Identity Crisis

I’m sure many of the students at ASL have moved around the world due to their parent’s job and have had to adjust to their new surroundings and culture. I have been moving to different places around the world since I was a baby and I can definitely say that moving is never easy. It sucks having to leave one place to another, saying goodbye to your family and friends, and leaving behind the good old memories and making new ones. Personally, the hardest thing for me when I moved from New York to Tokyo was finding my identity.

One of the toughest questions to answer is when people ask me where I am from. I lived in Indonesia for the first four years of my life, then moved back to Tokyo and spent three years, then moved to New York and spent seven years, then back to Tokyo for two years, and then here to London. It seems like a simple question but what’s the proper answer to that question?

Upon moving back to Tokyo from New York, I felt like a complete foreigner. I didn’t feel comfortable being in this new surrounding, I felt like I stood out from the crowd, and I didn’t feel like I blended in with the rest of the people. Attending an international school made it even harder for me to feel comfortable in the country where I was born and at times I felt like I was dishonouring my family because I would tell people that I was from New York, which to me back then seemed to be my home.

But when I moved to Europe in 2009, I was amazed to observe a melting pot of different ethnic groups: a sea of cultures ebbing and flowing through the city of London. This was the first time I felt comfortable with my identity because a few months after I moved to London, I began to miss everything about Japan and that’s when I realized my close attachment to Japan.

This identity crisis is something I share with the main character, Jasmine. Getting married young and being separated from her family at such a young age, she struggled with her thoughts about her identity. She was Jyoti to Hasnapur and Mataji but she soon became Jasmine to Prakash. But later when Hasnapur and Prakash died, she didn’t know who she was or what her purpose in life was.  

Lower Eastside Girl's Club in New York

Over the royal wedding weekend, I went on the Harlem Learning Trip with my community service group to get insights and ideas on how we can improve the Winchester Project from visiting similar organizations in New York.

One of the organizations we visited was the Lower Eastside Girl's Club which is a projects that addresses the lack of services and resources available to young girls and women. Through many activities and workshops in arts, science and technology, health and wellness, and literacy, this projects helps young girls and women find their individual skills and passion and continue to develop these interests to their full potential.

Our group was warmly welcomed by the members of the Girl's Club with a special performance by a singer who sang songs about raising awareness of violence against women and also to encourage women to stand up and defend for themselves. We then had a group of girls go on stage to talk about how the Girl's Club has helped them boost their self-esteem and how it has become a home for them. One of the girl's went on stage to talk about how she recently read The Vagina Monologue by Eve Ensler. Similar to what a lot of the people said in class, she mentioned how in the beginning she was uncomfortable to read a play on vaginas but once she began talking about it with her peers, she was empowered and it became a natural topic for everyone to talk about.She loved how the play was basically a conversation and she thought that creating this framework for sharing stories about embodied experiences is really important.

I definitely agree with her and I think Eve Ensler did a fantastic job in writing these play as if they were conversations she was having with the person she was interviewing. It created such a realistic atmosphere for the audience and I think that made it easier and more comfortable for everyone. I really liked how she introduced us to the word 'vagina' in a humoristic way because it allows her readers to become comfortable and encourages them to change for the better about female discrimination.

Cosmetic Surgery Gone Wrong

Han Hegyon Before

Han Hegyon After

In today’s society, beauty in a woman is measured by the size of their breast, the thinness of their waist and legs, the straightness of their legs and nose, and the thickness of their lips. Studies show that 60,000,000 women are dissatisfied with their noses, 30,000,000 do not like their chins, 6,000,000 do not like their ears, and 6,000,000 do not like their eyes. Women around the world are driven by the media and advertisements that encourage them to get cosmetic surgery to achieve society’s ‘perfect body’. At first cosmetic surgery was only reserved for those with physical deformities but as technology evolved, it has become an option for anyone who seeks to change their perfectly normal appearance. But is cosmetic surgery truly necessary?

A Korean woman named Han Hegyon was a beautiful young girl who dreamed of one day becoming a singer. She sang at nightclubs in hope that someone from the music industry would recognize her talent and give her a contract. But life wasn’t all that simple; she sang everyday for months and she had no luck in pursuing her music career until one day she found a flyer that called for all new singers to audition in Japan. Thinking this might be her breakthrough; she hopped onto a plane and headed to Japan, only to find herself singing at a nightclub there as well. She began to think that her failure to accomplish her dream was because of her appearance, her chin in particular.

Hegyon was always insecure about her chin. She thought the only part of the face people looked at was her chin because it was a square shape that stuck out the most. Putting aside her dream, she decided to get cosmetic surgery on her chin. She went to see a cosmetic surgeon to get silicone injections into her chin which would help to swell up her entire face so that her chin would not be recognizable as before. Although she hoped this would solve her complexion, the surgery didn’t help at all! In fact, she had to get the injections on a regular basis. Even though it was evident that every time she got the injections her face was getting bigger and fatter, she became psychologically unstable and crazy that the injections became an addiction. Her mother became terrified of her appearance that she kicked her out of her house and even the doctor became frightened.

While people around her tried to help her recognize what the injections had done to her beautiful face, she saw herself looking more beautiful and radiant every time she got the injections. Soon, her doctor didn’t want to see her anymore but she desperately begged him to give her more injections. Getting annoyed, the doctor gave her silicone and a needle and told her to do it on her own. She gladly took it home and began injecting silicone into her face. But a few weeks later, she ran out of silicone and urgently searched her house to replace the silicon. With no luck in finding silicone, her last option was to use vegetable oil. Hoping it would have the same effect as the silicone; she injected the needle into her chin but noticed a rather drastic change in her face. The vegetable oil hardened in her face that dragged her whole face down. She soon became the center of humiliation, leading her to become suicidal.

While I was reading the violence chapter of The Beauty Myth, it reminded me of the story of Han Hegyon because she was the victim of a cosmetic surgery that went terribly wrong. When Naomi Wolf pointed out that ‘the myth is not only making women physically ill, but mentally ill’ (229) and ‘the beauty myth seems to exist outside civilization: There is as yet no such thing as a limit’ (236), I quickly related this to Han Hegyon. She became psychologically unstable with her addiction escalating and she sure didn’t have a limit to what she was doing! This reveals what women would do and what they would put themselves through just to get her beauty recognized in society. I mean it’s not like there’s a judge out on every street that judges your beauty. So why are women so obsessed with becoming this perfect woman, which in reality doesn’t exist because no human being is perfect?  

I definitely agree that ‘Cosmetic surgical techniques appear to be developed in irresponsible medical experiments, using desperate women as laboratory animals’ (236) because women like Han Hegyon and other women who have had a terrible outcome of cosmetic surgery are treated like experimental animals. I’m not saying that all cosmetic surgeons treat their patients as lab animals because there are millions of patients who have had a great success in their surgery. However, many doctors won’t tell their patients the adverse effects of surgery because all they care about it how much money flows into their bank account.

It’s unfortunate to see the evolution of beauty. Women are no longer considered beautiful unless their skinny, have flawless skin, have big boobs, have a straight nose, have long legs, etc. And it’s even more depressing to see cosmetic surgeons treating their patients as if they were lab animals. It’s a shame to see the media and advertisements encouraging women to get cosmetic surgery to become society’s ideal ‘perfect woman’. ‘The surgeons say that “the benefits far outweigh the risks,” which is a value judgement about the relative importance of their version of “beauty” to that of a woman’s life.’ (263). Woman can’t let surgeons or the media or advertisements convince them that their not beautiful just because they’re not the ‘perfect woman’. No one is perfect. And those ‘perfect woman’ in advertisements only exist in the cyber world because they’re not real. They’re made up.

Interpretation of Beauty

What does the word beauty mean? Before reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, I considered beauty to be made up of both the inner and outer characteristics. The way someone looks or how someone presents themselves doesn’t make them beautiful, but it’s also who they are under their clothes and makeup. For me, I tend to judge people’s beauty more on their personality than their physical appearance. Anyone can try hard and make themselves pretty on the outside but it’s not always an easy task to make someone nice and loveable. 

Reading The Beauty Myth about the truth that goes on behind the advertisement industry and seeing the images of women on Killing Us Softly 4, concerned me about how these industries are dehumanizing women.  When Naomi Wolf talked about the sex discrimination case, I was struck when ‘the district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome’.’ (38). And I was also surprised when Naomi Wolf pointed out that ‘you can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup’ (39). So this leaves me with the question; how much is ‘too much makeup’ and ‘too’ revealing clothing? 

I have a friend in Japan who joined the modelling industry when she was just 14 years old. She was scouted on the streets of Tokyo one summer and was overwhelmed because it had been her dream to one day become a model. Her photographers commented on how pretty she always looked and were always pleased with the outcome of the photo shoot. But when she went to Hawaii for a bathing suit photo shoot, her photographer kept making offensive comments on how she had gained weight since the previous time they met and how he was planning on making her skin flawless on Photoshop because she had bad acne on her forehead. He kept on throwing pictures at her and yelled why she had to become ugly. She was so hurt by his repulsive comments that she became bulimic to the extent that her weight dropped from 88 pounds to an unhealthy 66 pounds. She even became depressed that she had to take some time off of school. But after two long difficult years of battling depression and bulimia, she headed towards a better future after she began seeing a psychiatrist. She began her new career as a strong activist to change the standards of the modelling world and to help young girls understand what true beauty really is. She hopes that one day, more and more people will understand the hell she had gone through so that no one else repeats what she did. She wants girls to know that the images of women in magazines are ‘unwomanly’ because they only exist in the cyber world.  

Hearing my friend’s story about her modelling career and watching Jean Kilbourne’s documentary made me really want to do something about the fashion industry and the effects media has on girls of all ages. People need to become aware of the truth or else they would fall into the same trap that many of us have fallen in. I agree that those women in those magazines are drop dead gorgeous. But we need to realize, no one has flawless skin like that. No one has perfect luscious hair or those killer legs. They’re all tweaked on Photoshop to mess with your mind that that is what beauty is supposed to be and that’s how all women should look like. I want everyone to know that no one is ugly. So what if you have acne problems, or you don’t have hair like those women on hair product commercials. We all have characteristics that make us all beautiful individually. And personally, I think beauty comes from within the heart, not just your physical appearance.

Baby, I Was Born This Way

Jean Kilbourne’s documentary, Killing Us Softly 4, lays out the societal consequences that result from the advertising and beauty industry ridiculing and objectifying the female body. She points out that many girls across the globe starve themselves to death because they want to look like the models in magazines. Women even pay thousands of money to get plastic surgery to make their breasts bigger, to remove their wrinkles, to look 10 years younger, to remove extra fat in their bodies, to make their lips bigger, to reshape their nose, etc. I’m sure we’ve all been at that stage in which we flipped through countless magazines and admired some of the models and wished you could be as skinny or as beautiful as her. But we all know the truth; no one, even those models in the magazines, don’t look like that. 

This film demonstrated how convincing it is for the advertising industry to send out negative messages that can affect women of all ages, such as eating-disorders, rape, murder, etc. Although we all live in a world with gender equality, watching this documentary made me realize that there still remains this stereotypical view of women as the weaker sex in a male dominated world. As we saw in the film, Jean Kilbourne showed a few pictures in which women were taken advantage by men. Men are usually portrayed as dominant, assertive, and powerful whereas women portrayed as innocent, passive, dependent human beings, and easy, which draws the idea that women are less human than men. Although this idea was very disturbing to me and hopefully for some other viewers, these advertisements appeal not only to male consumers but also to female consumers because it makes them believe that the ideal women (in those advertisements) is the way men would want women to be. The continuous use of women as sex objects to sell products disgusts me and seeing the images of women in the advertisements in the film terrified me. 

While watching this documentary, it made me think of Lady Gaga’s recent song, Born This Way, because she wants to send the message across to everyone in the world that no one should be pressured into thinking that they should change their appearance because everyone is beautiful, which is similar to what Jean Kilbourne wants people to believe in. The increase in the portrayal of women as sex objects in advertisements has been increasing in the last 50 years and if this violence against women and the objectification of women’s body continues, we might end up going back in time of male superiority. Consumers around the world have become obsessed with becoming this perfect woman like the ones in advertisements, who actually exists only in the Photoshop world. I think it’s great that people like Lady Gaga, who has a tremendous influence on women of all ages, is helping women realize that they are beautiful, just the way they are.

Flight Attendants or Models?

Reading the first reading assignment for The Beauty Myth reminded me of mom’s close friends who worked as a flight attendant at a Japanese airline a few years ago until they were fired for being ‘too old’ at the age of 30.

During their job interview, they were not only judged based on their quality of work, but also their physical appearance: beauty. One of them thought they were competing in some beauty competition because they were told to walk in a single line, as a model would do in a fashion show, and they even had to do their entire makeup in front of the judges.  One thing I found surprising was how the uniforms only came in certain sizes; extra small and small. And then I wondered what happened to those applicants who couldn’t get the job because of their weight, even though they were very much capable of doing an excellent job.

I thought this tied in to what Naomi Wolf pointed out on page 33, ‘a woman can be fired for not looking right, but looking right remains open to interpretation’. Why did the airline care so much more about beauty than their performance? Shouldn’t the airline hire employees who can perform their tasks well and not people who are beautiful and skinny? I’m pretty confident to say that passengers would rather have flight attendants who can perform their jobs at the very best than those who could be a model in a fashion show.

Some of my mom’s friends were accepted and worked as flight attendants until they were fired at the age of 30, but a few of them were rejected. After spending months of training and studying and all the effort they put into for their dream job, was crushed, all because they were either too fat or weren’t as pretty as the other applicants. They lost their self esteem and hope, and one of them even got depression and had to see a therapist! I mean don’t you think this is just ridiculous? Jobs like these as well as the fashion industry and show business encourages women to lose weight and get plastic surgery. Naomi Wolf reveals on page 52 that ‘urban professional women are devoting up to a third of their income to ‘beauty maintenance,’ and considering it a necessary investment’. Why can’t women just feel happy the way they are? I think it’s such a shame for women to have to undergo plastic surgery for society to accept them.

Although society has been making it hard on women to be comfortable for who they are, I know that if women were able to fight for their equality, they can also fight for society’s acceptance.

Obaachama

I was anxious to go back to Tokyo this spring break to see my family and friends but unfortunately because of the recent earthquake and tsunami that hit the northern part of Japan and with the devastating problem of the nuclear power plant, my family had to cancel our trip. I was hoping to sit down and talk to my grandma and interview her life and everything she’s been through, but instead I skyped her. I titled this post Obaachama, meaning grandmother in Japanese. 

To be honest, I’m not close with my dad’s side of the family. I used to live in Tokyo whereas my grandma lived in Osaka, a 3 hour train ride away from Tokyo. So I never get to see her that often and in fact, the last time I saw her was about 4 years ago! But thanks to technological advancement, we get to video chat via Skype. 

During this interview, I was actually quite upset because there was so much about my grandma that I never knew about. We never had a conversation about her life and it was so fascinating to hear all the stuff she had done in the past and the challenges she faced living in a male dominated society. 

One of the things I noticed during this interview was when she was describing her mother’s daily life. She recalls her mother cleaning the house, taking care of all her 6 children, and preparing meals for her husband because that was her role; women weren’t allowed to work. She remembers seeing her mother eating leftovers from their husband’s meals because they had to prioritize their husband’s needs before theirs. Her mother was a loving, caring mother who gave up her meals for her 6 children during WWII when resources were scarce. My grandma looks up to her as a role model and respects her for all the sacrifices she had to make in raising all her children and being able to send all of them to a two-year college. 

She sees a great difference between her girlhood and the lives of girls today and she believes it’s changing for the better. Girls today have far more freedom than girls during her time because they are able to have part time jobs and make money for themselves. Girls today live a more independent lifestyle whereas before, most girls had very strict curfews, strict parents, and were restricted on things they wanted to become because they were expected to marry young and have a family of their own. Although she says women’s status has changed for the best, she believes that girls as well as boys today don’t appreciate the things they have because Japan is rich in resources and they can have whatever they want, whenever they want. 

During the interview when asking about the difficulties during her young adulthood, I could really tell that my grandma had a rocky and difficult relationship with her mother-in-law. She was very strict and they both had very different opinions so they didn’t get along very well. She didn’t have anyone to talk to or seek anyone for comfort because all of her 3 sons went off to Tokyo for high school and college. She kept all her frustration inside of her for a very long time and at one point of the interview, she became very emotional because she was telling me how she just wanted to escape and be on her own. But soon after, her father-in-law past away and things began to change because they worked on their relationship and soon enough, they became closer than ever and even lived under the same roof. 

I actually enjoyed interviewing my grandma because we bonded for the first time in a really long time and it made me feel a lot closer to my grandma. This assignment wasn’t something that I felt like I had to do just because it was homework, but it was a way to connect with my grandma. I learned so much about her that I’ve never known and it made me really want to talk to her more.