My response to Buzzfeed's article: "I Wasn't Beautiful Enough to Live in South Korea."

**Authors note: I have the utmost respect for Ashley as a person and share many of her frustrations with watching students and friends value themselves based only on outer appearance, a problem prevalent all over the world. 

The disappointment of unrealized expectations and the frustrations of living within a culture that doesn’t follow the same codes can be painful. Having overlapped and lived the same amount of time as Ashley Perez in Korea, I know this. However, I feel the need to respond and present a different opinion than her Buzzfeed article, “I Wasn’t Beautiful Enough to Live in South Korea.” These disappointments should not unfairly dictate our perspective of Korean culture as a whole. I fear without proper addressing, we will have misled others about Korean culture and negatively colored the lenses of those who have not lived, worked, and breathed in Korea.

I empathize with Ashley’s disappointment at expecting to be included into a culture, but only finding that somehow she fell short. Being a quarter-Korean myself, I look far from it, looking strongly like my Caucasian father. Desiring, just like Ashley, to fit into my heritage, I found that I was rejected. Yes, my appearance doomed me from the start. Stronger than that though, I wasn’t born and raised in Korea, I don’t speak the language, and I don’t follow their social norms dictated by their value system.  It would be unreasonable to expect to “fit” into their culture. Perhaps in expecting to fit, we unwittingly became the problem.

I have two reactions to this. The first is the knowledge that I and other partial Koreans have Korean genes/blood within us. My appearance or lack there-of in no way mitigates this fact. I am proud of my heritage and I am passionate about learning more about it. My second reaction is a reminder that culture is more than just outward appearance. We cannot fall into the fallacy of “just because I look like something, it means I am something.” I cannot claim I am Korean simply because I look like many of the people who live there. They cannot claim that I am not Korean simply because I don’t look like many of the people who do live there. Culture is a complex web of language, food, customs, history, and location.

I agree with the beauty sentiment expressed in Ashley’s article and don’t seek to diminish her experience. My heart broke, too, for my students struggling with self-worth. As a world, we are unhealthily obsessed with maintaining an absurd and limited surface-level beauty. While I may not agree with the "need" for plastic surgery nor some of the cultural norms I witnessed living in Korea with a host family and teaching high school girls for one year, I think we have to be very careful in claiming we know and understand the big beauty picture in Korea, where it stems from, and that our idea of beauty is infinitely better. 

On the latter point, the US is the leader in eating disorder deaths and in anorexia rates by far. Paradoxically, we are also the leading country for obesity. Are we not also skewed in our beauty ideal or perhaps even more skewed?

While this is conjecture, could it be argued that Korea has partially us (the US) to thank for their beauty ideas? Without being an anthropologist, I cannot say with certainty where the Korean beauty ideal comes from. I am left wondering though if perhaps in our obsession of over-thin models, diet, weight loss, and our own versions of plastic surgery, we helped perpetuate the standard.

Not being fluent in Korean, nor having lived long-term in Korea (one year is not long-term), can we say with certainty that Koreans have no sense of "inner beauty"? If someone told me in a foreign language that my insides were beautiful, I'd be a bit more than disturbed. Americans coined the phrase, "beautiful on the inside," so we have no right to expect other cultures to use the same idiom we do. Furthermore, while Koreans may prize external factors, so do we. (It is empirically proven that humans are more receptive to “good-looking” people and those same good-looking people have a higher chance of going farther in life.) We are narrow in scope if we don't also recognize that there are other qualities valued in Korean culture. Looking at Korean history, logic tells us they must prize hard work and success (note their progress and success in the last fifty years), and they most definitely seem to prize intelligence (note public school term length and the importance of the high school exam, our SAT on steroids).

We have to be careful in projecting our individualistic society as somehow better than that of their communal culture. We prize "standing out," and communal cultures prize  "blending in." Is there something morally, inherently, or socially wrong with either of those options? Certainly not. There are pros and cons to both of them. In an individualistic society, conformists get stares…for going against the cultural norm. In a communal culture, it would be reasonable to expect stares if you walk home in your gym clothes when the majority of people shower and change at the gym. Can we blame a culture for staring when it is we who have interrupted their land and society and then demanded they change their ways to accommodate us? 

We call them clones for enjoying matching, yet we ourselves all love wearing the same type of jeans, buying the same designer bags, clothes, shoes, etc. We grumble at not having sizes that fit us when stores would go out of business if they didn’t cater to the market (of smaller builds and smaller stature). We rage against their lack of accommodation for heavier people when the only obese people I saw during my time there were foreigners or high school students who were sitting all day, not exercising, and eating western junk food at every meal. (With the waistbands of the younger generation expanding rapidly, Korea will eventually have to face it at some point.)

Are our ideas really so much greater or even different than Korea’s? Perhaps these beauty failings seem more glaring in a new light when we have grown so accustomed to the same shadows in our own peripheral. Let's take a break from attacking their culture for its deficiencies and instead, focus on our own.