What I talk about when I talk about love, and facial hair

               In case you were wondering, I’m still at that McDonalds on Prospect.  And in case you were wondering, I may or may not have a crush on the manager with the long, dark, wavy hair.  She’s a manager, so she gets to wear a fancy white dress shirt rather than the boring blue Polos given to the non-managerial staff.  She has a head of black hair that’s definitely been treated with one of those curling iron things, which incidentally are ridiculous.  You take a giant waffle iron and burn your hair so it stays straight.  Actually, that’s a straightener.  I have no clue what a curling iron is, but I’m sure it works on a similar principle and I’m sure it’s equally ridiculous. 

               I’m not complaining, though, given that this mysterious “curling iron” makes your hair look like the cresting and breaking of waves on a balmy Atlantic shore rather than the boring old uniformity of a stagnant pond.  The pond in this analogy is straight hair.  Anyway, this mysterious McDonalds manager’s hair is definitely of the surfable variety.  She looks like Catherine Zeta Jones from The Mask of Zorro except wielding a deep fryer instead of a rapier.  But alas, we can never be.  Star-crossed lovers doomed not to tragic, Shakespearean, mutually assured destruction but to not go out.  And it’s all because of my facial hair.    

               There aren’t too many things I’m bitter about.  I would say in general I’m not resentful.  Most of the time I don’t hold grudges for long.  Normally I’m a perfect picture of half-asian demurity.  Polite and mild mannered to a fault, respectful of authority, and deferent to age.  But I’m bitter about my facial hair.    

               I think being half-white, half Chinese, and fully racially ambiguous made me especially conscious of ways my appearance and behavior diverged from the cultural norm.  I remember in third grade I realized that kids were wearing long, knee-length shorts while I wore faded jean shorts that only went halfway down my thigh.  I immediately realized my wardrobe had to change to fit in, so change it did.  My M.O.—don’t stand out, keep your head down, blend in, do whatever it takes to ingratiate yourself to the native inhabitants. 

               So when I got to high school, I noticed a strange thing: my male contemporaries started growing weird, moss-like clumps on their chins and cheeks.  Wanting to fit in, I checked my reflection each morning for the strange moss to show up on my face.  Days turned into weeks, weeks to months, months to years, years to decades, and I still can grow nothing remotely resembling cool facial hair. 

               I’m half white with at least some polish on my dad’s side.  Polacks are hairy.  I imagine they have to be to survive the frigid arctic climate of Poland.  So I should be hairy.  On the other hand, Chinese people are generally not hairy.  For the most part they don’t grow hair on their chest, arms, legs, or face.  So I shouldn’t grow hair on my chest, arms, legs, or face.  As it is, I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.  About half the usual quadrants for hair growth on my face are devoid of vegetation.  The other quadrants grow a sickly, half-hearted crop.  It’s like my face started to produce a beard but, upon realizing hair growth in such a barren soil was hard work, threw in the towel.  So I’m left with a little bit of scruff here and there.  A weedy patch of hair on my chin.  A couple lonely tufts poking out around the temples.           

     

               In high school I thought the ideal American man was a mix between Indiana Jones and Sean Connery.  And 93% of their status as the ideal man hinged on their facial hair which magically grew, without grooming, into a stylishly trimmed Ryan Gosling half-beard or a Hugh Jackman five o’clock scruff.  Of course you won’t find many Asians who can grow such magnificent facial hair, and so I worry that no one will ever think of a half-Asian as an ideal man.  You know that whole Yellow Fever phenomenon that was popular on the internet a while back?  It’s not just that white guys go for Asian-American girls, it’s that Asian-American girls go for cool facial hair.   

               In my estimation, approximately 93% of male attractiveness is dependent on facial hair growing ability.  Inversely, why is Shia Laboef always cast in roles like his one as the effeminate sidekick to Indiana Jones in the series’ superlative fourth installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?  Why will Shia Laboef be cute but not hot?  Good looking but not a man? It’s his lack of facial hair. 

               I understand that facial hair isn’t a deal breaker.  I remember this one time there was this girl I had a crush on who told me that “I like guys with a bit of scruff,” and that “if a guy can’t adequately grow facial hair it’s a deal breaker.”  In that case it was a deal breaker. 

               Joan Brumberg, in her book The Body Project, wrote about a series of skin bleaching products targeted towards African-American women.  Brumberg said of one product, Nadinola, that “[Nadinola] claimed not only to light and brighten skin that was ‘dark and unlovely’ but also to loosen, remove, and clear up blackheads and pimples” (Brumberg, 78).  The wide assortment of those skin bleaching products testified to their high demand in the African-American community.  African-American women wanted, using the callous language of these products, to “cure” themselves of their black skin.  They wanted to fit into a racist cultural ideal that associated lightness with beauty. 

     

               Just as African-American women were culturally precluded from being “beautiful” as a result of their skin color, sometimes I think that I can’t be man-beautiful unless I grow a beard.  Us poor Asians and half-asians can never be those archetypal alpha males like Sean Connery or Chuck Norris.  Neither can we become folk singers.  All because of our half-hearted facial hair.  So here we are, Asian-American males, doomed to haunt the hallway between childhood and man-dom, to wait in the antechamber of not-quite-manliness, to reside in the dreaded foyer of erratic or non-existent facial hair,  never quite reaching the goal, never quite getting the ideal scruff.

              

               I was informed by my wise farmer friend during a stint in Bible School in 2008 that the first generation of crossbred, hybrid cows are genetically superior to their normal counterparts.  In cow terms, as my farmer friend explained, that means they have a high meat-to-carcass yield, an above average feed-conversion efficiency, and an increased ability to produce lean, tender meat. 

               When I went to Wikipedia to confirm this startling explanation for my heretofore inexplicable mix of intelligence, good looks, and natural basketball talent, I ran across this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

               According to Wikipedia, hybrids like me are genetically superior due to our suppression of deleterious recessive alleles from one parent by the dominant alleles of the other.  I haven’t tested my meat-to-carcass yield or feed conversion efficiency, but this theory of Heterosis explains a lot.  I’m pretty sure there's a pick-up line in there somewhere if I ever wanted to woo McDonalds manager Catherine Zeta-Jones.  My half of the conversation would probably go something like this:

“You want to go out?  I’m sure we will produce genetically superior Chinese-White-Hispanic babies due to the suppression of deleterious recessive alleles by our advantageous dominant traits.  You know, it’s like breeding cows with a high meat-to-carcass yield.  But you probably know about that cuz you work at McDonalds.” 

I would go on to qualify my pickup line.            

“No, I’m not calling you a cow.”

Finally, sensing impending doom, I would shout the first thing that came to mind in a frantic effort to salvage my courtship attempt.

“You have surfable hair.”

               As I was leaving, I saw Catherine Zeta Jones sitting at a table near the exit.  She had traded her regal managerial white for regular street clothes.  In the seat across from her was a male friend who looked suspiciously like her significant other.  I kid you not, he had cool facial hair.  I guess we were never meant to be, wavy hair lady, as, despite my superior, hybrid genes, despite all those suppressed deleterious recessive alleles, I still can’t grow a beard.