Korean obsession with Plastic surgery

Very recently,  I rented an apartment in Reforma area of Mexico City and I noticed a large community of Korean women around the point was they all look alike to me and that raise a red flag in me that why is that in K-POP video or Korean movies , all korean women looks similar.

After digging a bit further I found out the reason for this is Korean women obsession about Plastic surgery and half of the women in Big cities like Seoul has undergone plastic surgeries.

The most common procedures are eyelid surgeries and nose jobs, which Koreans colloquially refer to as "the basics." Getting "the basics" is like dying your hair— everyone does it and rarely are people secretive about the work they've had done.

     Subway stations advertise Cosmetic procedures

Korea biggest cultural export "K-pop idols"  are all seems to have gone under knife and most desirable "Western looking Features" are almond shaped eyes (double eyelid),  long noses.

Whereas in the West, plastic surgeries are less common and people in the west tends to do either boobs or butts job, they hardly go for surgeries on the face but in Korea the obsession with facial beauty is such that Job applicants are frequently required to submit head shots, and the belief that beauty means more social capital has resulted in countless parents pushing their kids into plastic surgery, a phenomenon that makes South Korea unique in that regard. 

Korean beauty contestants all look the same as all seems to have undergone surgery

Obsession with Western feature in non-white countries are not limited to Korea, it is predominantly common in other countries , In India, facial cream advertisement are full of making you "Whiter" and in Egypt people want blond hairs.

In India , it is called ""Snow White syndrome"

                                               A Ponds advertisement showing Indian white skin obsession


Source - Business Insider

Chinese Movie Series, Movie#2 - Nàxiē nián, wǒmen yīqǐ zhuī de nǚhái

那些年，我們一起追的女孩 (Nàxiē nián, wǒmen yīqǐ zhuī de nǚhái) means (In those years, we all were chasing girls), is one of my favorite chinese movies. It is also one of those rare Chinese movies, which doesn't involve Magic, Monkeys, swords fighting, Kungfu or Kings and landlords. (Probably the reason might be this movie has come from Taiwan)

Plot: The plot of this movie is everybody story of a careless boy in school falling in love with most beautiful and most intelligent girl of the class. Later he managed to come close to the girl, but in the end they get separated, it doens't have the typical happy ending means the girls and boy never get together.

                         Poster of the film  

                            

                    A still from the film  

Interesting Facts:
1. This movie is a Biographical fill of Giddens Ko (Director).

2. The film was on a very tight budget; Giddens used his entire savings and mortgaged his house to raise money, saying that he did it to impress ex-girlfriend, who provided the inspiration for this film's female protagonist, Shen Chia-yi.

3. This film was primarily filmed at Ching Cheng High School (精誠中學), the school Giddens and Shen Chia-yi attended.

4. The ending theme song "The Lonely Caffeine" (寂寞的咖啡因) had been composed by Giddens for Shen Chia-Yi when the two were in a relationship. He asked the male lead actor to sing the song in the film, because he felt this would convey the song's original meaning.

5. Another theme song - Those Years" (那些年).was an instant hit. The music video on YouTube logged its ten millionth viewer on 11 November 2011.

6. The film was heavily edited before its release in Mainland China.The scene where a flag-raising ceremony was taking place was edited away, as were the scenes involving masturbation.In total, six scenes involving "negative sexual and pro-Taiwan content" were either edited away or changed.

        Giddens ko on the far left, Michelle Chen(in the centre)

7. The film surpassed the performance of other Taiwanese films such as Monga, Cape No. 7 and Lust, Caution.


Conclusion: Watch it for the its beautiful story and to relish your childhood memory

Chinese Movie Series - Movie#1 - Qiū Jú dǎ guān sī (秋菊打官司)

One of the first Chinese movies I watched was "Qiū Jú dǎ guān sī" (English- Qiu Ju lawsuit), it is one of the many movies in which both Zhang Yimou(Director) and Gong Li(as an actress) worked together.

Plot: The film tells the story of a peasant woman, Qiu Ju, who lives in a rural area of China. When her husband is kicked in the groin by the village head, Qiu Ju, despite her pregnancy, travels to a nearby town, and later to the big city to deal with its bureaucrats and find justice.

Intersting Facts:
The film was shot in 1992-China in northwest Shaanxi province, Many of the street scenes in the cities were filmed with a hidden camera so the images are a sort of documentary of China during the time of Deng Xiaoping.

This film gave Gong Li international recognizition and she won multiple international film awards for her performance.

In this movie, she has carried her character with so originatily that if someone has not seen Gong Li before, will think that she is just an average looking , a real peasant woman. (you would be surprised to know that Gong Li has been one of the most beautiful woman in China and voted #1 during a newspaper poll in China in 1996).

Gong Li during a scene of the Movie

The same GONG Li in real life on the cover of a Magazine.

Conclusion: This movie is a must watch for Gong Li fans and those who want to know what China was lik in year 1992.

Human-flesh search engines in China - renrou sousuo yinqing

Human Flesh Search engines (Renrou sousuo yinqing, 人肉搜索引擎) have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. 

The usual goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. 

 It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens.


The first most prominent case of SouSuo came into picture when a wang min called "Beacon Bridge No Return" found a clue in "Kitten Killer" case. For someone who are not aware, Kitten Killer was a case when a middle aged lady posted a video of her killing a kitten with her high heels.

¶ There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

¶ The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death. (Source - New York Times)

The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.

This could be called Red Guard 2.0.(Red Guard was Mao's tradition who during "Cultural Revolution" called young students as Red Guard and asked them to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt)

In another case, the "wang min" got a government official lose his job and sent to jail when he was found smiling at the scene of a road accident that killed 36 people. After his photo was posted on Internet, people called for "Human Flesh Search" for him and he was found to be Mr. Yang, former head of the Shaanxi provincial work safety administration. It led to the exposure of Mr. Yang’s penchant for expensive watches and, eventually, a corruption investigation.

he was given a name on internet as Brother Watch.
He was given 14 years in Prison Sentence.

Another incident of "Human Search" involve a mid-level bureaucrat in the southern city of Guangzhou with the name "Cao Bin", he was online called "Uncle House" , after netizens found he has 22 properties.

It all started on October 8 with a post on Tianya, a popular online forum, which includes photographs of land registry records showing details of the properties ranging from a three-storey villa to a factory building.
The photos were accompanied by a short message which ended with the question: “How can an urban management official afford more than 20 properties?”

                                         

           "Uncle House" sentenced to 11 years in Prison