My daughter Edy is beautiful.

At the tender age of two she would already turn heads, charming everyone with her twinkling eyes and bright, teasing smile. She was a skinny little thing, buck-toothed, pigeon-toed, bow-legged, extra everything.

Now she is four, with a long and leggy form reminiscent of supermodels as young girls. Her eyes and hair are the envy of all here in Seoul, the capital of cosmetic surgery in the Eastern world, where women will sit for hours in fumes of ammonia to get the perfectly bouncy curls that grow out of her head all on their own.

And of course it should be that she of all people finds fault with her physical form.

It started a few months ago, when she entered preschool. “I wish my hair was straight,” she told me suddenly one day. I don’t want bubbly hair.” “Why?” I asked her. “Your hair is so pretty.” “Because the other girls in my class have straight hair,” she informed me. “Well, soon they’ll want curly hair like yours. Your hair is the hair of girls’ dreams.”

Then, just as abruptly, her fault-finding progressed to her skin tone. “Mom, I wish my skin were white. I don’t want my hands to be brown anymore.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because. I think I would be prettier if I had whiter skin.” “God made you perfectly,” I protested firmly, appealing to the Christian mores taught in her preschool. Then I had a thought:

“Did someone say something to you about being brown?” “Yes, Sion asked me why my hands were brown.”

Ah, I thought to myself, as my mind raced. I decided the best counter would be a strong one: “What a silly child! Obviously your hands are brown because your daddy is brown.” “Well I don’t want to be brown,” she said crossly.

Difference

Kids don’t want to be different from their peers. Of course. I remember wanting to be a little White kid when I was only a couple of years older than Edy and in primary school in Athens, Georgia. I wanted to be like Kielly Dunn, as White as could be, with bouncy auburn curls, and whose nanny walked her to school every day. Or Amanda Howell, who used to wear her wavy dirty blonde hair in a sideways ponytail, who once asked me to say a word in Korean, and then laughed even after promising not to. (She apologized afterwards, and we made up.)

Some differences confer status; others can demote. As a child I felt that my differences put me in the margins. My flaxen skin, straight black hair, and almond eyes set me apart from my White schoolmates. “Why is your hair so straight/black?” the other girls would ask. I don’t recall what my answer was, nor do I have one now. But the question implied difference, and an implicit, “Why aren’t you like us?”

My family was different as well. My father was earning his Masters in Computer Science at the local university, and my mother had my baby sister at home. Even if they had been like the White parents with regular jobs, like Erin Sims whose hair looked just like a Barbie doll’s and whose mother worked at a jewelry store, I knew on some level that my parents would stay different, with their non-native English and kimchi eating ways.

The marginal feeling of being The Asian Girl hardened over time as words like discrimination and racism worked their way into my consciousness. Nevermind that my childhood friends were all different from one another too. There’s a color-based chargedness that’s a fundamental part of the American social order. Whiteness is a pervasive concept, and has retained a higher status over non-White skin tones; it is loaded. My physical attributes fit squarely into that racialized narrative of America, and settled into my identity as a sense of being less than.

It wasn’t that I thought I was less than in all ways. As a first grader, I could go around the world three times in arithmetic before the teacher would mercifully excuse me (and the class, really) from the game. I was in the gifted program in the second grade, only because my father wouldn’t let me be in it before that, for fear my head would get too big. In the third grade, I was the first girl picked for any team in PE because I could always run and kick. But when it came to status, I knew people who looked like me in the United States weren’t sitting in the sky deck.

Difference: Seoul Version

Growing up in Seoul, my daughter Edy’s experience of her difference does not fit a racialized narrative. All the other kids in her class are ethnically Korean; she is the only one with an American daddy who is brown. We haven’t taught our children that in the American racial construct, their daddy is called Black, so they call him brown based on his skin tone. If we tried to tell them he is Black, they would disagree and say no, he is brown.

So when she says she wants to be white, Edy is not talking about the racially White kids, whom she has never heard of; she’s talking about the Korean kids with pale skin. Lest it pass you by, let me emphasize: Here, the Korean kids are “white.”

Beyond her physical appearance, Edy is probably also the only one in her class with a Korean mommy who grew up in the United States and lived there for nearly 35 years before fleeing to Korea during Covid. That’s not a visible difference though. The visual differences, she both sees on her own, and is prompted by her peers about them. And yet she grapples with the differences as simple traits; her classmates ask about them innocently. In a sense, the perceived differences are pure. They are not loaded on top of a racialized culture, like the one I grew up in.

Even as I know this intellectually, I’m wired by my Americanness to be racially sensitized. My social firmware was installed as a child in the American public schools where I grew up; my implicit attitudes are grounded in the racialized places I have spent most of my life, and my perceptions are still initially processed by that code. So my breath caught a bit when Edy told me she wanted to have white hands because white hands are prettier.

The Doll Test

There’s a famous “doll test” from the 1940s that American kids learn about in high school. A husband and wife team of psychologists presented white dolls and brown dolls to little girls about Edy’s age. The White girls thought the White dolls were prettier. So also did the Black girls. They also thought the White dolls were nicer, and generally better than the Black dolls.

Edy’s retort about white hands and brown hands took me back almost 30 years to AP US History, when I learned about this study. I have never prompted Edy with the question of whether an otherwise equivalent white doll or brown doll was prettier. But my conversations with her about her hair and skin tone suggest that perhaps she would answer as the other girls did, some 85 years ago. And that brings me back to a foundational lesson I learned when I was 16: society valued whiteness in a way that caused brown children to have lower self esteem than white children did. So, society had to change.

The iconic doll test is well known to my husband and me, and I daresay every friend of ours who went to high school in America. And somehow, the common modern consequence has become buying our children dolls that look like themselves. My friend Grace, a very nice White lady, once sent my elder daughter Jona a tan-skinned Josefina doll from the American Girls collection. I instantly knew why she had chosen it. Jona did not take to Josefina right away, but years later she has a renewed appreciation. (I’m not sure why.)

My dear friend Kim, an Asian American investor, also sent Jona a doll after she was pitched a racially sensitive dolls collection. That one didn’t take either - not because of the color or the hair, though they were darker and kinkier than Jona’s, but because the doll lacked the ability to close her eyes when lain down. Uncanny valley for the eight-year-old set, as it were.

When I bought my daughters dolls for each of their third birthdays, I searched far and wide for little baby dolls that most closely resembled their respective skin tones. I wanted them to have babies that looked like them and affirmed their color. Why? One wonders, in hindsight. The doll study did not conclude that giving brown children brown dolls enhances their self esteem. If anything, perhaps the opposite could be true. Moreover, all my girls had to do was look at me, their mother, to experience a difference and be, by this logic, disaffirmed.

I am as pale as any Korean person I know, while my husband’s skin is a deep Hershey brown. The mix of our tones created three shades of tan, with Edy the darkest of the three. She is the only one who cannot “pass” in Korea, and therein lies a critical basis of her experience as a child in Korea. If I put her in school in the US, I imagine she will have a more confusing experience being mistaken for being Indian or another medium brown people. Jona is a lighter brown, reminiscent of my friend Michelle, whose mother is Filipina. And our little toddler son looks like a tanned Mongol.

Edy loves the medium brown baby doll that I painstakingly chose for her. She has named him Timmo, a variant of her sister’s girl doll Timmie, a light brown doll I picked out with as much care for color as I did Timmo. The four of them play together almost every day, with baby brother crashing their tea parties now and again - an Impressionistic pastiche of moving earth tones, yet to be affected by racial consciousness.

Watching them play, I feel a sense of relief that they do not have the racialized firmware that my husband and I have. That they did not need to grapple with and overcome the strictures of color in order to play together, as we did when we met in business school. They are shielded from racial consciousness in Korea, where they are different and unusual, but not as a result inferior. Their difference lacks a conclusion; it makes them noticed, but the verdict on their status is not clear.

I suddenly remember why I wanted dolls that looked like my daughters. I wanted to use the dolls, specifically how well my girls loved and cared for their mini mes, as a barometer for how well they loved themselves.

Celebrity

Visible difference draws attention whether one seeks it or not. It is a precursor to celebrity. What the difference means is context dependent.

As an ethnically Korean person in America, I have drawn scrutiny for my East Asian features in places where East Asians are rare. As my type is often stereotyped as exotic, the attention was sometimes uncomfortable and occasionally felt unsafe. Yet it was nothing compared to the throngs of Chinese people who surrounded my now-husband when he took me to visit the Forbidden City in Beijing one summer.

The Chinese tourists (rural folk who were visiting Beijing as well) wanted to see my husband up close, touch him, take a photo with him, or just say hi and ask if he was Michael Jordan. In that setting, people thought I was Chinese so they left me alone or spoke to me in Mandarin, which I don’t know. But as my husband, who does speak Mandarin, humored their advances and smiled for their cameras, the crowd grew and I started feeling panicky. I waved and tilted my head back and to the right in the universal signal for I’m out of here.

I remember asking over a bowl of Muslim lamb noodles nearby how my husband processed the people’s interest. “They’ve never seen anyone who looks like me before. They’d probably do the same thing if I were purple.” True, I thought, but I value passing under the radar. Even when the interest isn’t charged, I still don’t like drawing attention. I suppose that’s in part why 15 years passed until our next visit to China together.

I remembered those Beijing crowds when we took our kids a few months ago to see the terracotta warriors outside of Xi’an. Chinese tourists from the countryside milled about and still occasionally accosted my husband, hoping for a touch of NBA Magic. He smiled and waved them off as we herded our three kiddie cats around the sprawling grounds. It was one thing to have them swarm him; it’s another to have them around the kids.

Edy Celebrity

Alas. In spite of our preference to the contrary, Edy’s differences draw frequent interest from strangers in Korea. Most people admire from a distance, though some in obvious open-stare ways. A good number of people, however, approach her. They always comment fawningly on her large eyes, and how beautiful she is. They ask her how old she is, and then exclaim when she answers in Korean. What a beautiful and smart child!

This local interest sets up a certain repeated experience. Edy is constantly made to be aware that people are evaluating her appearance. Favorably, yes, but the Observer Effect occurs on a multiple-times-daily basis. When she is with Jona, the commenters tend to loudly admire Edy, then turn and say, oh, her older sister is pretty too! Which sets up an awkward dynamic between them, which has yet to develop into anything because they are still only four and nine.

It is clear that I cannot stop the Korean interest in Edy, just as my husband cannot stop the rural Chinese interest in him. So my question turns: If we can’t stop it, is there an opportunity to use it to make lemonade, so to speak? Specifically, could the persistent peering into her difference be leveraged to enhance her status? Can we ultimately harness the local interest in the beautiful Edy, into celebrity?

TBD

We’ve decided to give it a shot, with the help of the children’s Korean nanny. I’ll return periodically with our learnings.