The Birth of Korean Cool (15 page)

Next to articles about Samsung and Psy, the Korean obsession with cosmetic surgery is probably the most oft-reported Korean story in the western press, and the stories are framed with
condescension and horror. Frequently they take the angle that Koreans are trying to look white, and these procedures are some kind of racial reassignment surgery. What utter rot.

I have had one plastic surgery procedure, the double-eyelid surgery, by which a crease is created in each eyelid to make the eyes appear rounder and larger. It’s the most frequently
requested cosmetic operation in Korea, unlike North America and Europe, where breast augmentation is the top procedure.

Dr. Kim Byung-gun, director of BK Plastic Surgery Hospital in Seoul, said the double-eyelid procedure accounts for some 30 to 40 percent of his practice. Double-eyelid surgery is almost
mandatory for Korean celebrities. In fact, the Korean R & B singer Rain has said in interviews that his handlers warned him that his refusal to get double-eyelid surgery would kill his career.
He held out.

I caved. But I promise I look no more Caucasian now than I did the day I was born, and I have hard evidence of this: no westerner noticed.

The procedure in a Seoul clinic took twenty-five minutes, required no incisions, and left no scarring. It cost about $1,000. Just three stitches on each eyelid, which resulted in the creation of
a discreet crease. A week later, when I returned to my home—Germany, at the time—none of my non-Asian friends caught on until I pointed it out.

So why bother doing it? I’m just vain. It’s kind of like that old saw that women dress up not for men but to impress other women. Asians, for the most part, get the double-eyelid
surgery for themselves and for each other—not for white people.

When a westerner thinks of the ideal for female beauty, the term “egg-shaped face” probably doesn’t come to mind. I don’t recall Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Songs
of Solomon comparing their ladylove to any poultry product. But according to prominent Seoul-based plastic surgeon Dr. Rhee Se-whan, Koreans have considered the egg-shaped face (wider proportions
on top, tapering to a narrow chin) a thing of beauty since time immemorial. Some Koreans will undergo “facial bone contouring” to achieve this ideal, which can include sawing down the
jawbone to make the face look less square-shaped. The procedure is almost never performed in the west.

Yet the procedure is not as invasive as you might think. According to Dr. Kim Byung-gun, the jaw contouring, called mandible angle reduction surgery, does use a rotating buzz saw one centimeter
in diameter, but its point of entry is within the mouth, not on the face, so the procedure leaves no outwardly visible scarring. It takes an hour, and runs between $5,000 and $6,000.
“It’s very safe, not a risky surgery,” said Dr. Kim. “Nobody notices.” That seems to be the catchword for most of the procedures Koreans favor: nobody notices.
Discretion is the name of the game.

Peculiarly, even though breast augmentation has become increasingly popular in Korea, the enlargement is intentionally subtle, says Dr. Kim. Basically, if people notice a difference right away,
you’ve gone too far.

After double-eyelid surgery, the most commonly requested procedure in most Korean clinics is rhinoplasty. Nose jobs are popular in the west, too, but to achieve different ends. Westerners almost
invariably want smaller noses (and in the last few years, narrower at the nostril area). The perfect nose by Korean standards, however, has particular contours. Dr. Rhee drew a geometric diagram,
explaining that, for a woman, the bottom of the nose should not be so flat that it is at a 90-degree angle to the mouth. “That looks too masculine. Ideally you want something between a 95-and
a 100-degree angle.” Furthermore, the profile of the nose itself should be more acute in a woman’s nose, so rhinoplasty might include adding a cartilage tip to make the nose
pointier.

The nose bridge—the part of the nose that falls between or just below the eyes—is what keeps spectacles from sliding off your face, and it’s a particular preoccupation for
Koreans, who tend to have very small bridges. Though one Korean dermatologist cited Princess Diana as an example of someone with a prominent bridge, all the medical professionals I talked to
insisted that Koreans were not hankering for a western nose. “We cannot make an Asian nose into a European or Caucasian nose,” said Dr. Kim emphatically. “We’re not trying
to. For Asians to have a Caucasian nose is not pretty.”

Another cultural factor that explains why Korean plastic surgeons really had to perfect their craft, according to Dr. Rhee Se-whan, is that “Koreans really pay a lot of attention to people
around them. In the west, people don’t care if you marry twice or even three times. Well, at least, they don’t care as much [as Koreans do]. In Korea, however, people always ask you,
‘How old are you,’ ‘What does your boyfriend do for a living,’ ‘Where is your house.’ Anyone in their line of vision is fair game for questions about their
private lives. It’s hard to say whether this is good or bad. But in the context of plastic surgery, let’s say someone gets double-eyelid surgery. People won’t say, ‘It looks
great!’ They’ll say, ‘Hmm . . . it looks kind of asymmetrical.’ Korean women especially.”

Has Korea gone too far with its plastic surgery fanaticism? I would say that it’s an unimportant question except for one troubling trend Dr. Rhee mentioned: the increase in the number of
young children requesting surgery.

“When I was a kid,” said Dr. Rhee, “no one got plastic surgery. Even in college, there weren’t that many. But even now, middle-school children get plastic surgery during
their winter school break. It’s not considered weird. It’s considered normal.”

The phenomenon of underage surgery is particularly dangerous because children are highly susceptible to peer pressure and the desire to conform. In some affluent schools, this has led to a
surgical arms race—a one-upmanship among schoolchildren to look prettier, like a diabolical version of buying the trendiest autumn clothes for the new school year.

Rhee gave an example. “There was a plain middle-school girl who got surgery and got much better looking. She got to go out with the best-looking guy in the school, so her friend [wanted
surgery], too.”

You might be wondering where all these standards for perfect proportion come from. Who calibrates these magic rulers, protractors, and color samples that determine the golden mean of what
constitutes the right face? Well, if you were to assemble all the various descriptions of what Koreans find beautiful—narrow face, alabaster skin, etc.—you would find that the Platonic
ideal of Korean beauty is based on the features most closely associated with North Korean women.

IN APRIL 2013 TENSIONS BETWEEN NORTH AND
South Korea were at their most severe since the end of the Korean War. As head of the Korean Tourist
Organization, Lee Charm was not thrilled with the effect of this threat on Korean tourism. Many South Koreans are familiar and weary of this recurring game. The north makes veiled threats of
annihilation almost every time there is a new South Korean regime, and since President Park Geun-hye had just taken office two months prior, the north’s saber-rattling was on schedule.

Lee, like most South Korean officials, approaches the issue coolly. “The North Korean regime is not crazy. They are very calculating. They don’t observe any rules; they use
extortion. Basically, they’re a criminal organization, but not crazy.”

Lee believes, as do the vast majority of South Koreans, that North Koreans are not so stupid that they fail to see the likelihood of mutually assured destruction if war breaks out. “They
know if they start conflict, they will be eliminated right away. That would mean the end of their regime. But they also know the world is very weak in the face of someone who doesn’t play by
the rules. They know they can get a good deal no matter what.”

By “good deal,” Lee is referring to the world’s worst-kept secret: North Korea makes these threats to extort money from the rest of the world, in the form of
“humanitarian aid.”

South Korea’s fear of North Korea has diminished over the years, as evidenced by a popular television chat show called
Now on My Way to Meet You
, which features a panel of
gorgeous North Korean female refugees. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that
Now on My Way to Meet You
is the most emotionally confusing program in the worldwide history of
television.

Watching this show makes you feel as though you are flipping television channels between
The Lawrence Welk Show
, the Miss Universe pageant, and
Schindler’s List
. The
format is part chat show: sometimes the North Korean beauties discuss cute and humorous topics, like the trials of dating South Korean men. It’s also part variety show, with the women
displaying their talents at dancing, singing, or playing the accordion (a bizarrely popular instrument in North Korea). The third and crucial component of the show are the women’s harrowing
testimonies of torture, rape, starvation, and other hardships they endured, not only in North Korea but during their escape as well.

I asked the show’s producer, Lee Jin-min, why her show’s panel guests were all women. She made reference to an ancient Korean expression, “Northern girls, southern boys.”
It refers to the common local stereotype that the prettiest Korean women are to be found in the north, whereas the handsomest Korean men are to be found in the south.

The show’s creators felt that the audience would respond more sympathetically to women than to men. “South Koreans feel very benevolently toward North Korean women. Nonetheless, in
practice, many South Koreans are still not totally ready to accept northern refugees [settling permanently in the South]. In order to put forth the most positive image of the refugees, we
determined that women would be more suitable for the show.”

But the show does an important public service: it helps to combat the discrimination that North Korean refugees suffer in South Korea. Many locals harbor resentment that their tax money is being
spent accommodating the refugees. South Koreans worry whether their economy can withstand the rapidly growing influx of refugees and the separate welfare category it creates. Some northern refugees
are disabled or in poor health; some possess no job skills that would be useful outside a totalitarian regime.

The North Korean guests on
Now on My Way to Meet You
look anything but sick and desperate.

No other country on earth could have produced a show like this. In typical Korean talk show fashion, the women have worked with a stylist and are dressed to the nines in coordinated, knee-length
silk dresses whose pastel colors are carefully chosen so as not to clash with each other and to create a tableau that is pleasing as a whole. Their hair is glossy and coiffed in the latest styles,
and they are sitting demurely with their legs closed and poised in an identical formation. If you didn’t understand Korean and you didn’t know what you were watching, you’d think
they were discussing the new line of Gucci handbags. But it soon becomes apparent that the glamorous image is completely incongruous with the tales that come out of the girls’ mouths.

Take the story of Yoon Ah-young. She told her story on a May 2013 episode of
Now on My Way to Meet You
.

In 1998 she and her family escaped to China, smuggled in by one of the many human traffickers who specialize in this area. The trafficker told Yoon that she had to be separated from her parents
to better ensure her safety. Instead, the human smuggler sold the seventeen-year-old girl into slavery for 4,000 Chinese yuan ($650), to a family who wanted a nanny.

Yoon was beaten by the female head of the house, who would tell her, “You’re an illegal. No one cares if you live or die. You don’t matter.” She stayed in captivity with
this family for three years. “For those three years, I had only one goal that kept me alive. I just wanted to save enough money to buy a gun, a quiet one, and then I’d kill her and then
kill myself.” One day, Yoon packed a bag, intending never to return. She was worried that the sound of her shoes would wake the old woman, so she made her escape barefoot.

She reunited with her parents, and in 2004 they reached the promised land, South Korea. Defectors who speak out publicly risk putting their loved ones in jeopardy back home. For this reason,
many defectors choose to keep a low profile. Several refugees I approached initially agreed to let me interview them, but got nervous and backed out.

I did manage to interview one of the show’s panelists, Shin Eun-hee, who had also escaped from North Korea to China with her family in 1998, when she was twelve years old. I asked Shin why
she was brave enough to appear on
Now on My Way to Meet You
—and to talk to an American journalist like me. Shin explained: “All twenty-four thousand of us North Korean refugees
are in danger. And it’s especially unsafe to talk about North Korea to the press. But there’s an expression: ‘You can’t avoid making fermented bean paste just because
you’re worried about maggots.’ I’m not going to give up my work just because I’m afraid of North Korea.”

Her parents were Christians practicing in secret—presumably having come under the influence of a handful of South Korean ministers who sneak into the north to spread the gospel. Preaching
Christianity in North Korea can lead to a death sentence, and their proselytes are often executed or put into labor camps. “The reason we had to leave North Korea is that my parents were
distributing cassette tapes about Christianity, and somehow they were discovered. We got caught by a government agent, but we managed to elude him and fled to China.” Shin is one of the very
lucky refugees whose family managed to stay together in the escape.

Originally, Shin’s family had no intention of making their way to South Korea; they expected to live out their days in China. This is fairly common among North Korean
émigrés, despite the fact that they live in fear of being arrested by Chinese authorities and returned to North Korea—per agreement between the two countries, which are still
allies despite increasing mutual annoyance.