Beauty and the Bleach : Hard Hair!

Every other television commercial in Taiwan featured a willowy young woman caressing her face while describing how this amazing cream actually makes your skin soft, downy and white. So now the LA Times has caught on in theBeauty and the Bleach , an article describing -- and I've seen them -- Asian women, mostly Chinese to my eye, or Taiwanese, wearing these anti-UV welding masks while driving, walking their toddler, pushing a shopping cart, taking out money at an ATM -- doing whatever. They look seriously freaky and definitely not attractive, not to me at any rate. Indoors, they may be total babes, but this chador of the face has something to do with the deep anxiety being dark that afflicts almost all the women of Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Perhaps their best bet for total sun avoidance is to move underground.

I wouldn't bother blogging about this again, but I encountered another freaky example of Chinese self-hatred when I went to the beauty salon attached to the huge Chinese grocery store here to get my hair cut. The Thai-Chinese owner discussed my short hair (I'm trying to grow it out now) and he brought over some mags with pix of short hair cuts. I pointed to a few and he said, "Your hair won't do that it. Your hair is too hard." My hair is too hard? what the ef? But I realized he was saying that because all the girls with perky short hair cuts in the mag were WHITE and that according to this freak, WHITE girls have soft hair. I felt as if I had straw growing out of my head --straw that I had wanted him to spin into WHITE, soft silky gold.

Well he can ask my red head husband who has hard hair! I was pissed off, but it seemed a bit hysterical to jump out of his chair and call him a racist self-hating weirdo, especially since we'd been kibbitzing in Chinese and I would have had to switch to English to call him self-hating. I really don't know how to say "self-hating" in Chinese and that in and of itself would be my lording it over his recent immigrant ass, so I did some deep breathing and went through with the whole haircut thing, but I won't be going back there ever again. I'm going to have to find a non-Chinese hairdresser -- and I regret this because I never paid more than 20 US for a haircut in Taiwan and they were all excellent -- especially after I learned to ask for pun-ku!

It will be dorky hair for the time being in SoCal where "feathering" was pioneered if not invented --

Ugh! Hard hair indeed.....