the bulk of the gastrocnemius muscles. Another extreme procedure, leg lengthening surgery, was just recently banned in China, despite its growing popularity. In China, being taller is seen as a sign of beauty, conforming to more Western ideas of height and body type. The procedure entailed the breaking of the patient’s legs and the insertion of steel pins into the bones just below the knees. The pins were attached to a metal frame that the patient could tighten little by little, constantly forcing the ends of the broken bones apart so that new bone would fill in the gaps, creating more length at the price of excruciating pain.
Resisting Stereotypes
Calvin Sun recently directed a documentary on Asian American standards of beauty titled Asian American Beauty: A Discourse on Female Body Image (2007). In the short film, Sun examines the inconsistencies of defining Asian American beauty. In the director’s notes to the film, he writes: “We also must reveal the contradiction of how Asian American girls are pressured in this society to look both ‘western’ and ‘Asian.’ ” He highlights the tension between “play[ing] up this well-known image of looking innocent, weak, and petite as ‘attractive’ ” and the construction of the mainstream media “depict[ing] Asian American females as alluring, ‘exotic,’ and ‘sexy.’ ” In the film, Sun examines not only the beauty constructs that are more specific to Asian Americans, he seeks to expand the more general discussion of female body issues, psychological concerns, and eating disorders to include Asian American women, a group that has usually been ignored or rendered peripheral in these discussions.
Although Asian American models still play a relatively small role within beauty campaigns, Asian Americans have become increasingly present as workers within the beauty industry itself. Korean and Japanese hair salons have popped up in most major cities—New York, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Chicago—specializing in treatments that have been made popular in Asian countries and are now available to Asian Americans. Chemical hair processes such as Japanese hair straightening, Japanese thermal conditioning, Korean permanents, and Japanese digital perms have recently become popular among a younger Asian American clientele. Even more pervasive have been the nail salons that have opened across the country, owned and operated by Asian Americans, especially Vietnamese Americans. The ubiquitous Asian American–owned and operated nail salon is so popular an image that it appeared in a Seinfeld episode titled “The Understudy,” first broadcast May 18, 1995. The character of Elaine, convinced that the Korean nail technician is talking about her behind her back in Korean, asks Mr. Costanza, fluent in Korean after his experiences in the Korean War, to accompany her and eavesdrop on the women. Even more recently, Sex and the City featured the August 8, 1999 episode “The Caste System,” in which the four women argue about the existence of a class system in the United States as they are having their feet serviced by Asian American workers.
Asian American women especially, but also Asian American men, have had to confront deep-seated misconceptions about immigration, integration, and unassimilability. The supposed interchangeability of people of East Asian descent, the assumption of close ties to the mother country, and cultural stereotypes about the Orient and Orientals have contributed to a larger call by Asian Americans for recognition and political and cultural voice. To that end, a number of glossy print magazines have attempted to provide a medium for Asian American voices. Some of the initial attempts met with financial difficulty—magazines such as the now defunct A Magazine, Yolk, and Noodle attempted to meet the needs of young, hip Asian Americans and found that the market had not yet developed and advertisers were not convinced of profitability. Today, magazines such as Hyphen, Audrey, and AsianWeek bring Asian American issues and concerns to the forefront and allow Asian Americans to better control and contribute to their cultural space.
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