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Valerie Sartor is a linguist, originally from America, who started
out as a Peace Corps volunteer after completing a BA in Russian.
From her travels to Africa and Korea she learnt French and Korean,
later returning to Korea to teach. She went on be awarded an MA
in Russian before marrying but subsequently returned to teching
English after leaving her marriage.
Valerie is now a freelance writer, who in the
last year has sold a number articles on China, the country in which
she now resides. Next month she begins working as a senior editor
for the Chinese government website in their English department in
Beijing and will turn fifty in August.
Here she writes about her experiences of plastic surgery
in the USA and China.
Chapter 1: West meets East
"Chinese ladies think white skin
signifies beauty," said Miss Na as she gaily draped a large
red scarf around her head and then pulled on her anti-sun opera
length polyester gloves. "My skin is brown enough as it is,
because I am a Mongolian/ Chinese, so I try to protect myself every
way I can." She deftly hopped on her bike and smiled at me.
"It baffles me that you Americans think brown is beautiful."
Waving her sun umbrella she motioned for us to go.
"Well, we don't anymore, what with UV radiation
and skin cancer," I replied, riding along beside her on my
old blue bike. "My skin has been wrecked from years on the
West African equator as well as a lifetime of swimming and surfing.
This month I'll be forty nine. I want to see a plastic surgeon to
enhance my looks. Please help me locate one."
Miss Na laughed and agreed. Her small, elegant
egg shaped face with its finely sculptured cheekbones and her shining
dark almond eyes immediately attracts male attention. Lithe and
straight-spined, my friend carries herself like royalty, even on
a bicycle. She resembles a Nubian princess. Next to her I feel old
and frumpy, a worn out white woman seeking adventure in China.
At thirty two Miss Na basks in the glory of her
womanhood. She modestly shrugs off her beauty but she, like every
woman over here, knows its inherent value: inside this highly paternal
society feminine attractiveness can influence women's work as well
as love relationships. In China form substitutes for substance and
the way a woman looks determines a great deal of her success in
life. China, like the west, equates beauty and youth with success.
Not surprisingly, plastic surgery is booming all over China.
First Western surgery
My history of plastic surgery started
accidentally. I returned from West Africa in 1983 with a railroad
track scar running across the top of my forehead after three years
as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. In Africa I'd been involved in a
serious car accident but when the PC found about my accident two
weeks later I'd already been treated.
The accident occurred after I'd routinely hitched a ride
along with many other passengers in a small truck that was crammed
with chickens, goats, baskets of cassava and a huge drum of kerosene
during monsoon season. Overloaded, the truck skidded, and then flipped
over into a ditch. My head hit the 100 gallon kerosene drum, whacking
it wide open and knocking me out.
Days later I woke, feeling dizzy and weak. The
first thing I saw was an unvarnished wooden cross on a whitewashed
mud wall; it seemed to sway because my head was still badly concussed.
After the accident a young African man had slung me over his shoulders
like a sack of potatoes and carried me down the red dirt road -
the trans-African highway. Unconscious and bleeding, an hour later
a small white pick up truck driven by an irritable, elderly Frenchman
stopped to help. He put me in the back and covered me with a musty
blanket but refused to haul the African. He drove me to a tiny settlement
of six Italian Carmelite nuns in retreat. One of them, in silence,
sewed me up with her needle and thread. Together they watched and
prayed over me. After two weeks of compatible silence with these
tiny birdlike ladies I could travel again so I hitched another ride
to Bangui to report my status to the Peace Corps.
The PC gave me a government voucher slip guarantying
payment to "erase" the scar. My aunt set up an appointment
with a plastic surgeon in Nashville. He had a private operating
theater in his office, two surgical nurses and an outer reception
room that smelled of old money. The surgeon's fingers were manicured
as fine as a movie star's. That sultry afternoon in July 1983 he
smoothly injected local anesthesia into my scarred forehead and
together with his two green clad nurse matrons the surgeon ripped
open the scar in order to re-sew it into an indiscernible line.
I felt nauseous hearing the crunchy sound of skin and flesh being
pulled. The entire accident flashed before my eyes, and I fainted
only to wake and faint again and again, half seeing bloody red gauze
bandages being wiped in and around my wounds. The doctor worked
steadily and quickly; he and the nurses chatted about their grandchildren
in a slow, southern drawl.
CHAPTER 2: American and
Chinese approaches to surgery
CHAPTER 3: First procedure
in China
CHAPTER 4: Second procedure
in China
CHAPTER 5: The end result
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Valerie
before her Chinese surgery