My Beauty Sins Are My Liberation

When I dream at night, I’m riding on my middle school bus, heading home for the evening. It’s your typical bus, with squeaky wheels and smooth leather seats, sticky with the mess of candy being passed around and art projects dripping fresh glue all over. In these dreams, I’m usually perched in the middle or back of the bus, my tangled wire headphones swinging along with the motions of coasting through suburban Georgia, oscillating to the rhythm of the bumps in the road.

On school bus rides home, there’s always a celebratory feeling in the air, fueling excited chatter about the potential of the weekend ahead. I, however, am distanced from this feeling – staring out of the window, I feel a pit growing larger and larger in my stomach as I count down the number of remaining bus stops until mine. Finally, the countdown hits zero, and the pit expands into the rest of my stomach as I gather my belongings.

For many of the other kids on my school bus route, arriving home would mean a place of solace and freedom, away from the pressures of school. For me, it was very different. School was my shield, a consistent place of respite away from the eagle-eyed gaze and heavy-handed grasp of my parents. Returning home afterwards was always a harsh jolt back to my reality.

I disembarked from the bus, making a slow trek to my parents’ house - the last one on the street, an unassuming cookie cutter build made to look like a variation of all of its neighbors. As I trudged home, I did my usual routine of wiping my smudged black eyeliner off as much as possible with the sleeve of my hoodie. Finally, I reach my house, and there’s nowhere to go but inside.

This is the part where the dream often diverges. As I enter my house, I can hear my mom washing dishes in the kitchen, plastic cups rattling around with ceramic bowls in the sink. I say hello and hold my breath – my mom will either turn around to say hello and notice the remaining traces of eyeliner around my eyes, or she will remain facing forward, acknowledging me only with her voice.

If she turns around, then I know that I am destined for at least a week of being in trouble, a soul-crushing prospect that strikes fear into me, even as a twenty-seven-year-old temporarily immersed in my middle school life. If she doesn’t, then I can dash to the refuge of the upstairs bathroom to quickly rub Vaseline across my eyes with a tissue, effectively removing the remaining traces of my crime.

My parents are both immigrants from Asia – my mother is Malaysian-Chinese and my dad is a refugee from Vietnam. Both came to America for different reasons: my mom came to expand her studies and get an American college degree, while my dad came to the States to avoid the draft into the Vietnamese army. Both of them ended up in the same place in the end, though, meeting each other while in college for electrical engineering. I never really knew if they truly loved one another or if they had at any point, but I do know that they found each other to be suitable enough partners to end up marrying and having two kids, me and my older sister.

Because my parents came from different cultures and had vastly varying experiences, they often had different opinions on what a well-raised child looked like. Their compromise was to combine all of their opinions into one huge list of what we could and couldn’t do.

There were reasonable rules, like not getting in trouble at school or drinking alcohol. But there were also the rules that suffocated me for over eighteen years, returning to haunt me in my dreams. We were never allowed to socialize with friends outside of school. Things like sleepovers, dates, and overnight trips were foreign concepts to us and something we could never imagine doing, especially in our younger years. My sister and I were effectively isolated from our classmates; in fact, we often tiptoed around even mentioning our friends because they, their families, and their choices were sure to be met with the same barrage of criticism that they often afforded us.

We were also held to impossibly high standards. Getting good grades was non-negotiable. Just A’s weren’t good enough. Instead, each grade had to be at least a ninety-five out of one hundred. If we got below that score, we would have to explain ourselves and walk through the test or assignment with my mother while being chastised and berated for our mistakes. Our weekends were expected to be spent studying, whether it was for our current classes, upcoming state exams in several months, or even the SAT in several years. My mother was also unemployed for a long period of our childhood, so she had extra time to focus on us and make sure we didn’t violate the many rules that her and my father had set up. My father had a merciless temper and often isolated himself from my family – when he wasn’t working, he was either joining in on enforcing rules with my mom or was tucked away in his bedroom on the computer.

Our only respite was the Internet and books. In a way, it felt like our only connection with the outside world other than school. We immersed ourselves in online communities, watched funny YouTube videos, and read books of other kids’ experiences. These hobbies helped us feel slightly more connected to being “normal”, and we obscured these bits of joy from our parents in fear that they would take them away as well. In their mind, books were for learning and our access to computers was for homework and learning. Any other use of them was inappropriate and would result in an hours-long scolding, or worse.

Middle school is a time period that I revisit in my dreams because that’s when I started caring about something that was harder to hide from my parents: beauty. My classmates started dating, wearing makeup, caring about clothing brands, and gossiping about people’s appearances, for the better or for worse. I was a very reserved and shy child, but was often determined to break out of this perception. Internally, I didn’t feel the same as I looked. I had plenty of thoughts and opinions and things to say just like my peers. But something felt different between me and them. Looking back, I realized it was many things, with a big factor being that I was one of the only Asian people at a predominantly white school.

I observed my classmates very closely to understand where the gap was. In my investigations, I discovered the topic of beauty to be very fascinating. I loved everything about the concept of beauty and beauty maintenance. It felt luxurious and indulgent to put on lip gloss or shape your eyebrows. In fact, I found that was something I craved – I wanted to indulge in these acts of self-care, just for myself, to make myself feel good and more elevated. It dawned on me with these observations that I had lived my whole life for my parents and hadn’t experienced any acts of self-care. Because of this, I viewed learning about beauty as my path towards freedom. Most teenagers dream about being an adult because of the money, maturity, and experiences, but I dreamt about it because of the ability I would have to finally express myself.

I dove headfirst into copies of Seventeen and Teen Vogue from the library, voraciously consuming every new issue as soon as it hit the shelves. My Internet usage morphed from playing games to browsing fashion and beauty forums to learn as much as possible about beauty, how to be beautiful, things people did at my age to feel more beautiful and express themselves. Beauty was my favorite subject, and these were my new textbooks.

My parents disapproved of my new interest. They viewed beauty and anything beyond basic grooming as vain and vapid behavior. They didn’t understand the appeal of beauty and fashion that I was so drawn to. In their eyes, I couldn’t do it all. Focusing on physical appearance in any way was a distraction from getting good grades and achieving their desired end goal of me becoming a doctor. My mother especially resisted teaching me things that other girls were learning from their mothers, like shaving and doing my eyebrows. Any time I asked for permission to try something new related to beauty, I was immediately dismissed with disdain and criticism of being materialistic and having the wrong priorities. I didn’t understand this logic; I knew plenty of girls at school that were excelling academically, were well-behaved, and that had similar interests. I knew from experience that those things weren’t as mutually exclusive as my parents made them out to be.

One day, I was reading a video about pencil eyeliner, absolutely fascinated by it, when I realized that there was an unlocked treasure trove of goodies I hadn’t thought of: my mother’s beauty cabinet.

My mother told me she’d always been beautiful, boys chasing her around the playground at her primary school in Malaysia. She looked nothing like me – she had fair skin and curly hair, with naturally glowing skin. From a very young age, I had decided she was the most beautiful woman in the world. As I grew older, that impression never left me. Ironically, she was very into beauty herself. She had shelves lined with thick face creams, bottles of serums, and enticing shades of makeup that looked like candy. She took pride in her appearance, and because of this, I felt like her stash was an excellent place to start.

It started with eyeliner. I had watched a few Paramore music videos and wanted to be strong, cool, and confident like Hayley Williams. I stole a black pencil eyeliner from my mom’s makeup drawer, sneaking it in my backpack to school and drawing it on in the bathroom just like I had seen in the tutorials. It was a crude job, but I loved how I felt with it on – I felt like myself, but stronger and more capable.

Unfortunately, my initial stint with eyeliner was short-lived. I had watched plenty of videos on applying it, but not too many on taking it off, and my mom noticed the traces of eyeliner smudged on my eyelids within a few days. The pencil was taken away and I received a very strong chastising, but I knew that it wasn’t over. The joy of my eyeliner routine and the power I felt wearing it was unforgettable. I wanted to keep experiencing it.

The older I got, the more rules I broke, and the stricter my parents became. I was heavily inspired by the punk, pop-punk, and alternative rock music I was listening to, and admired how unabashedly themselves the people behind the music were. They were bold, uncompromising, yet still kind and gentle to themselves and the world around them. Their softness and strength in expressing what they believe deeply resonated with me as a repressed teenager.

Consequently, I started experimenting with dying my hair and trying other forms of makeup passed along to me by friends or stolen from my mom. My experimentation was a declaration of independence, a sign to my parents that they couldn’t fully control me. I became more methodical, more calculated about my experimentation, going to extreme measures to hide the evidence. I learned how to do my makeup more naturally so it was less detectable but still enhanced my features. I threw away crumpled hair dye boxes and old makeup packaging at the library where I volunteered every weekend, one of my only unsupervised places of freedom. I stashed my precious beauty tools and makeup in my backpack or purse and carried it everywhere I went. Up until I moved out for college, and even beyond that, I was a criminal in my own house.

The Later Years

The fight continued in college. I attended a school an hour away from home, far enough to have some distance but still not far enough for my liking. I experienced more tastes of freedom than ever before. I could wear makeup freely and do whatever I wanted with my appearance, as long as I changed it back before family visits or holidays. I got my nose pierced the first week of moving on campus got professional highlights for the first time. But the paranoia and weight of my parents’ opinions still felt incredibly heavy, to the point where I once had a dream I got in trouble for my nose piercing and woke up to realize I had taken it out and it had closed up in my sleep. I got more adventurous with time, but this only meant the stakes were higher. I was always afraid my parents would pop in for a surprise visit, and the end of every semester was met with dread that I would have to see my parents again, complete with a weeks-long preparation plan to get myself back to as natural a state as possible.

My junior year of college, I had an epiphany. I realized my parents would never change, that their standards would never change, and that even when I was hundreds of miles away for summer internships, whether it was San Francisco or New York City, their rules and expectations were a ghost that haunted me and influenced my every move. With this epiphany came helplessness, especially with my impending graduation in a few years, and I realized that I had been living my life with very little to no autonomy, even as an adult. On top of that, I was growing into myself, but still felt this sense of internal repression that I wasn’t being all I could be. I was being held back in how I wanted to express myself and live my life.

By the end of the school year, I had made the decision to go no contact with my parents. I transitioned into complete financial independence. It was extremely difficult – I gave them back everything that they had given me, and had to figure out my own car, phone, and health insurance, among other things. It was both exhilarating and terrifying.

When you’re controlled your whole life, whether it’s your life choices or your physical appearance, you’re a bird trapped in a cage. Even though I had found a way to break out of the cage, I wasn’t sure what to do once I got out. I transferred schools and got a job, but now had one other blocker – I needed to graduate and be in a financially stable place before I could do any sort of deep personal exploration into who I was and who I wanted to be.

As the years passed, I started to feel more affirmed by the distance from my parents. I also began to feel more in control of myself and my situation. I started with small acts of self-expression like dying my hair different colors, trying different piercings out, and returning to my roots of trying to experiment and be more creative with makeup. It was hard to shake the lingering guilt, but I told myself repeatedly that this was an important and necessary step in my life. I was safe. I would no longer be in trouble for these things. They were small but radical acts of self-care in my journey towards finding myself and how I wanted to express myself.

My biggest breakthrough, though, was the tattoos. I have always loved tattoos and the idea of permanent art on your body, but it seemed like the final boss of self-expression. As a kid, it was never a serious thought in my mind because I knew my parents would never allow even the smallest tattoo anywhere on my body. If they hated me wearing makeup, I could only imagine how much they hated something even more permanent on my skin. But I loved the look of tattoos, and dreamed of one day getting a full sleeve on at least one of my arms.

The first few times I got new tattoos post no-contact, I felt brave and strong. It felt like a true marker of the person I was and the growth I experienced – I was someone who had survived and lived to tell the tale, and these were my trophies. I had claimed my power of body autonomy and the ability to do whatever I wanted with my body that would make me feel most like myself. I remember getting emotional when I finally started my full sleeve a few years later. I had come a long way. I finally, really, felt free.

The Now

Years later, I can finally put words to my beauty journey. It is a celebration of body autonomy and self-love, rooted in me wanting to express myself in ways that feel like me and make me feel good. Experimentation is a natural part of exploring beauty, and I spent years not just figuring out how to express myself externally, but also figuring out who I was internally. The internal and external journeys converged and diverged many times as I grew with time and experience. But the most notable takeaway from this exploration was the gratitude I felt to finally be free to explore and connect with myself without outside influence. The truer I am to myself and how I want to express myself, the more I find I can navigate other challenges in life with confidence. My beauty “sins” had opened up a gateway for me into an alluring and empowering life journey.

There wasn’t a single time I dyed my hair, got a piercing, or got a tattoo where I didn’t reflect on it and feel liberated that I had the personal choice of whether to do it or not. Each act of beauty was an expression of autonomy for me, and it was something worth celebrating and being grateful for each time.

This past weekend, I was a model in New York Fashion Week for two shows. It was a huge point of reflection for me as I looked back on the glowing professional photos of me being a canvas for designers’ beautiful visions. The woman in those photos is confident, proud, strong, and someone who feels like they belong in the spaces they occupy. I have never felt more liberated, and I owe that to the journey of discovering my autonomy with beauty and self expression.