1. In therapy, my therapist and I discuss what men want in a woman. “A blank canvas to project on,” is one proposed response. “Something to own,” is another.
2. In her essay An argument about beauty, Susan Sontag writes, “The best theory of beauty is its history. Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities.”
3. Deployment: A solid, military word for what we’ve been told is a delicate, intangible thing.
4. Deployment: As a teenager I tried different tactics to make myself beautiful. As a Chinese-American girl growing up in white, middle class suburbs “beauty” meant white girls with blonde hair and blue eyes. White girls with bare legs peddling bicycles up hills. White girls with white boyfriends, talking on the phone, kicking their feet in the air.
5. Deployment: At 16 I started applying warm saltwater to my eyelids before bed to make them look bigger - puffy and inflamed. I used dark brown eye shadow to highlight the crease in my double eyelid. I took antibiotics to treat my acne. Thick white creams dosed with clindamycin. Doxycycline pills taken twice a day.
6. My mother immigrated to the U.S. when she was 32. Back in her hometown of Ningbo she was a graduate student in Japanese literature. In the U.S. she worked as a waitress and a nanny. When I turned six she went to night school to become a beautician. Throughout my teens, my mother helped me with my beauty routine. She put brown highlights in my hair and permed it. She waxed the hair above my upper lip and steamed my face over a bowl of hot water to open my pores. Sometimes I hated her for the attention she paid to my appearance. She reinforced the idea that there was something that needed to be fixed.
7. Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, as a meditation on racial self-hatred. In the book the protagonist - a black girl from a poor family - prays for blue eyes. I read The Bluest Eye in one sitting. In an analysis of Morrison’s work, one scholar wrote that, “One’s visibility depends upon one’s beauty”.
8. Deployment: In romantic relationships I often felt an odd sense of triangulation. I was an invisible figure standing on the outside, looking in. As a girl I never saw any women who looked like me on TV or in the movies - laughing, having relationships, drinking coffee. A problem of representation. When men finally did look at me I could never quite shake the feeling that they were looking past me towards someone else. I thought maybe beautiful women felt this way too - to be beautiful meant you owed the viewer something.
9. From Reginald Shepherd’s Notes towards Beauty: “Beauty calls to beauty, after all, though beauty also demands an audience, an audience that is presumably not beautiful; otherwise it would contemplate itself”.
10. Sontag writes that the “ascription of beauty is never unmixed with moral values”. Nobody understands this better than a woman of color, whose beauty (if it is said to exist) is set in contrast to the “norm”. I used to say that I looked good in photographs but only accidentally.
11. Is beauty something that you are or something that you own? All of the attempts to dismantle beauty, all of the Dove commercials (the perfect marriage of beauty and capital), all of the quotes that say “Beauty is only skin deep” only go so far for me. Beauty works best when it is trying to sell me something.
12. When I was younger I thought my mother was beautiful. She had pale white skin that she kept soft and hydrated with bottles of white cream. She wore double layers of pantyhose to protect her stomach from the cold. Her bathroom vanity was spread with hairbrushes and make-up kits. When I couldn’t sleep at night I would climb into bed and rub my hands on her bare, white arms. They were cool to the touch and this motion always soothed me.
13. The Chinese character for beauty is 美 (mei / mĕi). Beauty is an element in the Chinese word for America. Mĕiguó = Beautiful Country.
14. As girls we were taught that Helen was the beauty whose face launched a thousand ships. The etymology of Helen’s name = Venus, the sun, the moon, a torch, a country. Helen for Hellenistic, the Greeks. Helen = Beauty = a country.
15. I gave up learning Chinese in the eighth grade. On a recent trip home, I sat across from my mother while she transcribed a piece of writing onto a piece of paper in Chinese. My mother has beautiful handwriting. Her script is firm and controlled. When I watch her write sometimes I can’t help but start crying. It is a symbol of all the parts of my mother I can’t access.
16. What is beautiful? Your mother writing poetry to you in a language you don’t understand.
Read Valerie Wu's To Be, As I Am
