Cosmetic surgery to assimilate produces a marked ethnic, not American, body.

Evidence

Fitting into American society means having the right kind of nose. In the fictional world representing the imaginary body of the American Jew, the retroussé “oriental” nose comes to be an ideal. But for the Chinese American, according to Gish Jen’s portrait, it is a sign of the new “Asian” identity. One nose does fit all. There aesthetic surgery is a sign of middle-class rather than “American” identity, though one could argue that there is a fatal parallelism between these two ideas of imagining oneself as different. Thus among Asian-Americans in California, double eyelid surgery has become “the gift that parents offer their daughters when they graduate from high school or college.” This parallels the experience of Jewish Americans in the 1960s. For the Vietnamese and Koreans in America aesthetic surgery becomes a means of defining identity as flexible rather than permanent. Hybridity means now reshaping the body to make it more American. Yet the end result is not an “American” body but an “Asian American” body. The diasporic body remains marked as different and, just as “black” became “beautiful” in the 1960s, so too is “Asian” beautiful today. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that double eyelid surgery as a graduation gift parallels 1960s Jewish Americans — is there concrete data on the 1960s Jewish rhinoplasty rates to corroborate?
• SHARE: The double eyelid surgery as a graduation gift detail is exactly the kind of concrete tidbit worth sending to someone interested in body modification or Asian-American studies.
• CANDY: Double eyelid surgery is now a graduation gift Asian-American parents offer daughters — a quick, memorable cultural fact.