Koreans are surprisingly vain; there's no question about it. More so than Americans (and I didn't think it could get any worse than America...) Given their reputation of having one of the best education systems in the world (no comment!!), I naturally assumed that the focal point of their lives would be education. Ha! Boy was I wrong!
You see, while high academic achievement is important (to the extent that it sets you up to be able to make the most money possible--and Koreans LOVE money!), I would argue that physical appearance is even more important. Nearly all of the students carry around mirrors the size of their heads (no exaggeration), and even larger, full-body mirrors can be found everywhere from the hallways to the principal's office. (Oh, and don't forget the public restrooms, where there are mirrors in each individual stall, placed strategically at the eye level of the person sitting on the toilet at the moment. You're on your own if you want hand soap, though...)
So it comes as no surprise that while teaching teenagers, and working around women, the topic of "beauty" comes up on a daily basis. As the students are applying whitening cream to their faces and using toothpick-like devices to poke their eyelids into forming what Koreans refer to as "double" (i.e. Western-looking) eyelids (Well, the ones who haven't yet had the surgical procedure done. After we returned from our first holiday break of the year, I was shocked to see all of the students who were still wearing surgical tape around their eyes, apparently having taken advantage of their break from school to have their eyes done.), they always tell me how much they adore big eyes, "S-line" body shapes, and small faces. (I'm starting to think that this "big eye" obsession has become a little too extreme, as all of the female news anchors--and some actresses, who, I'm told, would not be taken seriously by their fans without it--have gotten so much of the skin around their eyes cut off that they look like real-life Anime characters, just plain freakish.) As far as the "small face" goes, there are ample billboards advertising plastic surgery procedures that involve chopping off pieces of the jaw and cutting it into a more slender, rounded chin, complete with before and after pictures! Nose and breast jobs are no big deal--only a few thousand dollars and a few stitches, and voila, you're set for life!
The men want to be beautiful too. My neighbor casually told me about his male friends' seemingly unnecessary procedures, from nose jobs, to chin jobs, to space-between-the-nose-and-upper-lip jobs, along with his father's use of special shoes to look taller (Hilarious, considering that this is a place where you have to remove your shoes constantly in public places. When I mentioned why this very fact might pose a slight problem to his father's ingenious plan, he told me that his father's strategy is to always be the last person in the group to take off his shoes before entering a building, and the first person to put them back on on the way out, even if it means that he has to drastically shorten his time to eat or handle business.), and the fact that many Korean men routinely go to beauty salons to have their hair permed. (He also spoke nonchalantly about all of his mother's voluntary surgical procedures, which was a little odd, given that he told me that she had also had to have very necessary surgery to remove cancer from some part of her body. How does that even work??)
Back to my point about being "set for life." Again, in a place where it's common for students to go to school from 8:30am to 10:00pm (and then study at private academies until midnight), and the government just recently made it illegal to have school on Saturdays (Though there are many ways around this, with the most common being to simply lengthen the school year and shorten holiday breaks. Calling Saturday school "optional" also helps.), not only do you have to include a professionally-taken photo of yourself on your resume, but most people attach pictures that look NOTHING like their actual faces?! Yep. I believe they call it "photoshop." Every.single.picture is photoshopped here. Resume pictures, social networking site pictures--even family photos! After having to have some pictures taken for my official documents here, I was floored to discover that the very well-meaning photographer had even photoshopped the pictures of me?!? When I pointed out to my co-teacher the fact that my eyes weren't quite as large as in the picture (He even added a cartoon-like twinkle to my eyes. A TWINKLE.), and that my skin wasn't exactly so flawless and creamy, she nodded with satisfaction and simply said, "More beautiful."
I am told that I am lucky that photographs aren't required on my domestic resume, because in Korea, employers are only interested in hiring beautiful people.
By the looks of it, the word "beautiful" is a pretty euphemism for people whose facial features are "not ethnically Korean."
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