The Perfect Race (?)

My dear friend Jerri knows how much I LOVE trashy magazines. I won’t buy a People magazine, but I will devour a re-gifted one in no time at all! Talk about a guilty pleasure.

Anyway, there was an article on one of The Hill’s stars (can’t recall her first name, but her picture is above) and it struck me as kind of sad. I stared at her before and after and I wondered, is there a perfect race?

Hitler and his evil regime certainly thought so. Throughout history we have killed people based on little more than their ethnic identity—hair color, eye color, skin color, the shape of one’s nose, eyes or lips. But why? And what of our generation? What do we consider beautiful, what do we consider ugly?

For generations Asians have tried to whiten up with creams and those with eye folds were considered beautiful. Asians have also begun to enjoy the many miracles of silicone and a skilled surgeon’s hands and they are beginning to create their own ideal.

White Americans have bleached their hair and burned their skin for the past 40 years while black Americans artificially straightened their hair.

I looked at Montag’s “after” photo and she looked the same as every other nameless beauty in Hollywood. She could easily be one of Heff’s girlfriends or a porn star (evidently she got significant implants and wants to go back for some triple somethings…).

It appears we are creating our own “race”. We are creating faces and bodies that don’t match with the rest of society and are based on some beauty equation that I don’t understand. Since our ideal isn’t real, why do we continue to try and attain it? What is it about us that pushes us to become something we are not, something unnatural?

I look at my son and his beautiful caramel skin and his almond shaped eyes and I wonder how these images will impact his life. As an Asian American what kind of pressures will he be under to conform? Will he be as comfortable about his skin or his body shape as I am? I am far from the ideal woman—brunette, pudgy and oh so pale. Duc will never look like most the Vietnamese he will meet and he will never have the lean frame typical of many Asians. I hope I will be able to teach him that he is beautiful even if he doesn’t fit the “ideal” of many Asians and many Americans.