by Bill Bryson
The national fixation on plastic surgery began in the aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the offer made by the American occupational forces to provide free reconstructive surgery to maimed war victims. Particular credit or blame—you choose—goes to David Ralph Millard, the chief plastic surgeon for the U.S. Marine Corps, who, in response to requests from Korean citizens wishing to change their Asian eyes to Occidental ones, perfected the blepharoplasty. As Millard wrote in a 1955 monograph, the Asian eye’s “absence of the palpebral fold produces a passive expression which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the Oriental.” The procedure was a hit, and caught on fast, especially with Korean prostitutes, who wanted to attract American GIs. “It was indeed a plastic surgeon’s paradise,” Millard wrote.
There is a word you hear a lot in Korea: woori. It means “we” or “us” or “we-ness,” but, as explained by Kihyoung Choi in his book A Pedagogy of Spiraling, it blurs into a collective “I.” Choi writes, “When one refers to one’s spouse, one does not say ‘my husband’ or ‘my wife’ but ‘our husband’ or ‘our wife.’” (The divorce rate in Korea tripled in 2014.) “It is very important to be part of the woori group, to be part of your coalition or clique,” Eugene Yun, a private-equity fund manager, told me. “This is the antithesis of individualism. If we go to a restaurant in a group, we’ll all order the same thing. If we go into a shop, we’ll often ask, ‘What is the most popular item?’ and just purchase that. The feeling is, if you can look better, you should. Not to do so would be complacent and lazy and reflect badly on your group.” He went on, “It’s not that you’re trying to stand out and look good. It’s that you’re trying not to look bad.” He continued, “This is a very competitive society. In the old days, if your neighbor bought a new TV or new car you would need to buy a new TV or car. Now we all have these basic things, so the competition has moved up to comparing one’s looks, health, and spiritual things as well.”
For the good of all, then, let’s get back to the hospitals. Options offered at various establishments we visited included Barbie-Nose Rhinoplasty (“Let it up to have doll-like sharp nose!”), Forehead Volumization (“Your beauty will increase!”), Hip-Up surgery (to achieve “a feminine and beautiful Latino-like body line”), arm-lifts, calf reductions, dimple creation, whitening injections (called Beyoncé injections by one clinic), eye-corner lowering (so you don’t look fierce), smile-lifts that curl the corners of your lips and chisel an indentation into the crooks so that your now permanently happy mouth looks as if it were drawn by a six-year-old (this operation is popular with flight attendants), and “cat surgery,” to fix your floppy philtrum.
But most of the surgery performed in South Korea isn’t usually too drastic, and seems technically superb. The blepharoplasty can take as little as 15 minutes (“Less serious than getting a tooth pulled,” one man I talked to said). Unlike in America, where the goal is to have the biggest you-know-whats, the desired aesthetic in Seoul is understated—“A slight variation on what everyone else has” is the way Kibum put it. “Koreans are still very conservative,” Kyuhee Baik, an anthropology graduate student, told me. “It would be a disaster for a girl to show cleavage—it would make you look shallow,” a 19-year-old who’d had her eyes and jaw done told me. “You don’t want to stand out,” Baik went on. “That goes back to our Confucian foundations. It’s a very conformist society.”
“I never thought about doing plastic surgery,” said Stella Ahn, whom I met at a coffee bar with her friends Jen Park and Sun Lee, all college sophomores.” But then my father told me, ‘You have my eyes, so I spoke to a plastic surgeon who’ll make you more beautiful.’ Afterward, I regretted it a lot. I felt: I’m not me, I lost my true self. My eyes were bruised at first, so they seemed smaller.” When the swelling went down, Ahn came to like her eyes. Lee also had her eyes done at her father’s urging. “He told me that beauty could be a big advantage for girls. For instance, when you go on a job interview if the interviewer saw two women who had similar abilities, of course he’d go with the better-looking one.” It bears mentioning that, among the 27 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Korea, where the pressure to get married is significant, ranks last where gender equality is concerned.
Ahn continued, “Before I got double eyelids, the boys didn’t appreciate me so much.” Lee concurred. I asked if they were ever tempted to lie and say that they hadn’t had surgery. “These days, the trend is to be open,” Park said. “The reason girls don’t lie is that we don’t feel guilty,” Lee explained. “We are congratulated for having plastic surgery.”
Remember Queen for a Day, the TV show in which a jeweled crown and prizes, such as a washer-dryer, were awarded to the woeful housewife contestant who could convince the studio audience that she was the most woeful of all the other housewife contestants? A version of that show, Let Me In, is among the most widely viewed programs in South Korea. Each contestant on the show—given a nickname like Girl Who Looks Like Frankenstein, Woman Who Cannot Laugh, Flat-Chested Mother, Monkey—makes a case to a panel of beauty experts that his or her physical features have made it so impossible to live a normal life that a total surgical revamping is called for. The contestants’ parents are brought onstage, too, to apologize to their offspring not only for endowing them with crummy genes but also for being too poor to afford plastic surgery. At the end of every show, the surgically reborn contestant is revealed to the audience, which oohs and aahs and claps and cries.
There are a number of plastic surgery reality shows in Korea along these lines, but one, Back to My Face, has taken a different approach. I met with Siwon Paek, the producer of the show’s pilot. In the pilot, contestants who had had at least 10 surgeries compete to win a final operation that promises to undo all the previous reconstructions. Paek emphasized that the aim is to help plastic surgery addicts come to terms psychologically with their appearance. Those with lower incomes, she said, tend to be the most compulsive about plastic surgery. “They feel they have no other way to prove themselves to people and lift themselves socially and economically,” she said. Although the Back to My Face pilot was popular, Paek said that she will produce no more episodes. “I didn’t have the strength to continue,” she told me. The responsibility of changing people’s lives weighed too heavily on her, she said, and finding contestants was hard. “For one month, I stood outside a dance club,” she told me. “I solicited two hundred people. Most didn’t want to go back to the way they looked before.”
In recent years, a new Korean word, sung-gui, began to surface online. It means “plastic surgery monster.” A college student I spoke to defined the term for me as a person who has had so much cosmetic alteration that he or she “looks unnatural and arouses repulsion.” Not long ago, the Korea Consumer Agency reported that a third of all plastic surgery patients were dissatisfied with the results, and 17 percent claimed to have suffered at least one negative side effect. The agency keeps no official records of accidents or botched surgeries, but every few months there is a story in the newspaper about someone not waking up from the anesthetic after a procedure.
Amazingly, this does not seem to hurt business. Hyon-Ho Shin, who heads the malpractice branch of the Korean lawyers’ association, told me, over tea in his office, “These days, there are so many accidents, and nearly every hospital has had a serious incident, so it doesn’t matter so much. People who are having plastic surgery accept that it’s a risk they take.” Just before I arrived in Korea, a college student who had gone in for eyelid surgery died. Before the anesthetic was administered, the doctor offered to give her a bonus jaw operation free of charge if she allowed the hospital to use her before-and-after photographs. It was later reported that the doctor was actually a dentist. Shin estimates that as many as 80 percent of doctors doing plastic surgery are not certified in the field; these are known as “ghost doctors.” A 2005 BBC report mentioned radiologists performing double-eyelid surgeries and psychiatrists operating the
liposuction machine. Shin believes that nurses and untrained assistants are wielding the scalpel, too. Sometimes a hotshot doctor with a recognizable name will be there to greet the patient, but after the anesthetic kicks in it’s hello, Doogie Howser!
Another surgeon, Dr. Ha, told me, “The larger hospitals have become factories. One hospital even sets timers in the operating room so that, for instance, each doctor has to finish an eyelid surgery in under thirty minutes, or a nose job in under an hour and a half. If they go over, there are financial consequences and verbal reprimands.” These lapses have become an issue of national concern. Last year, a Korean lawmaker complained to parliament that 77 percent of plastic surgery clinics were not equipped with mandatory defibrillators or ventilators.
When the mother of South Korea’s former president Chun Doo Hwan was trying to conceive a child, in the 1920s, she met a wandering monk who told her that she had the face of someone who would be the mother of a great man—unless her buckteeth got in the way of destiny. With dispatch, she knocked out her front teeth using a log. (Some accounts say that she used a rock.) Her son ruled Korea from 1980 to 1988 as a brutal and repressive dictator.
If it worked for Mrs. Hwan, it could work for you. It is not uncommon for a Korean who is considering face alteration to seek the opinion of a professional face reader—i.e., someone who offers advice on which nips and tucks will do the most good. The occupation grew in prominence after the financial crisis of 1997–98, when competition for jobs became fierce.
On my last day in Seoul, I decided to pay $50 to consult a face reader. “Should I smile?” I asked my translator, who communicated the question to a squat old man in a quilted Chinese-style jacket, who was, like so many others I met that week, gazing critically at my countenance. “Just be natural” came the answer. We were in the face reader’s dark, tiny office, which was crammed with oil paintings, an old TV, drawings of the body segmented as if they were cuts of beef, and lots of tchotchkes (a Manchester United paperweight, a small Buddha, a piggy bank).
After asking me when my birthday was, the face reader offered some general truths. “He says if there is a scar between your eyes it makes you desolate from all your wishes and hopes. Then totally, yes. One should have plastic surgery,” my translator said. “He says if there’s a nose bridge that isn’t straight enough, it disconnects you from your family.”
But, I asked, what about me?
“He says your eyebrows look like you have a lot of friends,” the translator said. “And your nose indicates that you are going to be wealthy.”
Should I change anything?
“He doesn’t have a bad thing to say about you. But your teeth might be a little weak. And you should eat a lot more beef.”
D. T. MAX
A Cave with a View
FROM The New Yorker
Take any road in Italy, look up, and you’ll see a lovely hilltop town: a campanile, a castèllo, a few newer buildings spilling down the slope, as if expelled for the crime of ugliness. But even amid this bounty there is something exceptional about Matera. It clings to a denuded peak in the extreme south of the country, in the Basilicata region—the instep of Italy’s boot. Travelers are often shocked by the starkness of Matera. It’s a claustrophobic outcropping of cave dwellings carved into limestone, like scrimshaw, with hardly a tree or a blade of grass to be seen. In the afternoon sun, Matera looks like a pile of tarnished gold thrown down by a careless giant. Its severe beauty is as much a tribute to human resilience as to the rugged landscape where it is situated. Most places in Italy encourage you to celebrate the prettiness that wealth bestows: exquisite iron grillwork, festive marble fountains. Matera is more visceral—a monument to endurance and thrift, to hard lives lived without waste.
Matera may look inhospitable, but people have been settling here for a long time: it is often cited as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, in a league with Aleppo and Byblos. There is something inherently alluring about this natural fortress, which towers above fertile plains and the Gravina River. A cave near Matera contains the remains of a 150,000-year-old hominid; another has tools and bones from 10,000 years ago, and dozens of Neolithic sites dot the surrounding ridges. Matera was already a significant settlement in the Bronze Age.
Because of Matera’s narrow confines, rebuilding has been constant, making the city a palimpsest in stone. A dig in 1906, near the Duomo, in the town center, went 35 feet below the surface and found Christian coffins and the remains of a Saracen invasion from around A.D. 800. The scientists kept going, and below that they discovered statues, broken columns, and money from the Byzantine occupation, of around A.D. 400. Farther down, they uncovered ancient Greek and Roman coins and, under that layer, bits of ceramics from 3,000 years ago. Matera stands at what has long been a crossroads between East and West. As Anne Parmly Toxey points out in her comprehensive 2011 study, Materan Contradictions, Greeks, Romans, Longobards, Byzantines, Saracens, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons all passed through the town. Man came here and never left—that’s the local boast. Given this history, it is jarring to learn that 50 years ago the government tried to make Matera go extinct.
In the middle of the 18th century, Giuseppe Antonini, a baron from Salerno, praised Matera for its “highly cultivated” citizens and “its vast and extremely fertile countryside.” The Roman abbot Giovanni Battista Pacichelli, a contemporary of his, was likewise impressed. The town, Pacichelli noted, was divided into three sections, as it is today. The main section, the Civita, contains grand churches and picturesque palazzi; it is flanked on both sides by the Sassi, or the Rocks—steeply graded districts where mostly peasants lived. The pileup of the Sassi disconcerted Pacichelli: the roof of a house, he wrote, could well be the floor of a church, “confusing the places of the living and the dead.” But he, too, admired what was then a thriving ecclesiastical hub. The town was the seat of an archbishop and, at the time of Antonini’s and Pacichelli’s accounts, a regional capital. From Matera, Spanish occupiers oversaw part of the Italian Peninsula, eventually giving way to the French.
Matera’s status began declining in 1806, when Joseph Bonaparte moved the seat of the region’s government to Potenza, 60 miles to the west. Over time, Matera became known as “the capital of peasant civilization.” Rulers came and went, but the locals endured in their cave homes, or grotte. Each morning, they descended long, narrow trails into the valley, and worked in fields that were often miles away. At dusk, they returned to the mountain. Much of the communal life of the town was lived outdoors, in small courtyards called vicinati.
Materans were tough and self-sufficient. They had their own rituals and songs, their own demons and dialect. Many of their traditions developed as ways of preventing waste. Using shared ovens, they produced a unique horn-shaped bread that was leavened and baked slowly, yielding large pores that helped it stay fresh for a week. Rainwater was captured by a complex network of stone basins and underground ceramic pipes. Resourceful as the Mate-rans were, however, their lifestyle increasingly lagged behind that of the rest of the world. The better-off citizens of Matera began departing for the Piano—a more recently settled, flatter section of the hilltop—and the townspeople who remained in the Sassi were almost exclusively poor. In the caves, plumbing, electricity, and telephones were practically nonexistent. And until the 1930s you couldn’t take a wagon drawn by a donkey into the Sassi, only a hand-pulled cart.
Within Italy, Matera came to be seen as just another out-of-the-way town in the impoverished south; among foreigners, it had a reputation as a picturesque troglodytic locale. But, as the world modernized, curiosity gave way to repulsion. It seemed grotesque for people to live in lightless dwellings alongside their animals. In 1853 John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy declared Matera “a dirty city” and noted that “its lower classes are said to be the most uncivilized in the whole province of Basilicata.” Its problems seemed intractable: poor sanitation, brutal work conditions, malaria
. Yet the population continued to grow, reaching 15,000 by the early 20th century. Half a dozen family members often crowded into a cave; residents used basins for toilets and burned the waste on the cliffs. Italy was falling behind the other nations of Europe, Basilicata was falling behind Italy, and Matera seemed to be last of all.
In 1902 Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli visited the Sassi and reported that it awoke in him “not just amazement but deep pity.” He proposed new railways, which weren’t completed, and land redistribution, which didn’t happen. In 1926 the archaeologist and social activist Umberto Zanotti Bianco called Matera “a Dantean horror.”
By this time, the Fascists were in power, and Benito Mussolini was determined to bring his humiliated country up to date. Matera was an obvious candidate for modernization. He connected the town to the Apulian aqueduct, providing the Sassi with running water, but the Fascists were stymied by the prospect of overhauling the caves. One solution, they decided, was to depopulate the Sassi and transfer the residents to houses near their fields.
Mussolini was ousted in 1943, and, paradoxically, it was one of his opponents, the leftist Carlo Levi, who fulfilled the Fascist agenda for Matera. Levi, a doctor and a painter from Turin’s upper class, had been arrested for anti-Fascist activities in 1935 and exiled to Aliano, south of Matera. He spent a year there, amid poverty that he would not have seen otherwise. In his 1945 autobiographical novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli, he described the peasants of Italy’s extreme south as living “in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria.” During his exile, Levi visited Matera only briefly, but his sister, also a doctor, passed through on her way to see him, and his book incorporated her observations of children “sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen” from trachoma. She described boys and girls trailing her down a path, begging for quinine.