by Jane Hseu

My grandfather founded the Taiwanese branch of Shiseido, the high-end Japanese cosmetics company. The family story, told to me by his daughter, my mother, is that during WWII, while Taiwan was under Japanese colonization, my grandfather went to Japan to work, leaving his young wife to take care of their young daughter and his aged parents in the hardships of the Taiwanese countryside. For my grandmother, my mother said, life was bitter. After working at Shiseido in Japan, my grandfather founded Shiseido in Taiwan, Shiseido’s first overseas venture, and became a rich man. There were tens of millions of Taiwanese women to whom he could sell make-up and skin products.

My mother said that her family suspected my grandfather had another woman while he worked in Japan. After he became wealthy from founding Shiseido in Taiwan, my grandfather would have three concubines; my mother said it was typical for rich men of my grandfather’s generation to have multiple “wives.” In addition to the five children my grandfather had with my grandmother, his only legal wife, the concubines bore my grandfather many children whom he legally adopted as his own. The fourth and final “wife” was an obvious gold-digger: she was thirty-some years younger than my grandfather, and, when I interacted with her on many occasions, was super tacky, wearing ostentatious jewelry with knuckle-sized gemstones and dramatic make-up, including heavily-applied bright blue eyeshadow.

My father had come to the US from Taiwan as a graduate student in 1966. After receiving his master’s degree, he went back to Taiwan and married my mother. My father and mother had known each other for nearly a decade when they got married and had written letters  to each other the years my father was studying in the US. After they married, my father brought my mother to live in the US in Orange County, California. A few years after that, my parents became US citizens.

In the 1980s, my mother’s family in Taiwan grew increasingly anxious over Taiwan’s tenuous political position in the world and no longer being recognized as a country, and thus wanted to get legal status in the US. Besides the family connection with my mother, my grandfather thought it might help his citizenship case to start a business in the US. My mother was asked to start a Shiseido chain store¹ business in El Toro², the south Orange County suburb in which we lived.

Today in the US, one sees Shiseido chain stores in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ethnic enclaves across the country. My mother’s first Shiseido chain store was in El Toro, and, after a few years, she moved it to Irvine. Irvine at that time in the late 1980s had not yet become the “Little Taipei” for which it would later be known in the 1990s and early 21st century. In this era, a high number of ethnicized residents of Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, other Asian, and Persian backgrounds moved to Irvine, and brought with them their stores full of cultural goods and gloriously tasty restaurants. In the 1980s though, Irvine was perceived, at least to burgeoning punk rockers like myself, as a sterile, homogenous white upper-middle-class planned community—with residential villages, parks, and business areas built on a uniform grid.

My mother’s store in East Irvine in Arbor Plaza was next to a popular Japanese restaurant called Taiko outside of which people would line up, waiting for the restaurant to open. Also in the plaza was a Japanese stationary store at which I liked to buy origami, and, behind the row of stores, a not-very-well-kept koi pond with abundant algae. My two sisters and I spent our weekends and summers at the store, since this was much cheaper than getting a babysitter at home. Today, Arbor Plaza is across the street from a bustling 99 Ranch Chinese supermarket, and Arbor Plaza’s businesses, including family-owned restaurants and bubble tea houses, are now predominantly Taiwanese/Chinese. My mom’s former space houses a Hello Kitty store, a tanning salon is next door.

After running the Irvine store for a while, my mother developed a severe ulcer from intense stress and overwork. In addition to managing the store full time, my mother was the primary caretaker of us three kids and also my two cousins, who lived with us since they were “parachute kids.” Their mother, my mom’s sister, thought they would have better opportunities living in the US while she stayed in Taiwan. My mother could hardly get out of bed, and so ended up closing the store. Yet in the years my mother had the store, and all the time I spent in it, roughly from age seven into my mid-teens, the store had a pronounced influence on my body image and idea of beauty.

Shiseido’s cosmetics displays and advertisements predominantly contained Japanese models in avant-garde make-up and poses, and Chinese immigrant women made up the majority of the store’s customers. However, my idea of beauty would be strongly influenced by the white, thin, long-legged, even-featured models in the American and European fashion and beauty magazines such as Vogue, Seventeen, and Elle stacked in piles in the store. These magazines gave me, and the workers and customers in the store, an idealized beauty image to emulate. The store’s magazines and beauty ideals would be corroborated by the same magazines I would myself buy at the supermarket and drugstore. My friends and I would read the magazines together and mimic the make-up techniques, hair styles, and fashion trends we would see in the pages. With the possibility of still growing in height at this age, I would desire to have long legs and be tall, rather than be 5’ 1” (I never grew taller than that) and have short, stubby legs. Having never been one to exercise, instead, in junior high, I would regularly eat only a bag of chips for lunch in order to try to lose weight. With the lunch money I saved from only eating chips, I could go to the nearby Fashion Gal store and buy inexpensive, flimsy earrings.

I was born with rather pale skin for a Chinese woman. My mother remarked repeatedly and affirmingly throughout my childhood that I had been born with and continued to have pale, or the term she used in Chinese was very “white,” skin. My older sister had pale skin, perhaps even paler than mine, whereas my younger sister had a more medium skin tone. The fashion magazines at the store reflected the normative ideal of female beauty in the public schools I attended. The majority of El Toro’s residents were white and middle class. There were a few Asians, Latino/as, and African Americans at school. We didn’t talk explicitly about race in my classes, and I wouldn’t develop a vocabulary for racial consciousness until my late undergraduate, perhaps even graduate, school years.

At school, the popular pretty girls were mostly white. The ideal of beauty was large eyes with double eyelid folds, like the models seen in the magazines. However, besides for the goth kids like my sister and male best friend who lived across the street, who wanted to be “deathly” pale and intentionally stayed out of the sun, pale skin wasn’t really the norm at my school. Rather, we girls tried to be Southern California tan, and you could find me regularly “lying out” in my back or front yard in a bathing suit, slathering baby oil on my skin to tan more quickly. Skin cancer was not in our vocabulary.

It is almost cliché to say that I tried to have eyes with double folds. I was born with two epicanthic eyefolds, which I can see in the photos of me as a baby and young girl. Around the time I was in second grade, I noticed when I woke up that sometimes one or both eyelids would have double folds due to my eyes sleeping against the pillow. Thus, I intentionally slept pressed against my pillow the eye which seemed to show the most promise, and at some point I developed a permanent double fold in my right eye. Sometimes though, after a long, intense crying jag, the double fold would disappear, and, at times, when I woke up in the morning, I had to massage my eyelid to get the vanished double fold back. Yet I felt rather lopsided, and do to this day, having one double fold and one epicanthic fold. I believe I saw my mother using a brown eyeliner pencil to pencil in a double fold, a method I would also try myself. And, in my thirties, while talking to one of my mother’s friends I had known from childhood, I was struck by the woman’s obvious use of eyeliner pencil to draw in double folds on her eyelids. Double folds were more desirable than the epicanthic folds which were closer to the slant-eyes drawn at me when I was teased with Chinese jokes on the school playground.

In my thirties, I was a bridesmaid and had professional make-up done by a Vietnamese American female make-up artist who the Vietnamese American bride said was the best in the area, particularly for Asian features. The make-up artist was doing my eyes, and, at one point, had a baffled look on her face. I thought she might be thrown off by my eyelids having two different folds, and I pointed out to her this was the case. She told me, in a matter-of-fact tone, that I could probably buy something to correct this, possibly at a store in Chinatown (perhaps at a Shiseido chain store?, I thought). I assumed the “something” was to help my left eye get a double fold, not to return the right eye to the epicanthic fold I was born with.

Since my family is in the business, I grew up using Shiseido make-up and skins products. After my mom’s store closed, I would receive small Shiseido samples from my aunt, my mom’s sister who was Chairman of the Board of Shiseido Taiwan, and a celebrity who was on TV in Taiwan, my family and my parents’ Taiwanese friends told me. Some of the samples came from Shiseido’s line of “whitening” skin care products. There is an older line of products called such things as Advanced Super Revitalizer Whitening Formula and Shiseido Whitening Tone Up Cream. Shiseido’s current line is called White Lucent, which has a wide range of skin care products that enable a “brightening” effect. According to the product descriptions, the line will reduce dark spots and the “brightening” will give the effect of lightened skin. One time, the same Vietnamese American friend spent the night at my apartment in college and noticed the whitening product in my bathroom. She asked me about it and then said she hadn’t noticed that my skin was that white or that I was into the whitening effect. I had used the products for convenience’s sake, because they were free, but perhaps they really had made my skin whiter. I still have several of those whitening samples in the plastic bin on my bathroom shelf that contains my travel-size products. However, I received the samples many years, even a decade or more, ago, and, since there is an expiration date for beauty products, should probably throw them away.

In my mid-twenties, I went to visit family in Taipei, Taiwan, and was brought to an elegant and luxurious shopping mall. In an elevator I was riding in, I came face-to-face with a Taiwanese model pictured in a nearly life-sized ad. The model had round eyes and pale, almost translucent, skin. I would learn that the ideal beauty image in Taiwan is to have pale skin—the more pale the more beautiful. My aunt, the Shiseido chairwoman, has pale skin, doubtlessly encouraged by the whitening products. My mother also values her rather pale skin. My father, however, has darker skin with even darker age spots on his face. My mom jokes that he is countryside, and crude is the word she uses in Chinese, with his darker skin.

To me, skin color in my family connotes class and geographic hierarchies. My mother’s family predominantly lives in the cosmopolitan capital of Taipei in northern Taiwan, and the ones who work for Shiseido are wealthy. In contrast, my father’s family hails from rural southern Taiwan, near Kaohsiung, and are more working and middle class. When visiting Kaohsiung, we would stay in my paternal grandparents’ modest walk-up apartment. My grandfather had risen to the position of manager of a sugar mill and was able to live in this apartment the company allotted to retired managers. My father grew up on this sugar mill, and I visited the area during my first visit to Taiwan, when I was 3. My memory is of a rustic area with tropical foliage and a languid atmosphere, of family members sitting outside and reminiscing. I played hide and seek with my cousins and hid in a closet. After no one found me, I pulled on the doorknob and it came off in my hand.

My grandparents’ apartment was utilitarian. Much of the apartment was covered in tile, the most effective material to use in the humid environment. The pervasive mildew in the tile grout doubtless sprouted from the high humidity that seemed to make everything damp. We took turns using the one bathroom: there was no bathtub or shower, so we bathed by filling a bucket under a water spout and pouring the water over our bodies. When we stayed with my grandfather to go to my grandmother’s memorial service after she passed away, my grandfather apologized to my sisters and me that his home was not as nice as my parents’ house in El Toro, where he had stayed fifteen years ago during his only trip to the US.

At one point during my tween years, my mother chastised me for misbehaving, for developing into a daughter who talked back, didn’t respect her authority, and was rebellious and too strong-willed and independent. She blamed the fashion magazines, brandishing one in the air,and said that I didn’t become this way until I started reading the magazines and began following the bad examples given in them. My mother forbade me to read them from then on, yet I persisted, as they were still amply available in her store and on supermarket and drugstore shelves. Sometimes I perused those shelves for long periods of time while my parents were grocery shopping or I had gone to the market on my own, using the store as a library instead of buying the magazines. The photos I liked the best I would put on my bedroom walls or show to the hairstylist as the way I wanted to get my hair cut. Little did my mother know or does know even today that, yes, I had learned and internalized from those magazines ideals about beauty and what a girl and woman should be, and this was reinforced by my family’s history with Shiseido and growing up in her store.

¹ Shiseido chain stores are independently owned but affiliated with Shiseido Japan.
² El Toro was an unincorporated area of Orange County until 1991, when it became a city and was renamed Lake Forest, probably because residents thought this sounded classier.
 
 
About the Author
Jane Hseu is Associate Professor of English at Dominican University outside Chicago. She is a writer, teacher, scholar, and student of Asian American literature. Her creative nonfiction essay “Hseu Family Names” appears in Kartika Review (issue 19, fall 2017), and her current projects hybridize personal and academic writing.