Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia

S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479802272
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How
transnational modernity is taking shape in and in relation to Asia

Fashion and Beauty in the Time of
Asia
considers the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of Asian modernities and
the formation of the so-called “Asian Century.” S. Heijin Lee, Christina H.
Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu train our eyes on sites as far-flung, varied, and
intimate as Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto. They
map the transregional connections, ever-evolving aspirations and sensibilities,
and new worlds and life paths forged through engagements with fashion and
beauty.

Contributors
consider American influence on plastic surgery in Korea, Vietnamese debates
about “the fashionable,” and the costs and commitments demanded of those who
make and wear fast fashion, from Chinese garment workers to Nepalese nail
technicians in New York who are mandated to dress "fashionably." In
doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology moves beyond common
characterizations of Asians and the Asian diaspora as simply abject laborers or
frenzied consumers, analyzing who the modern Asian subject is now: what they
wear and how they work, move, eat, and shop.

1

White Like Koreans

The Skin of the New Vietnam

THUY LINH NGUYEN TU

My first visit to Vietnam was in December 2000, a trip to escape the New York winter but, in retrospect, well-timed in many other ways. Just a decade had passed since the country had instituted its economic reforms and it had been only a month since President Clinton’s visit, the first by a US president since the war. During my six-week stay, I lived in Saigon but traveled throughout the country. Americans—and I was surely one despite being born in Vietnam—were still an uncommon sight, especially outside of the city. Where we traveled, my partner and I inspired all sorts of responses, from a friendly wave and “hello,” to stares and pointing. Vietnam was just beginning to rebuild. The Imperial Hotel’s recent multimillion-dollar renovation was a sign of things to come. The Furama Resort had just opened in Danang, the first luxury hotel built on the beach where the United States had installed the army base made memorable to Americans by the hit television show, China Beach. Once, while sitting on its white sand, a woman selling guava, cut up and served with salt and spicy red pepper, approached our group. We bought several to share and as she was departing she turned to my cousin and asked if her friend—me—was American? She said she could tell because my skin was so white—a comment I would come to hear endlessly.

When I returned to Vietnam in the summer of 2012, much had changed. Saigon was packed with new and renovated hotels, restaurants, and shops. The 68-floor Bixteco Tower stood at its center, casting a long shadow over the central district. American, European, Australian, Japanese, Korean, and Thai tourists all slurped pho in beautifully appointed settings. On a return visit to Danang, the Furama looked like it had seen better days, overtaken by dozens of lavish resorts lining the beach, including the dazzling new Grand Hyatt. Strangers still found me comment-worthy, but not because of my absolute foreignness. “You speak Vietnamese very well for a Japanese person,” a street-side coffee vendor in Hoi An told me. Once, at a Karaoke lounge, I was even mistaken for a local. My skin too had become rather unremarkable. Its much-praised lightness seemed to have disappeared in the intervening years.

A decade had passed between these two trips and the years had no doubt left their mark on my body. But my skin had not darkened significantly, nor had my features changed noticeably. How had I gone from “American” and remarkably “white” to “Japanese” or “Vietnamese” with rather unremarkable skin? These comments hinted at a shift in the signification of color, race, and nation. They compelled me to consider, following the insights of many historians and anthropologists of the body, how narratives about the body—here, the skin—are also ways of making sense of the world—in this instance, of a city undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformation.

In Vietnam, one particularly revealing place to observe these changes was at the upscale malls and boutiques—or shrines to skin, as I came to think of them—that had sprung up in the wake of postwar economic reforms. Like fast food restaurants and foreign cars, malls blew into Vietnam on the same winds of trade liberalization that delivered most other luxury items. But unlike most malls in the United States and elsewhere, whose main floor windows are filled with the latest fashion, here, cosmetics dominate the scene. Ads for beauty supplies, from low-cost shampoos to high-status lipsticks, also flood magazines, newspapers, and television—outpacing, in my estimation, advertisements for any other kind of consumer good. Not surprisingly, sales of prestige cosmetics, including brands like Shiseido and Lancôme, have far outpaced those of luxury clothing. In comparison to the cost of a new Prada purse, cosmetics are a relatively affordable luxury item. They attract a wider swath of consumers in part because they offer even those with modest income an opportunity to participate in the global luxury market.

If cosmetics reigned at these glittering spaces of consumption—by 2000, Vietnam had become the fastest growing market for cosmetics, outpacing even China in the Asia/Pacific region—it was skincare that really ruled. These products take up about 75 percent of the market. They are displayed in pristine glass boxes, proffered by women (and occasionally men) neatly dressed and perfectly polished—the very representations of what they sell. Indeed, these local Vietnamese look no different from the globally circulated advertisements that surround them. Their hair black and shiny, their faces heart shaped with wide eyes, their skin clear and, in their favorite word, “bright” (sáng).

These women, like the places they inhabit, seem to be shining with the new. And at the cosmetics counters, they sold more than just affordable luxuries. They promised, in their goods and persons, access to something more elusive and perhaps even more urgent: entrance to the modernity enveloping Saigon. As in other places in the non-West—Brazil, for instance, in Barbara Weinstein’s fantastic history of São Paulo—this unfolding modernity has a color.1 It is, simply put, white. But you might be surprised by what that whiteness looks like in Vietnam, what it means. Thinking back to my first visit to Vietnam, two decades ago now, it seems plausible that my light skin might signal my Americanness, that whiteness could be monopolistically tied to that geography. But by 2012, such associations were being unraveled by a dazzling Asian futurity, forged in the much-touted success of South Korea, Japan, China and their “tiger economies.” To their Southeast Asian neighbors in Vietnam, these nations modeled a bright future, one figured most commonly by the Korean star, whose lightness glimmered. How do we read this whiteness, embodied on Asian skin and signaling both aesthetic and economic possibilities for newly developing countries in the region?

Answering this question required me to think about “skin talk,” or local discourses and debates about skin, within the context of Vietnam’s ongoing modernization, as well as the emergence of South Korea as a cultural and economic power in the region. Moreover, it demanded that I consider whiteness in both a more cosmopolitan way—that is, not dominated solely by a US racial framework—and in a more provincial way—that is, as it is represented and read, imagined, and realized in a local and regional context. Reading Vietnamese women’s considerations of and practices of skincare in this way, I began to see their efforts and imaginations of beauty as classed and gendered projects of development. As Vietnamese men literally rebuilt their cities with a muscular entrepreneurialism, elite Vietnamese women developed their own bodies to reflect both their nation’s aspirations and their own hopes for the “new Vietnam.” Their desire for lightness reflected these ambitions.

Yet light skin signaled something quite different in Saigon. Light skin in the United States has long been constructed as delicate and fragile—as a sign of Western femininity, of white women’s need for protection and care. Moreover, the fragility of whiteness has been further reinforced in recent years by populist narratives that have positioned white people (men in particular) as constantly under threat, from lost jobs to terrorist attacks. But, as I hope to show, Vietnamese women embrace lightness not as an emblem of feminine vulnerability or of threatened masculinity. Quite to the contrary, the Korean brand of lightness they desire conveys power and dominance, a mark of South Korea’s cultural and economic position in the region—and a sign of the possibilities for their own positions, even in the face of these nations’ incompatible histories.

Hierarchies of Lightness

Among the images that dominate visual representations of postwar Saigon, perhaps the most iconic is that of hordes of men and women riding mopeds, masks covering their faces. The heat, dust, and chaos are palpable. In some ways, this image narrates a kind of generic third-world urban disorder—this could be Dhaka or Delhi—but what locates it firmly within a Vietnamese context is the body of the women, covered head to toe and presumably sweating in the scorching sun. The commentary that usually accompanies this image is one about Vietnamese women’s obsession with lightness, their covered bodies a testament to the lengths they will go to maintain a fair complexion. And, like other spectacular examples of covered bodies—women in burqas, for instance—this one elicits a lot of feelings. There is pity for these women, who apparently suffer under both the dominance of Euro-American beauty standards and local forms of patriarchy. There is perhaps even anger on their behalf, a desire to free them from their own sweltering veil.

Saigon bursts at the seams with mopeds. These motorized scooters, which outnumber all other forms of transportation, became even more prominent post-reform, when new models entered the market and when families began to accumulate enough capital to purchase them.2 They are a symbol of the increased mobility, both spatial and economic, that many Vietnamese enjoyed in the wake of Đổi Mới, the economic reforms instituted in 1986 that sought to turn the nation into a “socialist-oriented market economy.” Mopeds expose their riders to the elements—to rain, sun, dirt, and heat. Commuters from the city’s peripheries routinely pack additional clothes, as their travel gear inevitably becomes soiled and sweaty by the time they arrive at work. Women cover up in this context to shield against all the elements, but the reading of their fastidiousness as a preoccupation with whiteness has become widely accepted, and not just by outside observers.

“These women are so worried about getting dark,” Ma, an editor at Elle Vietnam told me, “they don’t care what they look like, as long as they can hide from the sun and stay light.” Ma was, as usual, impeccably dressed during our lunch meeting, wearing a white blazer over a black mini-dress that exposed her long, bare legs. I asked her if she ever worried about “getting dark” herself. Ma replied, “of course I want to have good skin, but I also want to wear fashionable clothes and not have to cover myself like người nhà quê.”

Người nhà quê, a country bumpkin, or someone who lacks sophistication and cosmopolitanism, is a common derogatory term that hinges on a long-standing discourse in Vietnam about the spatial, cultural, and moral distinctions between the city and the country.3 Ma’s invocation of it struck me because it suggested that if Vietnamese women shared a desire for lightness, they understood that desire differently. For Ma, the fashion editor who wore her sophistication on her sleeves, this ambition to “stay white” was actually a sign of backwardness and was antithetical to what it meant to be fashionable. The image of the fully covered Vietnamese woman, so commonly understood to be representative of a widespread longing for the norms of modern femininity, was here being read as actually hostile to it. For Ma and her circle, the woman sitting astride her moped appears to inhabit the same city, but she actually lives in a different time.

Women like Ma rarely ride mopeds, preferring cars or cabs. These vehicles offer wealthy women not just a new way to travel but also a new relationship to their body. For enclosed in these cars, these women can be both exposed and protected. When they alight from the cab and enter the mall, there is no dirt or sweat on their clothes and no sign of the sun that has barely kissed their skin. In Saigon, cars sit at the top of the vehicular hierarchy. In the (ever-changing) rules of traffic, non-motorized vehicles (bicycles and cyclos) must yield the right of way to mopeds; mopeds must in turn give the right of way to four-wheeled vehicles. In a similar vein, this figure of fashionable femininity, whose wealth reshapes her body’s relationship to the environment, reveals how the pursuit of whiteness is also hierarchically structured. In the eyes of Ma and her ilk, working-class attempts to “hide from the sun and stay white” are like the moped that these women ride: a symbol of aspiration that reveals its own distance from real power.

Our conversation raised as a question a phenomenon that I had previously understood as social fact. Scholars and social critics have written extensively about color and beauty and the privileging of whiteness in normative notions of attractiveness and desirability.4 These norms, they say, have been exacerbated in recent years by cosmeceutical companies, which have sold billions of dollars of skin-whitening creams to young, urban, educated women in the global south by linking lightness with modernity, social mobility, and youth. Comment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1. White Like Koreans: The Skin of the New Vietnam
• 2. China: Through the Looking Glass: Race, Property, and the Possessive Investment in White Feelings
• 3. Beauty between Empires: Global Feminisms, Plastic Surgery, and the Trouble with Self-Esteem
• 4. Beauty Regimens, Beauty Regimes: Korean Beauty on YouTube
• 5. Fashioning the Field in Vietnam: An Intersectional Tale of Clothing, Femininities, and the Pedagogy of Appropriateness
• 6. Splitting the Seams: Transnational Feminism and the Manila-Toronto Production of Filipino Couture
• 7. Manicures as Transnational Body Labor
• 8. “Little Freedoms”: Immigrant Labor and the Politics of “Fast Fashion” after Rana Plaza
• 9. Cartographic Imaginaries of Fast Fashion in Guangzhou, China
• 10. Times, Tempos, and the Rhythm of Fast Fashion in Los Angeles and Seoul
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Index