Yellow face
I remember the time that I went to Disney Land in LA for the first time in my life. It was my first trip to overseas, and the first trip to go without my parents. Under the excuse of ‘language exchange’, I and some other kids in their early teens went to one elementary school in LA and sat in the classes for about a week. I remember they were having oranges for deserts after lunch, their paper towels in the bathroom were brown, recycled one, those petty stuffs.
The biggest event was of course going to the real Disney Land. Practicing our petty English, we were timid but excited. Well, if one kid started one thing, all the others just followed. Then we saw a street painter. He was drawing caricature version of people’s portrait. I was excited. I stood in a line and so did all the other kids. I was in the middle of the line, so I had to wait a lot. Looking at the drawings of the people earlier in the line, I could bear all those waiting time. Then finally it was my turn! It was the time that my patience would pay me. I sat there for a while, full of expectation and when I received the drawings from him, I was just shocked. It looked like a witch in a cartoon. Sly and small eyes, super high cheek-bones, extruding teeth..... Other kids laughed at me watching the picture but when the next kid got the similar one, the rest of the kids gave up to have the drawings. I left the drawing in the States when I came back home, even though it was the biggest expense of my trip at that time.
Then I forgot about that feeling for such a long time, when I was randomly trying to text my friend. Living in Korea, which I think is the kingdom of emojis, I thought I was open to quite a lot of absurd ideas until I saw the supper yellow thumbs. Still, the yellow in the round face didn’t really offend me because they’re just emojis, and emojis can have yellow faces, right? So it goes. Then Apple decided to make a more personalized emojis, making several versions of skin colors, and that really shocked me. Before saying that, as a citizen of the empire of emojis, and I think emojis are the witty representation of various ‘emotional status’, not the representation of their racial identity or social group. Anyway. Do you want to customize your emoji? My iphone said. Then there it goes, a very yellow smiling skull(not a face, but a skull) with no hair. It said to customize it, but how? It almost looked like Simpsons. Hahaha...
That was the moment that I realize that what I think I look like and what others perceive are quite different. Then I start to wonder. Can I just say that yellow face or the caricature with the slit eyes are not myself? What am ‘I’ anyway? Am I who I insist who I am, or other people’s perception of my being(I mean, reflection…?) That’s the moment that I start being confused…. I didn’t know that I was Korean until I left Korea. I was just ‘I’ before. Then I started to realize that the concept of ‘I’ does not belong to myself, but to others.
Chaekyung Lee
