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Homegrown’s Note: It is possible (read: probable) that at least once in our lives, we have all faced the rather unpleasant feeling of wanting to change something about ourselves - a passing comment one our weight or a glance at a more ‘attractive’ body may feel like the root cause of such feelings, but they are triggers of a larger play. The systemic idea of belonging to a certain appearance is longstanding, and so much of it has to do with cultural oppression.
As South Asians, we face an immense amount of scrutiny about everything from our food to our clothes, and our accent to our skin. Ravjot Mehek Singh is one of them, and she has had enough. Her nose, in all its pristine beauty and a symbol of her cultural heritage, was ridiculed for far too long. In fact, it still is, but she now chooses to rise above it and reclaim her identity.
A nose –– a rudimentary nose, which was once the target of hate and discrimination is now a tale of owning one’s identity and being oh-so-proud of it. Read on for her story, in her own voice.
This is an ode to the South Asian nose; the bane of my colonized existence. The root of my twisted struggle to assimilate. The target of ignorance bathed in white supremacy. The focal point of not only external mockery, but racially charged self-hatred that would drive me mad the moment I clashed with the cruelty of the American agenda. But this regal, unique, aquiline nose marks my ancestry; marks a beauty that has not yet been accepted; marks the future of what will be celebrated. This nose is the icon for progress, the beacon of light that illuminates the path for the next generation.
On this momentous day, I acknowledge it. For the very first time with gems of its own, the star of my ethnic face. Lining the ridges and flares with a luxurious, proud shine that once opened the doors to xenophobia. Standing proud, like my tall, sturdy Punjabi ancestors. Decorated with its declaration and proclamation of extinguishing the Western beauty standard.
I have always diminished it, contoured it to be the smallest and flattest, compared it to the button noses of the Europeans that lined the halls of my schools and filled the magazine racks, considered surgery or fillers for the bumped ‘imperfection’. Time and time again, I have analyzed every millimetre of my ethnic being, boiling it down to an anglicized, romanized science –– angling two mirrors in my bathroom to create an infinity of inferiority.
In my colonized mind, I saw an infinite number of reasons to wish I had been born someone ‘better’. I saw an infinite number of ‘ugly’ faces looking back at me, with their naive eyes darting back and forth between each feature looking for a key that my genetic code was not designed to answer. I saw not only my nose, but my dark peach fuzz, the coarse, black hair growing on my upper lip only hours after I had last removed it, the large pores left behind after tweezing my unibrow, my uneven olive skin, my eczematous patches, my entire body covered in a dark layer of fine hair. I saw my shortcomings, which according to Western culture, is anything besides whiteness.
I had wanted a nose job ever since I was eight years old. The urge only grew bigger as I got older and turned into an obsession. It was not surprising that I spent every day fixated on looks and presentation and trying to fit in. I had to because I was finding ways of minimizing the trauma I was faced with every day when I was called too hairy to be a girl, being told I caused 9/11, being told my clothes smelled of curry, being told I was a towelhead, being told I was Osama’s daughter.
By the time I was 10, I had already accepted that I was an ‘other’, an alien, a nonbeing that would never be treated like my other classmates. As I dated white men and white women, I was struck with insults that left me feeling short of any beauty or value even from the people who should have loved me. An ex once said my nose looked like Toucan Sam and called me that constantly after we broke up. Never did I think a children’s cereal mascot could be the centre of a traumatic memory.
This idea of being an ‘other’ and not being ‘normal’ stuck with me for ages, and it is a plague for all South Asian Americans who have certainly felt ‘othered’ before. Our skin colour, our coconut oil-slicked hair, our religions, our music, our foods, and our languages are all an ‘other’. Those of us who lived in areas with minimal diversity knew that our childhoods were a game of ‘Which one of these objects does not belong?’.
America, when I was growing up in the early 2000s, was deeply ignorant and rampant with anti-AAPI and Islamophobic sentiments, and America still is ignorant, but particularly before social media, it was entirely dominated by white people who believed in white America. This idea was only reinforced by the propaganda that followed 9/11, which caused hate crimes against Muslims to rise 1617 per cent from 2000 to 2001, according to the FBI. This statistic did not even include other South Asians that often get mistaken for Muslims, such as Sikhs. As someone from a Sikh background in an ignorant white town, one can only imagine all the issues this caused for me. In my town of white folks, everyone who was nonwhite was made to feel like they were from outer space as if our cultures and heritage made us less human than them.
The countless times I heard ‘savage’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘uncivilized’ to describe my people in educational settings only further ‘othered’ me. These white children were being fed this information under the guise of education because their teachers and principals were racist. This led me down a wild path of finding any possible way to make myself appear normal, to fit in, to appease the white gaze and to keep myself as safe from the racist attacks as I could.
My research on reshaping my features to appear more European never stopped. I soon learned that fillers to even out my aquiline shape would suffice, which I almost went through with a mere few months ago. But one thing kept me from ever taking the first step of booking my consultation –– and that was this fierce energy of revenge that pulsated through my soul, for which I could only blame my Punjabi ancestry for. It was this intense, passionate mission to take ownership of my ‘odd’ and ‘unusual’ take on beauty. It was this understanding that I could not let the West win. I would not become assimilated, even if it came at a temporary lack of self-confidence over my deeply ethnic features.
I envisioned the beautiful faces of my homeland and their mouths twisting in the disappointment at losing another one of them to the European beauty standard. I envisioned the faces of my mother and father as they hid in the closets of their neighbours as violent mobs of nationalists went door to door, hunting and burning and dismembering Sikhs in 1984 in Delhi. Why would I not honour that incredible power of survival and ability to overcome? Why would I not be proud to be the product of two Punjabi warriors who have lived through lifetimes of struggle just to get us to this safe nation? Why would I erase their histories and the histories of those before them? This will to persevere whether by vengeance or newfound inspiration created a path for me to slowly come to terms with not only my nose and my ethnic features, but also my entire history.
My ethnic face became a catalyst for deep dives into my mom’s closet to seek desi fashion, unending hours of learning Punjabi history and connecting with the media that was representing me. The moment I became open to being more than just another victim of assimilation, I saw a world unfold in front of me. One filled with this heritage I had locked away for so long, and filled with other young Asian Americans who felt the same.
I was not an error to be erased, not a flaw to be fixed, and not an issue to be resolved. No, I would not become just another proof that we all must cave in. I would not be another victim of the inferiority complex that twisted our strengths into flaws. I would become proof that this bumped, ethnic, ancestral nose is empowering, beautiful, and sexy.
My nose is defiant. It is tall. It is proud. It is a map of my inherited story. We may not be best friends with our own features, but that is not due to our own selves, but rather to the imperialization of our nations and the erasure of our culture. We are now equipped with the truth and with the power of our community and need not fear the idea of being lesser than by default. So here’s to our South Asian noses. Thank you for reminding us all that our people have overcome. Thank you for leading us into the future.
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