Nekesa Mumbi Moody wrote for the Huffington Post that Jessica Alba was upset about a Chinese woman having plastic surgery to look like her so she could win her Alba obsessed ex-boyfriend back.
When this news hit the stands in February, I missed it.
I’m currently watching Alba in Dark Angel on DVDs, a TV series that survived two seasons. I’ve seen Alba in the Fantastic Four franchise and that’s about it. She’s a talented actress that started with a small role in 1994 in Camp Nowhere, a film that didn’t do well.
However, Alba went on to compile an impressive history in film, was nominated for 29 awards and won nine.
Alba was right when she said, “I think you should never have to change yourself like that. If someone loves you, they’ll love you no matter what.”
Well, I wouldn’t agree totally with “no matter what” and there may be another side to this story. In China, what you hear is often not the real story.
In China, the odds of being successful at anything are daunting. Less than 15% make it into universities and most of China’s more than 1.3 billion people work hard for little pay earning enough so they won’t starve or become homeless.
On the other hand, there’s a growing shortage of women in China and this woman that wants to look like Jessica Alba should have no trouble finding another man without the plastic surgery.
In fact, the woman who wants to look like Jessica Alba isn’t the only woman changing her looks to gain something.
Over 40 and Feeling Fine says, “There’s an article on ABC News about women in China going under the knife to have ‘western’ eyes, fuller lips, bigger breasts and longer legs.”
Anne Marie Dorning at ABC News says, “Imagine, if you will, a surgeon breaking your leg bones in four places, then attaching a steel scaffold frame to the outside of your limbs with metal pins jutting into your bones.”
The odds are that the woman who wants to look like Alba may be doing this for other reasons than for love. Looking like Jessica Alba in China may lead to success in other areas.
Consider what this young woman accomplished. She used love and sacrifice bordering on the insane to gain the attention of the world’s media, and a well-known American actress responded.
This Chinese woman may have found a way to get to the head of the line. If successful, she will probably write a book about how she did it. Knowing the Chinese obsession to achieve success, it would be a best seller.
Discover how The One-Child Tragedy led to a shortage of women in China.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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I happen to be a Jessica Alba fan; there’s no denying her timeless beauty. Plus she seems to have her head together. Just last night as a matter of fact I watched Machete (on pirated DVD here in China), which is an ultra-violent yet amusing exploitation film about illegal Mexican immigrants, staring the lovely Alba. You should check it out (for research purposes, of course).
Your blog post is also timely because just the other day an aspiring Chinese superstar died during plastic surgery to have her jaw bones shaved down (the girl was already gorgeous). Her mother was in the next room also having a procedure done, but the doctor didn’t inform the mother of her daughter’s death until 24 hours later to avoid a confrontation. Incidentally, that same doctor had already botched several past surgeries but had gone unpunished due to China’s disinterest in upholding laws that protect the consumer. It’s a pity.
What happened to that aspiring Chinese superstar is a tragedy but what happened to her reminded me of Michael Jackson and his doctor giving him so many drugs he died from them. Then the Western media had a field day making money off Jackson’s death. The doctor had his day in court and was punished. However, Jackson is still dead and the media richer for it. Like Elvis, Jackson may now be worth more dead than a living drug user.
However, I’m not surprised by China’s seeming disinterest in upholding laws that protect the consumer/individual. While the focus of Western law is the individual, in China the law, until recent times, was focused on maintaining a harmonious society and avoiding rebellions and war, which may explain in part why the Chinese spent two thousand years building and maintaining The Great Wall.
This also probably explains the high execution rate in China as a way to get rid of those people that do not practice Confucian filial piety. Individuals that rock the filial piety boat and threaten the harmonious society are eliminated so they don’t pass their DNA on to other troublemakers that don’t want to fit into the whole
Since the Han Dynasty, for more than two thousand years, China’s legal system focused on enforcing filial piety, the Confucian philosophy designed to bring peace and harmony to a war-torn land.
The same ancient legal system that existed from Qin Shi Huangdi to 1911, also avoided legal actions when possible and was a deterrent to control outbursts.
People that grew up with Western values may not understand the Chinese mindset that does not value the individual above the whole as in the West where the individual is more important than the whole even when new laws end up hurting almost everyone.
The Chinese mindset is different—at last for most Chinese. Of course, There are individuals like the dissidents that keep being tossed in jail for their outbursts that are seen by many Chinese as rocking the boat to harmony and possibly leading to an armed insurrection and rebellion.
In China violent rebellions tend to lead to millions of deaths. Chinese history is full of that happening.