Double eyelid surgery produces an Asian American body, not an American one

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger. In the story “Eight Bites,” Machado’s narrator despises her body as it is—its heaviness, softness, and sagginess: “I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.” So she undergoes bariatric surgery and shrinks down to a more socially acceptable size. But the narrator is haunted by what she first thinks is a ghost and then discovers is something much creepier: the fat she shed as a result of the surgery, one hundred pounds of it, which has taken a featureless human form in her home. It is a fat golem, the self she could not bring herself to love and so chose to cut away. “I kneel down next to it,” the narrator says. “It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder. It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real.” The narrator then beats her double with terrible violence. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 578 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cosmetic surgery to assimilate produces a marked ethnic, not American, body. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784; Aesthetic surgery cannot erase visible ethnic difference and marks false acculturation.; Surgical body transformation can produce a hated abandoned self that returns as a double — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 578

Broader Connections

• Cosmetic surgery to assimilate produces a marked ethnic, not American, body. #expands (0.95) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784
• Surgical body transformation can produce a hated abandoned self that returns as a double #complicates (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 578