i. I was a pretty child. The type of pretty that ensured that for every street of Seoul my mom would push me down in a stroller, there’d be a passerby who’d look over and begin to coo.
“너무 예쁘다!” // “She’s so pretty!”
“인형처럼 생겼어요!” // “She looks like a doll!”
“남편이 외국사람이에요?” // “Is your husband a foreigner,” they’d ask my mom, excitement visible in their eyes. They were sure, after seeing my pale skin, light brown hair, and big, round eyes, that I was not fully Korean. Something different. Something exotic.
Soon enough, my mom was offered a child modeling gig which she immediately declined. Her mother-in-law, though, quickly decided I was destined for greatness. Her plan for me was:
I no longer live in Korea, speak Korean well, nor do I meet the height requirement to even enter Miss Korea. My hair and skin have darkened, my chin has jutted down and outwards, and my eyes have thinned like someone grabbed them by their edges and pulled. I like to think it’s my body trying to make up for lost time; That after years apart from my motherland, spent resenting my features and yearning for the cascading blond hair and blue eyes I saw on TV, it decided to take matters into its own hands. Nobody in America asks me if I’m a foreigner—they know.
When I was younger, I used to have a nightmare. A nightmare that upon reuniting with her in Korea, my grandmother would hold me by the shoulders, look me up and down, and grimace. She’d shake her head, unable to mask the disappointment and pity in her eyes, and wonder where the future pageant queen she’d once held in her arms went.
Now, I have a different nightmare. In it, I walk up to her in a busy airport and tap her on the shoulder. She turns around and smiles, it doesn’t reach her eyes. She opens her mouth.
“아, 죄송한데 제가 아는 분인가요?” // “Sorry, do I know you?”
***
ii. When I was 13, after carefully examining my face, my dad lovingly rubbed my shoulder and said he would pay for any plastic surgery I wanted after high school. It’s a common tradition in Korea for parents to give their children cosmetic surgery upon graduation. To grant their child the gift of beauty and thus hope for a better job, marriage, kids, and life.
At 14, my biggest wish in life was for the snipping tool from Microsoft to exist in real life. Within the comforts of my room, I’d trace my finger around the innards of my face and imagine the excess skin and bones outside the small, delicate outline I’d drawn, completely melting off. I’d bring both index fingers up to my face and starting from right below my ears, drag them downwards till they met at a perfectly pointed V.
Instead, I simply settled on waiting for my 18th birthday.
I spent hours standing in the mirror—poking, prodding, and pulling back skin, trying to envision what my new face would look like. I had a checklist of all the operations I was planning on undergoing. Ones that would rid me of my giant forehead, monolids, slightly crooked nose, and sticky-outy ears (which earned me the affectionate accolade of “Dumbo” from my parents).
But the one I anticipated the most was the one that would fix my long and “manly” chin. It was the one my dad anticipated the most, too.
We were lying next to each other when I turned to him to ask what we’d eat for dinner, and he lightly caressed my jaw. With a sad smile reserved for funerals of distant relatives or whenever I cried, he looked at me and wistfully said, “You’d be perfect if it weren’t for that chin.”
When I brought it up to my mom a few days later, she told me it was because he felt bad. That he felt guilty for passing on his chin to me. “The surgery, it’s- it’s his way of apologizing. Of making amends.”
My dad was also a pretty child. Pale, round-eyed, and rosy-cheeked, he had been adored by everyone around him. By the time he’d entered high school, his hair and skin had darkened, his chin jutted down and outwards, and pimples littered his face (I often poked my fingers inside the small, lasting dents they’d left on his cheeks). His face had morphed into one unrecognizable from his past but eerily similar to mine.
With my head in her lap, I pushed down a bubbling wave of guilt in my stomach and looked up at her.
“What if I turn out like… him?”
I felt her fingers scour my scalp, looking for new gray hairs to pull out. “You won’t. Everyone is ugly in middle school. They’re ugly as teens and become pretty in college.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do. And it’s different for girls anyways.”
“But what if it doesn’t get better? What if I’m…” I swallowed down a wave of horrible discomfort and near nausea.
“Then you learn how to do makeup. You learn how to style your hair.”
“But I don't want to do that. I want to naturally, like really be—”
“Then get surgery.” I fell silent at the agitation in her voice. I yelped as she pulled out another hair.
She sighed. “Why do you have so many? It’s because you’re stressed. Don’t stress about this. You’ll be pretty in college, that’s what happens to girls. Remember, beauty is pain.”
***
iii. I always imagined that once I turned 18, something big would happen. The kind of movie makeover metamorphosis that nerdy girls in chick flicks from the early 2000s always underwent was the stuff of dreams. The idea that I had had some special, transformative beauty inside me all along, waiting to be unlocked and revealed to the world, had been what had kept me going all those years.
I’ve grown a little taller and no longer look (as much) like a child trying to wear an adult’s skin, but to be honest, I don’t think much has changed.
One of my better life realizations is that trends are
As of late, complaints about my giant forehead have been met with a stream of scandalized Korean.
“What? You know how many people would kill to have a forehead like yours?”
“Yea! People pay thousands of dollars for a forehead like that and you got it for free! You have no idea how lucky you are.”
I wish I had something to say back to them. I wish the idea of having something “people would kill” for, didn’t make me feel giddy. I wish that a good or bad hair day wasn’t enough to make or break my whole week.
Last night, my mom apologized. She said it was her and my dad’s fault for obsessing so much over my appearance when I was young. She compared me to a war general, yearning for the glory-filled days of his past and struggling to accept the invisibility of mundane life. “You wouldn’t care this much if you'd just been ugly.”
I insisted that she was wrong, that my lifelong fear of becoming the reverse ugly duckling would’ve been there anyways, was always there.
She shook her head and brushed strands of hair out of my face. “Someone who’s never had it, won’t care. But with you, it’s like… it’s like you fell in. You fell in and you’ve been trapped ever since.”
If there’s one thing those chick flicks got right, it’s that insecurity never really goes away. Except now, instead of a constant, merciless barrage of waves, it’s ripples in a pond. They’re easier to ignore but they linger. All it takes is one small rock, a bad selfie or a glance in the mirror that lasts a little too long, to set the whole pond in motion.
I had a dream, a new one this time. I stand in a white room brimming with emptiness. A man who radiates the feeling of being the only person in the room in on a joke stands behind me. He casts no reflection in the mirror. He hands me a scalpel and nudges me forward.
As I step closer, I think to myself that I have no idea what I actually look like.
My left eye is lower than my right. This is my face.
My hairline is shaped like the East Coast. This is the face I was born with.
My chin is too long. This is the face I will die with.
I close my eyes and tenderly clutch the scalpel’s handle with both hands. I press the flat side of its blade against my cheek. It’s warm.
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