So what's the deal with me blabbing on yesterday about law school and random non-Korea-related schtuff? Well, it's my weblog and I can cry on it if I want to, I guess.

The final student in my Korean language class came to school today; he'd stayed in New Zealand 'til now because of a friend's wedding. It's been a long time since I've seen green eyes -- pretty! Reminds me of a Spanish guy I met once in France, when I was at that Christian camp with Maggie la Magnifica and about a thousand European teenagers. I talked to him maybe twice, but I remember his mesmerizing eyes.

I have a hunch that it won't take long for Koreans to latch onto colored contact lenses, which is gonna be just SO weird. Everyone colors their hair already, and half of the young women in Seoul have undergone cosmetic surgery to create western eyelids or more prominent nose. I think I did see a commercial this weekend in which a young Korean woman had some colored lenses in.

When we were in high school, ABD Linders, who is Thai, did have some purple contact lenses that she would put on for drill team shows. Being the owner of two huge almond-shaped eyes, the color really stood out. They were cool but scary at the same time. Like, whoa! What planet did you come from? (Incidentally, I always see "almond-shaped" in descriptions of Asian eyes, but what eyes are NOT almond-shaped? Are there eyes out there that are walnut-shaped? Or pistachio-shaped? Macadamia-shaped? I mean, really. Let's just forget I mentioned the almonds.)

I applaud everyone's right to change the way they look to suit their tastes (which is why, every autumn for a few years, my own black hair would magically become reddish brown), but at what point do tastes reflect a cultural imperialism? For Christmas, John gave me Warrior Lessons, a book about Asian American women written by Phoebe Eng, the publisher and founder of A Magazine, a magazine targeted at Asian Americans. At one point, she writes about women in Asia getting their jawbones ground down to create a more oval, less classically "Asian" look. I hadn't heard about this, so I asked a colleague at work, and she verified it.

She said that while neither she nor her friends have had cosmetic surgery, she has heard that it is addictive: you start with getting some eyelids or tattooing on some eyebrows (my mother and my father's mother have done this), and then putting extra cartilage on the bridge of your nose to make it stand out more doesn't sound so radical. She also said that she thought Korean women are very conscious about how they look, and that there was a recent poll that showed that 80 percent of Korean women think they are fat! Oh dear. In addition, many Japanese and Chinese women come to Korea to undergo these types of surgeries, because Korean surgeons are cheaper than Japanese surgeons, and more reliable than Chinese surgeons. Oh my.

Before I came to Korea, the Tiffster called me and asked me not to have cosmetic surgery while in Korea. Well, Tiff, I said it then and I'll say it now: I'm waaaaay too cheap to have cosmetic surgery. But I'm also wary of the statement, however unintentional, that I might make if I opted to have larger, rounder eyes or a bigger nose or a less round face. In late December the Islamic Malaysian government pulled a Toyota ad featuring Brad Pitt. Malaysian Deputy Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin called the advertisement "a humiliation against Asians" and said that "Western faces in Western faces in advertisements could create an inferiority complex among Asians."

Zainuddin want on to say: "You advertisers inject the sense of inferiority complex among Asians...Why do we need to use their faces in our advertisements? Are our own people not handsome?"

This is all the more weird since Brad's ads had been running in newspapers for some months, and since Brad has proven to be VERY popular in Asian markets (his first Toyota advertisements in Taiwan in May 2001 were stolen by young girls for their bedrooms!).

I'm sceptical about the motives behind pulling Brad ads (I've read that there is a trade agreement involved), but I'm intrigued that Maidin used this line of argument, since Caucasians are used in Asian market ads all the time. While I think Maidin's accusation of advertisers is horse puckey, I wouldn't mind if Koreans stopped going under the knife in order to look more western.

(sources: "Malaysia Bans Toyota Ad," 12/20/02, asiamarketresearch.com; "Pittch man gets pinched," Andrew Yeh, 5/1/01, Asiaweek.com)