Embedded Files
several thousand dollars. Blepharoplasty and rhinoplasty are among the first procedures that come to mind when thinking about ethnic plastic surgery, and both have charged histories. But this is not the case for other predominantly Asian procedures Kwan performs today, several of which fall under the literally bone-crushing category of “facial contouring.” The first time Kwan broke and rearranged multiple bones in a patient’s face, back in New York, it was by accident. He’d been filing down an Asian patient’s cheekbones to narrow her face, which the patient believed was too wide and flat, when the delicate zygomatic bone snapped off in his hand. “I said, ‘Oh my God! I broke the bone!’ ” he recalls. During his fellowship in the facial-trauma unit, he’d learned to reconstruct faces shattered in car accidents; this time he’d shattered one himself, but knew exactly what to do. “The patient came back and said, ‘I love it!’ ” Facial contouring is popular in Korea and includes procedures like V-line jaw shaving, which turns round faces into hearts in pursuit of an ideal more manga than Playboy, softening the angles of a square jaw and creating a daintier chin. “Double-jaw surgery” is a procedure sometimes used to treat severe underbites and other deformities, now being used for a cosmetic purpose, in which the jawbone is broken and pulled back while the maxilla (or palate) is broken and pulled forward, to yield a fetishized mini-chin. To Westerners, facial contouring is among the most mysterious of Asian procedures. When I looked at before-and-after pictures of women with sharply jutting cheekbones who’d had their faces narrowed and smoothed via zygoma reduction, I inevitably thought they were prettier before. Without looking up from the pictures, Kwan replied, “Cheekbone reductions are just ethnic. Asians hate this kind of cheek.” But white people never seem as fascinated with this surgery as they are with double eyelids, he added. Maybe that’s because the eyelid surgery provides a neat parable for those who believe race can be erased with a scalpel. Reality, of course, is rarely so neat. Monolids are mostly unique to Asians—but that means cosmetic alterations to them are a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon, too. As has been the case for hair extensions, chemical straighteners, and wigs, beauty rituals that once seemed designed to oppress sometimes turn into symbols of group membership or the foundations of a new aesthetic. Adopted from Korea into a white family in Queens, Mee Young Mendler befriended Koreans at her school in Fresh Meadows; her brother, also adopted, had mostly white friends. To the extent that Mendler was self-conscious about race growing up, it was that she wanted to be more Asian so she could fit in with her friends. Imitating other girls, she sometimes taped her eyelids, a DIY crease-creating strategy akin to wearing false eyelashes. Mendler didn’t fully understand blepharoplasty until she saw it on the news at age 19: “They were talking about the surgery and how sad it is that young girls wanted to change their identity. It may sound weird, but that’s what made me go look into it.” So she took a credit card and made her first big purchase: 20 minutes under the knife with Dr. Edmund Kwan. Her white adoptive mother did not support the choice—but plenty of her Asian friends did. “I think we’re kind of losing ethnic niches. I don’t think there’s going to be a black race or a white race or an Asian race,” says Dr. Michael Jones, a plastic surgeon whose claim to fame is operating on Wendy Williams. (He did my earlobes,” she announces in a radio commercial.) “As we travel more, we have more interracial unions. Essentially, in 200 years, we’re going to have one race. I see that even now, people just picking things they like from different ethnicities and calling that the ideal for the moment.” This fantasy of racial convergence, and post-racial or supra-racial beauty, is a common one, if sometimes insidious: a shortcut for imagining a sexy future beyond prejudice without any real effort, just some biracial boning. When National Geographic published a mixed-race portrait series called “The Changing Face of America,” other websites raved about “the lovely faces” showing “how the ‘average American’ will look by the year 2050.” (“Look at how beautiful it is to see everything diluted that we used to hate,” Hairpin blogger Jia Tolentino groaned.) But even the work that Jones performs, on patients who are predominantly African-American, doesn’t give a neat picture of racial convergence. “Our two big procedures are ethnic rhinoplasty, which tends to make an ethnic or African nose more Anglo—and butts! We are giving people larger derrières,” Jones says. There, “they want more ethnicity.” And unlike Asian cheekbone reduction, Jones points out that these “more ethnic” ideals have been adopted by the white mainstream, too. White women want “Kim Kardashian” butts and “a more full, Mongoloid- or African-looking lip,” he says, sounding every bit the casually blasphemous plastic surgeon. Fifteen years ago, Jones started his practice in the first floor of the Harlem brownstone he shared with his TV-anchor wife. He found himself revising bad surgeries from the 1990s that had left his black patients with significant scars or the dreaded L-shaped nasal implant, infamous for poking holes through the tips of
Google Sites
Report abuse