Digicam delusions of beauty

Everyone knows about the typical Asian girl webcam or digicam shots. She looks up, her eyes are inexplicably large, her face is pale, due to the light shining directly onto her face, and her expression includes kissy lips or some sad, save-me type look. I was watching an episode of a Taiwanese talk show today, and lo and behold, their topic was girls who put up these amazingly cute webcam pictures up on their webpages (their versions of myspace, I suppose), and then look… sometimes shockingly different in real life. They brought out 7 girls, showing their pictures first and bringing out the girls afterwords, and the disparity was really rather jarring. I admit I’ve taken webcam pictures of myself, and I admit to having used the light factor to make my skin look clearer (though rarely paler, because I don’t subscribe to the skin-as-pale-as-tofu belief system), but these girls were pros. Absolute pros- they used the contacts with the black circle around the pupil to make their eyes look bigger; they used completely different hairstyles to make their wider faces look small; they used kissy lips to avoid showing off a rather scary set of buck teeth and to create an illusion of cheekbones. What is it about Asian society that makes these girls think that this makes them look good? Is it the need to look more Western, or to look like the ubiquitous anime or cartoon characters, or something completely unrelated? There’s barely a need to mention that all of these girls are as thin as the anorexic girls you see profiled on MTV or something, since that seems to be the overwhelmingly popular trend throughout Asia. This has seeped into Taiwanese culture, with stars like Cyndi Wang, Fanfan, and Angela Chang revealing skeletal bodies whenever they come out in public. I suppose you can’t fault them because they cave to the pressures of society and believe in everything my aunt has told me about being pretty. It’s not a different brand of conformity, just of a slightly different nature. Their audience isn’t looking for the slutty outfits; they’re looking for the big eyes and pale skin, and they know what sells. It’s interesting to see this seep into the United States, though. I’ve browsed my share of Xangas and Facebook pictures to know that Taiwanese-American girls, along with many other Asian girls, take these types of webcam pictures of themselves. In this very different world, do these pictures still have an impact? There must be, or they wouldn’t continue to take these pictures. It’s certainly strange to see this trend seep across the Pacific, into this world of fake tans and bikini shots, and still manage to have such a hold on the Asian-American female population. Karen personally likes taking scary pictures of herself and her friends and specializes in contorting her mouth in particularly heinous positions. She is otherwise, however, a non-threatening specimen of a Taiwanese-American girl. She can be reached at karen_shih at yahoo.com

Humble Beginnings

My mother was 23 when she came to the States. The only other person she knew here was my dad, who had gotten here six months before. They lived in Albuquerque, NM while they finished up their masters degrees and got their English down. Before long, they were married, degreed up, and ready to head out. By that time, they had one friend in LA and one friend in NYC. They flipped a coin and headed East, my Dad driving all they way (except for in Oklahoma and Ohio, or where ever it was flat). For about 5 years, they lived near where my dad was working at a lab alongside getting his PhD in Nuclear Physics, or something of that sort. My mom was toiling away sometimes at the lab, and then some times babysitting, and sometimes temping at Sumitomo Trust Bank. She had gotten her undergrad degree in Literature and her overgrad degree in Special Education, but neither were really getting her anywhere for the time being. It was a hard life for two young Taiwanese, scraping by in New York City, but they stuck it out. At some point, they decided they were ready to have a baby. It was time, and they could afford it. Despite living in an expensive town on objectively meager salaries, my parents had the advantage of being Taiwanese, part of the DNA structure which includes this amazing ability to save money despite the odds. She loves telling me how she saved 70% of their income, on top of managing to feed themselves, their landlord, and her immense taste for clothing and shoes. What can I say – student housing is a major coup, and gas was only 50 cents a gallon back then. When she was several months pregnant and busting at the seams – my Mom is a very tiny woman – she was walking down 112th street, when walking in the opposite direction was another Asian looking lady. She was young and pretty and spunky. She stopped my mom. “Hey, are you Taiwanese?” she asked, in Taiwanese. “I see you’re having a baby. Let me tell you what – I’ll help you babysit your baby when she’s born. I’m very good with children. We Taiwanese have to stick together you know. There aren’t many of us here.” I love imagining what my mom must have looked like at that moment - small, foreign, young, and very pregnant - her mouth, speechless, frozen in an O and her forehead, crinkled in surprise. My mom was startled by this very forward Taiwanese woman, and more startled by how easily she found herself trusting her. It was a clear day, and I know that at that moment, the rays of the sun came down, surrounding the two women, binding them together. My mom did end up taking her up on her offer. They quickly became friends, and I was dubbed Sweetie (hard “t”). As it turned out, this woman’s pluck wasn’t limited to soliciting lone Taiwanese women on the street. Her husband at the time was a pharmacist, and they were toying with the idea of starting a company. My mom, tired of seeing my dad get kicked around in the lab, wanted out of academia and into something with more potential. After all they now had a baby, and it probably wasn’t healthy anymore to hang around labs that housed experimental radiation. They ended up picking the restaurant business to go into. With all their science backgrounds, why they ended up choosing to serve up beef with broccoli to Americans is random to me, but hey, it worked. They plugged away for 30 years and in that time, one tiny corner take-out joint became a larger full-scale Chinese restaurant serving sushi and even Thai food, with, at its height, 12 locations dotting Manhattan. People ask me how my parents got into the restaurant business, and I like to attribute the secret of their success to me. Because, would Mia A-Yi have ever stopped my mom on the street if she hadn’t been pregnant? I like to tell it like she wouldn’t have, but I know the truth. We Taiwanese have to stick together. Audris still lives in NYC but has since moved from 112th street. She does eat Chinese food almost everyday though.