While sucking down a delicious smoothie at Smoothie King I took notice of a very interesting ad they were showing on their wall…
Although spitting in public is acceptable in Korea, spitting smoothies is not. I decided to take a picture of the sign and spent a few hours thinking about the picture and ask myself if the hidden message in this sign has been in front of my face for the last three months, but only when it was spelled out in front of my did I actually realize it. Then I faced the truth…

Asians want to be whiter

The desire to make your skin whiter is a growing phenomenon in Asia and without thinking much into it there’s two immediate explanations that will come to mind…

1. Symbolism - From a Western standpoint we might assume the desire to be white in Asia stems from the symbolism behind the color and it representing purity, innocence, light and serving as the contrast from darkness and evil. However, in many Asian cultures white is the symbol of death, so that’s not it.

2. “The grass is always greener” – There’s no denying a large number of white people wish to be…darker. Those who know me will attest I’m a big fan of Banana Boat SPF 4, and a strong advocate of switching sides at 11 in volleyball when the games is to 21 (just to make both sides get an even glow!). However, I have never gone to a tanning salon, used fake tan spray or wished I was darker. I simply enjoy being out in the sun as much as possible. Getting tanner for white people is a seasonal obsession in the summer or on vacation, getting whiter for Asians is a cultural obsession that persists throughout some of their lives (I want to stress some here so I don’t generalize about all Asians).

So what’s lying beneath the surface for the Asians who strive to be whiter? The implication of class.

See way back in the day in Asia, if you had darker skin it meant you were basically a peasant who spent your days tilling fields and harvesting rice while the wealthier folks lounged around and…did something else.

The method of altering your skin color is quite obvious…

- The natural method of getting tanner is quite simple: spend more time in the sun.
- The unnatural method of getting tanner is quite simple: buy products that will make you tanner.

- The natural method of getting whiter is quite simple: spend less time in the sun.
- The unnatural method of getting whiter is quite simple: buy products that will make you whiter.

I’m sure most people never heard of products that make your product whiter, but we all know Michael Jackson (r.i.p.) showed us it was possible to have the procedure done medically.

“So BG, do you go to the Korean CVS and pick up products to make your skin whiter?”

Well, not CVS, but yes they do sell whitening products over the counter here, though for some people those aren’t enough. A black market is also available where you can by whitening products which are too…good?…to be sold in a store. The problem is any chemical you apply to your skin to alter its color that is sold on the black market will and has caused a lot of horrible and irreversible results.

Though if you’re not willing to injure yourself from using black market whitening products that’s okay, feel free to peruse http://www.ASIANWHITESKIN.com. On their homepage you’ll see such links as “Whitening Pills,” “Injectables,” and “Skin Machines.” My first search on the internet was “asian white skin” and that website was the first site which popped up much to my dismay/delight. I was expecting to begin reading articles about the significance and history behind Asians trying to make their skin whiter, I didn’t expect to be given more ammunition.

While these products claim they are safe, even over the counter and legal lotions are problematic. One of the key ingredients in these lotions which helps skin whiten is mercury. Mercury is an extremely dangerous subject, and even with my little medical knowledge I know it is a toxic chemical that has lethal consequences if there is over exposure. I did some research about mercury laden skin whitening products and found a case where people were using a certain brand which had “between 9,000 and 65,000 times the recommended dose.” Then I felt the need to look up the real dangers of mercury and found that side effects are “impairment of peripheral vision, speech, hearing, and walking, muscle weakness, skin rashes, mood swings, memory loss, mental disturbances, lack of coordination of movements such as writing…”

In the Western world we lay in cancer beds, here they just apply some rub on lotion which could have immediate results, for “better” or much worse.

Examples of the picture I posted are all over signs and the TV here, and now I can easily see there is a preference in the media towards people with whiter skin. I kicked myself upon this revelation for not remembering I’ve witnessed this somewhere else…Bollywood. (Although this entry focuses on Eastern Asians, this stigma also carries over to India as well.) If anyone reading is familiar with Bollywood films/movies, you’ll notice that the Indians starring in those roles are always much lighter than the ones you see, know, or imagine in your head.

Being whiter was an association with class and royalty during ancient times in Asia. Although that is outdated, I'm sure the perception still resonates with some of the more old school families here. Now, being whiter gives people a "leg up" to fame. The singers are “whiter than average,” so are the models and the movie stars. The media is telling us this is what's beautiful, so it's now only natural that people will aspire to be that way at costs that are detrimental to our physical and mental wellness. Back then people aspired to be whiter because it made them feel like they were nobility, now we all want our moment in the sun, even if it’s just for a little while, to make us feel better about ourselves, and that's all we want isn't it? Shaking my head...

On that note, I just booked my plane ticket to Vietnam where I'll be spending a week catching rays under the sun. Isn't it ironic...

* Random fact regarding mercury. In the 1800s a certain type of hats were made by applying mercury to them. The chemical seeped into the peoples brains from their head just by wearing the hat, and caused damage to their central nervous system. People who wore these hats had mood swings and extreme behavioral changes, and they were described as being “mad as a hatter.” Yes, that is the origin of the Mad Hatters name from Alice in Wonderland. Pretty cool…I guess.

I don't plan on recycling content out on the web here, but below is a very, VERY interesting article on race relations from The New York Times.

One of the requirements of submitting your application for a job is including a picture of yourself. I don't find this offensive, but I am a dashing young man. I have read stories from people who have teaching experience, a certificate to teach English as a foreign language and are a hell of a lot more qualified than most people who teach English here (myself included), but the recruiting process ended when they submitted a picture and it was "discovered" they were (insert anything that's not Caucasian/Asian).

I'm not familiar enough with the culture here to write on such a deep topic, and why bother putting an ill-informed take on it when the article below does an excellent job. Perhaps in a few months I'll be able to comment more but for anyone reading this blog who finds what I write to be interesting, I think this article is very insightful and worth reading.

South Koreans Struggle With Race

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.