A typical gift given to young people turning 18 in South Korea is cosmetic eyelid surgery. It is a very common operation and is not the only one that many Korean people resort to throughout their lives to improve their appearance. In fact, in South Korea, physical beauty is considered a value and a fundamental aspect in which to invest to establish yourself in society and make a career: you can see how cosmetic surgery has long been accepted by walking around the cities, where products and interventions are often advertised. aesthetics, talking to people and reading books by South Korean authors.
The author Elisa Shua Dusapin, who grew up between France, Korea and Switzerland, told it in one of the articles in the latest issue of The Passengerthe book-magazine from the Iperborea publishing house on places around the world, dedicated to South Korea. We are publishing an extract.
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My Western readers are often surprised by the discovery of a phenomenon that is now obvious, in my eyes. In 2012 I spent a few months at Yonsei University, in Seoul, to improve my knowledge of Korean. It was then, wandering the streets and coming into contact with students, that I understood to what extent cosmetic surgery was normal. In the center you wander among cardboard mannequins that extol the qualities of whitening creams. Men ask girls for advice on the latest makeup, or how to imitate a three-day beard. Cosmetic surgery advertisements, with before-and-after photos of faces, line the walls of the subway. Everything is normal in the country of K-pop, the Korean music industry sponsored by clinics that for some years have been churning out clones idolized by young people all over the world.
In South Korea a person is defined by his origins: who you are matters more than what you do. In other words, social belonging is crucial. Your family of origin, the name of the university you attended, matter a lot. There is fierce competition for access to the best universities, even despite the high costs. It is one of the reasons why many couples choose to have only one child: to be able to focus everything on his education, in the hope of ensuring him a favorable position in society, and a better pension for them in the future. They are willing to pay for surgical operations because they know well that it is a way like any other to increase the chances of social affirmation, no more and no less than how to put on make-up or dress well for a job interview. A friend told me that she was refused a job as a representative on the pretext that today surgery is within the reach of every budget. Her potential bosses had thrown her natural features in her face, thus accusing her, in a sense, of negligence.
In Korean literature we find numerous examples of this phenomenon. In the story «Your Metamorphosis» (2012) by Kim Yi-hwan, the narrator outlines his ideal body: «I would like to have a longer nose. And thinner nostrils. The cheekbones, those are ok. But my chin is square, maybe I should make it a little more pointed?”. Another image is offered by a story contained in the 2007 collection released in France with the title La beauté me dédaigne (“Beauty despises me”), by Eun Hee-kyung: “After losing eight kilos, I understood that the new man manifests himself only through diet.”
Cheon Un-yeong, in the story «L’aiguille» («The Needle», 2001), takes matters further: «I have pronounced cheekbones, a fat neck, a bit like my back, rounded and with a hint of a hump, a timbre of voice unpleasant to hearing, plump toes […] I am the embodiment of the concept of ugliness.”
Clearly these standards of beauty – double eyelids, pointed chin, sharp nose – are the result of Westernisation. When I was twenty, a passerby in Seoul asked me the name of the surgeon who had enlarged my eyes. The interest quickly turned into polite distance as I replied that I hadn’t had any operations, but that my mother was South Korean, my father French.
At this point the paradox is complete: it’s fine to have double eyelids and a sharp nose, as long as you’re Korean. Which I wasn’t, in that woman’s eyes. My mixed-race origins make me a foreigner, like the French-Korean narrator of Winter in Sokcho, with the difference that she has never known the West, except through literature.
Because after all, what is the purpose in South Korea once the bandages are removed? Why does my mother’s country, so proud of itself and viscerally nationalist, try to transform its face? Should we look for profound reasons in Confucianism, which urges harmony of body, heart and spirit?
In Korean society the community matters more than the individual, educated to submit to the rules without asking questions. It is probably these values that made possible the formidable economic rebirth of South Korea in the 1980s, which made it a leader in the cosmetics and, obviously, technological sectors: the reign of Samsung and LG, of megacities invaded by giant screens, projectors , reverberations; in the streets, from the facades of buildings, images of standardized men and women, athletic and slender bodies, with perfect skin bounce back.
The fact is that today, in South Korea, it is no longer enough to be in harmony. You need to be momjjang – have a perfect body and face – to succeed in life, that is, in marriage and work. The protagonist of Oh Jung-hi’s story «First Snows» is thirty years old, still unmarried, and brutally realizes that she does not correspond to the standards of beauty: «I had passed the threshold of thirty, I was starting to become fat, and to fall into depression. » In Korea, in fact, I have noticed the obsession with nutrition, nutritional balance, and in parallel the phenomenon of meokbang: social live broadcasts of individuals who binge on junk food. They follow them in thousands, or rather, in millions. People who feed themselves by proxy, exhausted by a daily life of dieting and self-control.
In «Your Metamorphosis» by Kim Yihwan, the protagonist finds his friend transformed into liquid form, inside a plastic bag. The search for physical perfection had led him to make his body disappear. «But you looked happy. […] Ultimately, I thought, cosmetic surgery isn’t that bad.”
