They Never Knew.

The beauty standards as an Asian American specifically a Korean American are very different than what most would expect. It's as though you were meant to never fit in with the initial step of looking the right way. As most people say about interviews, the first thing that sticks about impressions isn't what you say but rather the way that you look. In America, that typically meant being Caucasian and fitting into the stereotypes that followed. In Korea, that meant following the traditional ideals of beauty of being lighter skins with no sun marks (https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/02/05/581765974/in-seoul-a-plastic-surgery-capital-residents-frown-on-ads-for-cosmetic-procedure).
I didn't fit in either place. Something that causes a lot of this is my love of outdoor sports. I swim, which means in the summer my skin gets tan and much darker. Right now even, people have complimented me for being "so tan." The season is barely half way done, so my tan will only get worse. I say worse because there is a distinct line to while people comment on the color of my skin. I am either "so tan" and they want to have the same color as me or I am "so dark" with the negative connotation for being outside. It was never something I thought about until it kept happening.
In class, we watched the film Miss Representation. It heavily focused on the effects of media on those who identify as females. They point out the ideas that go beyond people calling other "fat" or "ugly" like the lack of social presence. It is how females aren't motivated to accomplish because they don't see other females who had already done so. In a way, this is a vicious cycle where I don't see those like me so I don't do anything and then others behind me have the same idea so it continues on. Others were of how women are expected to be sexualized, intellectual, and composed all at the same time to be even recognized as coming close to equal to men. Physicalizing this is the first battle.

When visiting my family in South Korea two summers ago, one of the first things they said to me was about getting plastic surgery. Now if that happened to any of my friends in America, their reactions would have been much different in comparison to mine. I just smiled and nodded in argument. I don't actually plan on getting plastic surgery in the future, but as a mannerism to respecting your elders and going along with the Korea beauty standards, I have to appear as though I would highly consider this idea. They pointed at all the "problematic" areas of my face like needing double eyelids and tattooed eyebrows. I always saw this as a normality, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was only this way for me.
My Caucasian friends most likely wouldn't know what it was like to be expected to enter high school with girls who all have had some procedure done (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6005311/). They most likely wouldn't know what it was like to have their own families saying what is wrong about their physicality. This is where culture overlaps with beauty standards because the messages of Miss Representation are displaying how all of this undermines the confidence of us and the future of women.