"You're so pretty for an Asian."

“You’re so pretty for an Asian.”

What haunts me the most about the time I was told this in high school, is that I actually took it as a compliment.

I had internalized so well what I had been taught for so long, that I didn’t even question the underlying assumption here that prettiness was whiteness, and whiteness was prettiness. What I was being told, was that you could be pretty, but only within the category of your racial demographic. You couldn’t just be pretty, period, because once a white girl walks into the room, you won’t even compare. I was being told, you are okay looking and that is surprising to me because Asians are supposed to be ugly. Here is a gold star from me to you for managing to do well for yourself despite being Asian. All of these are the unsaid words whose weight I have carried around for years.

The person saying this meant well--I remember they didn’t say it in a mean way at all, but that doesn’t mean the weight was any lighter.

Comments like these were also reinforced by the white-centered media. In movies the desired girl, the interesting girl, the main character--she never looked like me. Just like there’s the token Black friend who’s funny, there’s the token Asian friend who’s nerdy. Perhaps back then this tokenistic diversity was seen as progress, but simply acknowledging our existence is not enough when our complexity and humanity is not also acknowledged. Those qualities were reserved for the white, main characters, and the token POC friends were defined by their ethnic-ness, or stereotypes associated with their ethnic-ness. We are all supposed to be the main characters of our own stories, and yet I didn’t feel that way in my own life, in the way I saw myself. I was not the main character of my own narrative. I was robbed of that self importance and in its place was the constant feeling that I was not whole or individual or complex. I was the uglier friend, the sidekick, the counterpart in the shadow of the “standard,” the “normal”-- the pretty white girl.

It is tough to admit, but I felt this way about my position in my all-white high school friend group as well. I was the ugly, non-white duckling among my taller, prettier, and whiter friends. It was never anything they said, it was just the way my own perception had been warped. I would perceive in group photos that I alone looked uglier, my face wider, my eyes smaller. I would perceive their compliments to be said out of pity. I would perceive that boys could never be interested in me next to them because I “wasn’t as pretty,” and what my subconscious knew to be “wasn’t as fitting to white standards of beauty.”

Even more harmful than the Western media narrative I was being fed however, was the East Asian media I began consuming in high school. I turned to Kpop and Japanese dramas because the girls looked like me--or so I thought. They looked like me, but they also didn’t look like me. They had high nose bridges while I had the Asian button nose. Their faces were small and angular compared to my wide, round face. They were just the same Western ideals in an Asian form.

I remember excitedly sharing my favorite Asian celebrities with my white friends, and one commenting on a photo of the Chinese model Angelababy saying that she looked very white. I defensively insisted she was Asian without realizing that I had chosen to download the most white-looking photos of her, and she was also, as many Asian celebrities and models tend to be, partly white. I wanted to embrace being Asian, but I simply worshipped these East Asian celebrities as a more attainable version of the Western ideal. I couldn’t become white, but I could do my makeup a certain way and use skin whitening creams and weird face rollers that were supposed to make my face smaller--every Japanese girl will know what weird face roller I’m talking about--and I couldn’t become white, but I could look whiter. We were being taught, even in our own cultures, to erase our Asianness with creams or iron it out with rollers. Our Asianness was our imperfection, and characteristics of whiteness were praiseworthy.

I see this same trend, ironically, in Japan’s biggest cultural export as well: anime. Big wide eyes, a small pointy nose, and a v-shaped face. Weaboos come all the way to Asia looking for a “real life anime girl,” when I believe those beauty standards were based off of Western features--us Asian girls as a whole look nothing like anime characters, not the least also of course because we are not two dimensional characters often written to fulfill a male fantasy.

And you may say--perhaps this wasn’t colonization? Perhaps Asian ideals just happen to overlap perfectly with features of whiteness. I cannot speak for Asia as a monolith, but I know the history of my own country of Japan. While whiteness was generally prized as a mark of higher class from before Western interaction, until very recently actually--around World War II--the beauty ideal of Japan was very different from today. Beautiful women were those with an oval/round face with thin, monolid eyes, and a long nose. Below you can see the impact of Westernization on beauty standards over time.

The traditional Japanese beauty before Western influence, as shown in traditional woodblock prints:

The pictures and photos below are from the late 19th to early 20th century, around the Meiji and Taisho era. While Japan was beginning to westernize, these still show vestiges of the pre-Western traditional beauty standard. Some of the material here including the first one below are beer commercials by the way--I guess conventionally pretty women have been used to sell products to men since the beginning of marketing. The second and third photos are geishas that were famous for their beauty. They still align closely with the ideal from the woodblock prints.

These are pre-WWII ads from the 1930s, but you can already see the Westernization of beauty standards. The women have larger eyes, more arched eyebrows, and the face shape is a little ovular but more defined.

Below is the impact post-WWII. These are photos of what were considered the beautiful actresses at the time. They obviously look very different from the woodblock prints or the Meiji-era photos, and I think this was the definitive leap to hop on board Western beauty standards--they’ve been pretty Westernized ever since. Especially the first woman really feels like an Asian Audrey Hepburn. With their pointy, high-bridged noses, v-shaped angular faces, deeper set and bigger eyes, these women provide an Asian-ized version of white features and the Western ideal.

I couldn’t truthfully say that I have been able to fully free myself from this “white is pretty” mindset. Unlearning is difficult work. You are doing the work of resetting the defaults of your mind. I have to catch myself every time I look in the mirror and criticize what I see. I regress sometimes, and I have to admit that I was just looking up the cost of jaw reduction surgery the other day, “just because,” I told myself. I have to catch myself every time I take a picture and I try to tilt my head or cover with my hair in a way that hides the wideness of my face. I have to resist the temptation to easily photoshop my face on the numerous East Asian photo apps there are that instantly reduce your jaw, size down your face, widen your eyes, and whiten your skin for you.

But why would I ever want to hide this part of me? I look into the wide, beaming, beautiful face of my Japanese mother; her wide, flat nose, her full cheeks, her wide forehead. When I hide certain features because society has told me they make me less pretty, it feels like I am denying my heritage, my culture--like I am hiding that I am my mother’s child. I don’t ever want to do that. I love being Japanese. And I don’t think simply de-centering whiteness from beauty standards will help. I think as a whole our society needs to de-center beauty standards from how we evaluate people, especially women. It’s not like I want beauty standards in Japan to revert back to what they were pre-Westernization, when they were less white, but also arbitrary and subjective. Looking at the photos of the “beautiful” women from the 19th century didn’t inspire me to parade those photos around and convince people to adopt that as the new ideal and have girls judge themselves against those standards. Those Meiji-era photos, and the fact that I do not find those women pretty, just reminds me how arbitrary “beautiful” is, and how something so deeply ingrained in me right now is also so transient from a larger perspective of time.

My face is just my face. I am not “pretty for an Asian.” In fact, whether or not I am pretty is irrelevant, and I do not want beauty standards to change, I want them to become irrelevant. I am curious, empathetic, creative, and many more things that enable me to bring enrichment to the world. The people that are important to me see me for that, and I am coming to see it too.