One’s Many Faces

“A debate is raging over a microsurgeon’s plan to transplant a face,” read the caption on the New York Times homepage. The tease worked — transplant a face? the horror! — and I immediately clicked on the article. “A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery” discusses the difficulty of the surgery and the ethics involved in performing such a procedure.

Most people who have read Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy, or Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, about her friendship with Grealy, can probably understand the importance of the face in society. The chopping off of noses is a punishment in some parts of the world. The Smile Train, a nonprofit, performs cleft lip and palate surgery on children whose families could not otherwise afford it. Extreme Makeover.

Some people might even know of the fantastic French movie, Les Yeux Sans Visage, or Eyes Without a Face, about a woman whose face is disfigured in a car accident. Her father subsequently kidnaps girls and cuts off their faces to transplant them onto his daughter’s face. I saw the film in a college class on horror movies, and it really was terrifying, the idea of something so intimate as one’s face being removed from oneself. The film isn’t that graphic. The violence is, save for a few seconds, suggested. Still, one of my classmates fainted during the viewing.

"Caste and Class" Pt. 2

I enjoyed reading “Caste and Class” (refer to previous entry for link) because of its relevance to some things I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve started to think seriously about what I want to do with my expected journalism degree. It seems that in any sort of privileged setting, everyone there is expected to have ambitious career goals. I did choose New York University partly because the media industry is so concentrated in New York City. But I think from the beginning of grad school I had the sense that I might not stay, and the longer I’m here the more I feel that way.

In “Caste and Class,” Goldman writes about working for the Washington Post. He came from a working-class background and felt like an imposter at the Post, where, he says, “I was surrounded by reporters, male and female, who were younger versions of [executive editor Ben] Bradlee. … Other younger employees could find mentors in the upper reaches of the Post to help them through difficulties, but I had no idea how to do any of that.” Goldman decided to leave the Post and eventually became a boxing writer.

Now that I think about it, maybe his article isn’t as relevant to my experience as I thought it was. He seems to regret what he did, after realizing why he felt the way he did: “There’s something called the imposter syndrome. When people advance quickly, they can create a gap between how others see them and how they see themselves. They believe they’re protecting the secret of terrible inadequacies and are in constant fear they will be unmasked.”

Either way, I can sympathize with his experience at the Post. Although I’m not from a working-class background, I appreciate his observation that one’s talent only partly determines one’s success in the newsroom. Being able to fit in with the newsroom culture — with the culture of any working environment, for that matter — also indicates whether or not one will survive there.

If New York City is the center of the American media industry, I also see it as relentlessly corporate and competitive. I don’t know if that’s the kind of environment I want to be in.

On a slightly related note, I recently read Laura Hillenbrand’s “A Sudden Illness,” published in the Jul. 7, 2003, issue of the New Yorker. Hillenbrand is the author of one of my favorite books, Seabiscuit.

Hillenbrand came down with chronic fatigue syndrome while studying at Kenyon College. Despite having to drop out and despite her illness, she went on to become a freelance writer on equine issues and a bestselling author.

Two stories from writers who found their niche. It makes me wonder whether or not that’s what I should spend my time doing: thinking less about available jobs in journalism and more about the topics that I feel passionately about as a writer.

Questionable Advertising and Race in America

There’s an ad from a major pharmaceutical company in the latest issue of Newsweek. The ad begins, “Recently the FDA ordered three medicines from ‘Canada.’ When they arrived one thing was clear. They weren’t from Canada.” Below this text is a diagram showing what happened.

First, “After receiving a spam e-mail from a Web site offering to sell cheaper ‘generic’ drugs from Canada, the FDA ordered Ambien, Lipitor and Viagra.” The diagram goes through four more steps before concluding, “The FDA tested the products and found significant quality problems. The fake Ambien had too much medicine. The fake Lipitor and Viagra had too little medicine and had too many impurities.” At the bottom of this ad is the following text: “Where did all these medicines really come from? And what exactly is in them? Getting medicines from ‘Canada’ isn’t the answer. But it does raise a lot of questions.”

Like did this major pharmaceutical company really think this ad would work?

First of all, I would hope most people today are aware of the perils of responding to unsolicited e-mail. I would hope anyone seeking cheaper medication from Canada would be a savvy enough consumer to know, like anyone who shops online, that you should be wary of what you find on the Internet.

What irritates me is how this major pharmaceutical company can’t make a substantiated case against buying medication from Canada. Because the fact is, pharmacies in Canada receive their supplies from America. Same exact thing that we get here, except we pay more for it. So this major pharmaceutical company resorts to scare tactics, and it doesn’t even do it very well. What about the senior citizens on fixed incomes who travel into Canada and buy their medication at an actual, brick-and-mortar pharmacy? Can this major pharmaceutical company convince them that they’re buying fraudulent medication?

On another topic, I ran into a former co-worker of mine, Sudhir, who’s headed to India at the end of this semester to do dissertation. He talked about how he’s really looking forward to it because he’s just so sick of being here at this point. We got to talking about race, and he said how, since he came to America a few years ago, he’s assimilated himself into the culture. Almost all his friends are white hipsters from Brooklyn, and he finds that sort of odd, how, being in New York City, almost all his friends would be white.

I told him how on Saturday, I suddenly found myself in a group of seven Asians (friends of friends of friends joining up), and I became very uncomfortable. Several of my closest friends are Asian, but I have a few who are not and have typically not had a circle of friends that was completely one race or another.

Sudhir made the observation that everything in America has a racial bent, which made me wonder whether or not I intentionally avoid being in an all-Asian group for fear of looking unassimilated, looking like an outsider in a majority white population.

My thoughts tied in nicely with a segment on The Leonard Lopate Show today, an interview with Adam Mansbach, author of Angry Black White Boy. I particularly liked this experience Mansbach related to illustrate the arbitrariness of race:

I was looking for an apartment in Brooklyn. And I was calling all these brokers, and I got a call back from this British woman. And she was telling me about an apartment in Bed-Stuy. And I said, well, you know, I’m looking in Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy is a little boondocks (?) for me, but thank you. And she says, No, no, no, really, you should check it out. Bed-Stuy’s changing, it’s very safe, a lot of white people are moving there. And I’m like, okay, I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to be that guy.

So I say, well you know what, I don’t really like white people. And there’s a pause, she doesn’t know what to say to me, and then she says to me, Sir, I didn’t mean to offend you. I can tell from your voice you’re obviously African-American. And I say, no, you’ve got me all wrong — I’m white! …

There’s further silence. And she says, And you don’t want to live around white people? And I say, no, it’s like I said, they’ve got a real sense of entitlement, they’re real complacent, no offense. And she says, Well I’m not offended, I’m black. And because of that British accent and my own messed up system of racial identification, this had never occurred to me. So all we could do was laugh. I mean, there are these ways that race is constantly a factor that we don’t quite know how to understand or talk about.

A Related Pain

Leaya is a friend of mine, but I also thought her article, “Famous and Hungry,” about her Taiwanese pop star cousin who has an eating disorder, was well written and interesting.

[Update 4/6/05]
I forgot to link to her article, but it also seems that she took it down from the site. I know she already felt nervous about posting something so personal online, but when she told her family about what she’d written, I think their reaction made her regret her posting.

On Pain

Terri Schiavo died this morning. But what I wanted to write about is Schiavo’s problems with bulimia, which I have not really seen expounded upon by anyone. Did find this AP piece that states, “It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.”