{"id":37049,"date":"2014-08-13T01:13:49","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T01:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37049"},"modified":"2014-08-15T05:38:17","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T05:38:17","slug":"is-race-plastic-my-trip-into-the-ethnic-plastic-surgery-minefield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37049","title":{"rendered":"Is Race Plastic? My Trip Into the \u2018Ethnic Plastic Surgery\u2019 Minefield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Race Plastic? My Trip Into the \u2018Ethnic Plastic Surgery\u2019 Minefield<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

New York Magazine<\/a>
\n2014-07-27<\/p>\n

Maureen O’Connor<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got some nice Caucasian features,\u201d Dr. Edmund Kwan says, inspecting my face at his Upper East Side<\/a> plastic-surgery practice, where the waiting room includes an ottoman larger than my kitchen table. \u201cYou\u2019re half-Asian mixed with what?\u201d Chinese mom and white dad, I reply. \u201cYou inherited a Caucasian nose. Your nose is nice. Your eyes have a little bit of Asian mixed in.\u201d He proposes Asian blepharo\u00adplasty<\/a>, a surgical procedure to create or enlarge the palpebral<\/a> fold, the eyelid crease a few millimeters above the lashline<\/a> that many Asians lack. \u201cYou\u2019ve got nice big eyes,\u201d he admits, but eyelids more like my father\u2019s would make them look bigger.<\/p>\n

To some, Kwan\u2019s assessment may seem offensive\u2014an attempt to remove my mother\u2019s race from my face as though it were a pimple. But to others, it will seem as banal as a dietitian advising them to eat more leafy greens\u2014advice having nothing to do with hiding one\u2019s race or mimicking another. Asian blepharo\u00adplasty belongs to a range of niche cosmetic procedures known colloquially as ethnic plastic surgery, the popularity of which has spiked in recent years\u2014and is prone to heated arguments, major misunderstandings, alternating whiplashes of sympathy and disgust, and some intensely uncomfortable reckonings. (Including, perhaps, the ones in this article.) The issues at stake are loaded: ethnic identity, standards of beauty, the politics of diversity, what constitutes race, and whether exercises of vanity can reshape it.<\/p>\n

From 2005 to 2013, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that the number of cosmetic procedures performed on Asian-Americans increased by 125 percent, Hispanics by 85 percent, and African-Americans by 56 percent. (Procedures on Caucasians increased just 35 percent.) This is, in part, simply a mark of rising purchasing power: Plastic surgery is nothing if not a sign that one has money to burn and status anxiety to spare.<\/p>\n

And doctors comfortable advertising their expertise in ethnic plastic surgery are growing wealthy creasing Asian eyelids, pushing sloped foreheads forward, and pulling prominent mouths back. These are procedures outsiders generally view as deracinating processes, sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks, and Latinos while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews. Some are refinements of formerly rare procedures like the ones that deformed a generation of Jackson-family noses, while others arrived Stateside from the bone-breaking, muscle-shrinking, multi-procedure extremes of Korean and Japanese plastic surgery. And, in fact, many procedures under the \u201cethnic\u201d umbrella have no Caucasian model at all, as the Asian women asking surgeons to reduce their cheekbones can attest.<\/p>\n

And yet this new wave of such plastic surgeries has produced something of a principled outcry from people of all races and ethnicities. \u201cDid I give in to the Man?\u201d The Talk<\/em> host and broadcast-news veteran Julie Chen<\/a> asked last year<\/a>, displaying photos from before and after the double-eyelid surgery she got after weathering workplace racism in the \u201990s. So many people replied \u201cyes\u201d that Chen took time to defend her choice<\/a> the following week. Reports about Asians overseas getting surgery to resemble \u201cpretty Western celebrities\u201d have a tendency to go viral in Western outlets ranging from The Daily Mail<\/em><\/a> to BuzzFeed<\/em><\/a> to \u201cThis American Life<\/a>.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Race Plastic? My Trip Into the \u2018Ethnic Plastic Surgery\u2019 Minefield New York Magazine 2014-07-27 Maureen O’Connor \u201cYou\u2019ve got some nice Caucasian features,\u201d Dr. Edmund Kwan says, inspecting my face at his Upper East Side plastic-surgery practice, where the waiting room includes an ottoman larger than my kitchen table. \u201cYou\u2019re half-Asian mixed with what?\u201d Chinese […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,14647,2039,8,20],"tags":[17727,12972,17728],"class_list":["post-37049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-economics","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-maureen-oconnor","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-plastic-surgery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}