The other day, I was watching Margaret Cho's Beautiful concert for probably the 10th time (but only the fifth time on LOGO). In one bit, Margeret spoke about going to a radio station for an interview and having the disc jockey ask her, "How would you feel if you woke up one morning and you were beautiful?" Stunned by his question, she responded, "What do you mean? I AM beautiful." Without missing a beat, the disc jockey answered, "No, I mean if you were REALLY beautiful. If you woke up and had blonde hair, blue eyes and was tall and thin." The always witty Margeret put him in his place by saying, "Well, I wouldn't be able to wake up because I'd be too weak from hunger."
I confess that I've never been referred to as "the pretty one" or the "beautiful one". According to mass media, this should bother me intensely and should have resulted in me having some sort of eating disorder, filling my face with filler, sucking out my flubber with lipo or trying to rid myself of any remotely yellow peril-ish physical characteristic but it's never really bothered me, not being pretty.
Maybe this lack of desire to be desirable is just something I've gotten used to since I started out life as the "chubby baby" and not the "cute baby". I attribute this not to my lack of akachan attractiveness but from being kind of unusual looking in appearance as I was born a Buddhahead with a big fluffy afro. Jarring to the eyes even now but back in the 60's, clearly evidence that somebody hopped the fence over the plantation some generations ago. You ask people in my family what they remember about me as a baby and chance are they will first tell you what a crybaby I was and how I had a fro that resembled Chaka Khan caught in a wind tunnel. Even my Dad admitted to being relieved when my hair finally decided to go "Japanese" and straightened into good old stiff horse tail texture a few years into toddlerhood as people would ask him if he was sure he was really my father.
My afro never came back, except chemically. How ironic that I have probably spent thousands over the years trying to get some type of wave back as well as hundreds of hours of follicle abuse at the hands of my grandma with her boxes of plastic curlers that were shaped like chicken drumstick bones and hurt like hell when she popped them close near my scalp. Add to that the sulfuric smell of Lilt Perm solution - akin to taking nostrils full of Madame Pele fumes - and the burning sting as the solution hit my young scalp. Yes, beauty is pain but trying to regain your Asian-fro with a $5 box of perm being applied by your baachan with limited vision and even less patience should qualify you for Hague Convention tortured refugee status. Oh, did I forget to mention that Grandma also lived green by recycling the perm papers from the last person she tormented so you could feel the terror of that poor relative whose hair was Angela Davis-ized before you.
I'm not even going to go into a discussion of how finding a newly grown crop of white hair launched me into a two day crying jag and a battle with my inner being not to pluck every sucker out. The only thing that worked was someone telling me I should leave them because when I get older and start balding, I will have even less hair there since the black ones will fall out and there will be no white ones left. I wrote a blog post about that and intend never to talk about it again.
I have to admit that I did go through a phase when I wanted blonde hair - that was when I was "the strange one" and my parents stopped taking photos of me for a few years. It has nothing to do with being the standard Barbie kind of beauty unless you consider wanting to look like Stewart Copeland of the Police which I guess is more like wanting to be a Ken kind of beauty. This was in the ending years of high school and college when I was a New Waver and transformed myself into someone who shopped with the Buffalo Girls on Britain's Kings Row. It really depended on who I was listening to on the cassette tape then (post-disco album period). I did not have enough hair to make the Kate Pierson B-52 hairstyle so I chopped everything super short and just dyed it a different color every week. I was a blonde for a while but it was only blonde in the middle with brown roots with green ends - like an inside out sunflower. I always had a box of temporary brown hair color at home because I never knew when I would have to look somewhat normal. Like when I applied for a summer scholarship sponsored by Japan Air Lines and had to find something to cover my bright red and orange "fighting chicken" hairdo in time for the interview. I felt kind of like I was lying about who I really was since I had to play the overachieving nikkei-jin but beneath the boxes of Sun-In and the dozens of safety pins attached to my ripped striped t-shirts, that is really who I was. BTW - I did get the scholarship and spent most of my free time outside of class hanging out with the other strange people in Harajuku. I'd show you a photo but I think my parents destroyed them.
Some delusional women say that they felt beautiful when they were pregnant. Supposedly, you are at the pinnacle of beauty with your bountifulness of curves and the aura of motherhood. I swear that there was not a single moment during either of my pregnancies that I looked in the mirror and said, "Hot dang! I am so fricken gorgeous!" This is likely due to the fact that on my first pregnancy with the twins, I seemed to sport the same voluptuous figure as Yokuzuna Akebono as well as the same sexy thighs-painfully-rubbing-together-as-he-leaves-the-ring-post-match waddle as soon as the IVF was completed. While you know I have a thing for drag queens, it is not the same feeling as a woman to have to borrow clothing from your Dad and brother because you've outgrown every sailor suit in the maternity department. It's even worse when you have to wear their shorts underneath your bulging belly and need help to get those on and off. All I can say is I did not make a very atractive drag king at nine months of pregnancy - I looked like every husband on "My Big Fat Redneck Wedding" but with more chest hair and a few less stretch marks.
Eventually, even Dad and Junior's clothing no longer fit and I had to go to the plus-size department - not the regular plus size department but the SUPER plus size department. We are talking 3XL action here. The pickings for stylish clothing for those of us who are regular two digit sizes are slim but at 3XL, you are basically looking at Mrs. Roper type of polyester caftans in a variety of eye-blinding neon colors or aloha prints that are reserved for actors playing tourists on Hawaii 5-0. I simply could not do it, even though I do not believe I am very vain about my apperance. Instead, I went to the Big Boys department and chose outfits that made me look like an Asian Notorious BIG. Every time I left the house in my gigantic NBA logo tank tops and shorts, I wondered if P. Diddy and Mase would pull up in a Bentley to take my 200 pound plus pregnant butt to pick up some hoochies and some non-alcoholic Crystale.
Also, if anyone tells you that you will feel beautiful when you give birth (even if under lots of drugs with a C-section), they are full of crap. Both times, I was puking up due to the li hing mui flavored medication to prepare me for my spinal and all I was concerned about was not throwing up on the twins and the second time, making sure Oscar the Grouch did spend half an hour filming the afterbirth. Uh, the babies were also not as beautiful freshly out of the womb as babies born on Lifetime movies nor as any child spawned from Tori Spelling's million dollar va-jay-jay. They look like they have been dipped in Crisco, are as hairy as the aforementioned wedded rednecks and their faces have a shrunken head prune-like alien appearance that will freak you out if you aren't prepared.
In a few months I will be 50 and I know that on a really good day in the right lighting, I look 50. On a bad day, I look (and feel) about 70 plus. I have been asked for my ID on Senior Citizen days at Don Quixote (60 years), at Foodland (55 years) and at Zippy's (65 years) and I was wearing my usual 3 pounds of eyeshadow on all days. It should have bothered me but I chalked it up to people who are cashiers having bad vision due to the eyestrain and the pressure of having to make change.
Also, I think growing up not being "the pretty one" is a lot less pressure than being the anointed beauty of the bunch. I know that even as my body ages, my sense of sarcasm has gotten even snippier and people tend to humor me when I make a joke because I am usually the oldest one there. I do not feel any need to get to the plastic surgeon's office or to have a botox party for my friends because nobody is interested. Now, all of my friends are objectively beautiful - some are natural beauties without a stitch of make-up and some are walking billboards for Sephora whom I have never seen without at least foundation and eyeliner, some are model thin and some are deliciously thick, some are impeccably coiffed and styles, some are always in a state of fashion chaos - yet, they all wear it well.
I look at my daughter who is so strikingly beautiful that I cry just looking at her (again totally objective) and wonder why she complains about being "too fat" or frets over her thighs being "too round" when she is visibly perfect. I remember reading Jan Ken Po by Dr. Dennis Ogawa in college and remembering the chapter on hapa kids being the ideal when it came to dating, how the mix of races created perfect half-half beings. Here is this young lady in my house who is everything that society says makes a true beauty - tall, thin, long hair, fine of face - yet something will not let her embrace and accept who she is. I asked her the other day how it felt to be so pretty and she responded, "Oh, I'm not beautiful, look at this..." and she proceeded to point out everything she felt was wrong with her. For a minute, I was worried and wondered how to respond but she quickly added, "I'd rather be smart than beautiful and Mom, you KNOW I am smart, right?"
Damn right, Girl, and you got that smart from Mommy! However, the Jew-fro is from Dad.
