Hello Peril: The in-betweens of Asian-American body image By Hillary Hao (November 13, 2019) Here is the link to the website: https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13/hello-peril-the-in- betweens-of-asian-american-body-image/ I have talked a lot about the struggles that diasporic Asians face, but it’s time we initiate a discussion around how these binds metaphorically and literally shape a racialized body. There is a constant, unrelieved pressure to possess certain physical traits which have an astonishing amount of worth assigned to them to the point that Asian American women begin to weigh in on them in girlhood. The importance of a thin female figure is a harmful pattern in many societies, but for those who are “in-between” cultures, there’s an unspoken burden of straddling multiple cultural lines. To resist markers of difference on a racialized body in order to fit in, we must conform to Western beauty standards. Yet we must also balance them against eastern beauty standards to feel accepted by our parents and relatives. This process is incredibly disempowering. As Kalea Martin, a student at Mount Holyoke, said, “when you’re Asian in America, you find yourself in a lot of situations where you stand out. And when you’re surrounded by a bunch of people that don’t look like you, you’ll inevitably be heavily influenced by the beauty standards they set.” These patterns strip the individual of the ability to negotiate body-image on their own terms. Though, I would be doing violence to the truth if I said that a white power structure was entirely to blame. Eastern beauty standards are just as demanding and bodies are constricted by traditional patriarchal structures. Korean pop singers are the perfect case study for this. It is well-known that management companies oblige their singers to diet in preparation for debut or a new release; the rationale behind these otherwise unjust practices is the universal palatability and value of thinness — and the singers wholeheartedly accept this. Their highly publicized, “new and improved” bodies become even more cause for concern when you consider that these singers are described as “idols.” The label’s air of superiority and aspiration elevates these young women and their thinness to the highest level of class and as a result, the value of thinness is artificially inflated. One can imagine the repercussions of this for Asian-American women. We are already exposed to this body image by virtue of being a part of the community, but our understanding of thinness’ importance is further distorted by Korean pop’s explosive popularity in the U.S. Since it has been accepted by a multicultural society, the false universalness of the appeal of thinness is further perpetuated. https://dailyfreepress.com/author/hhao/ https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13/hello-peril-the-in-betweens-of-asian-american-body-image/ https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13 ...

1. Hello Peril: The in-betweens of Asian-American body image
By Hillary Hao (November 13, 2019)
Here is the link to the website:
https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13/hello-peril-the-in-
betweens-of-asian-american-body-image/
I have talked a lot about the struggles that diasporic Asians
face, but it’s time we initiate a
discussion around how these binds metaphorically and literally
shape a racialized body. There is
a constant, unrelieved pressure to possess certain physical traits
which have an astonishing
amount of worth assigned to them to the point that Asian
American women begin to weigh in on
them in girlhood.
The importance of a thin female figure is a harmful pattern in
many societies, but for those who
are “in-between” cultures, there’s an unspoken burden of
straddling multiple cultural lines. To
resist markers of difference on a racialized body in order to fit
in, we must conform to Western

2. beauty standards. Yet we must also balance them against eastern
beauty standards to feel
accepted by our parents and relatives.
This process is incredibly disempowering. As Kalea Martin, a
student at Mount Holyoke, said,
“when you’re Asian in America, you find yourself in a lot of
situations where you stand out. And
when you’re surrounded by a bunch of people that don’t look
like you, you’ll inevitably be
heavily influenced by the beauty standards they set.” These
patterns strip the individual of the
ability to negotiate body-image on their own terms.
Though, I would be doing violence to the truth if I said that a
white power structure was entirely
to blame. Eastern beauty standards are just as demanding and
bodies are constricted by
traditional patriarchal structures.
Korean pop singers are the perfect case study for this. It is well-
known that management
companies oblige their singers to diet in preparation for debut
or a new release; the rationale
behind these otherwise unjust practices is the universal
palatability and value of thinness — and

3. the singers wholeheartedly accept this.
Their highly publicized, “new and improved” bodies become
even more cause for concern when
you consider that these singers are described as “idols.” The
label’s air of superiority and
aspiration elevates these young women and their thinness to the
highest level of class and as a
result, the value of thinness is artificially inflated.
One can imagine the repercussions of this for Asian-American
women. We are already exposed
to this body image by virtue of being a part of the community,
but our understanding of thinness’
importance is further distorted by Korean pop’s explosive
popularity in the U.S. Since it has
been accepted by a multicultural society, the false universalness
of the appeal of thinness is
further perpetuated.
https://dailyfreepress.com/author/hhao/
https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13/hello-peril-the-in-
betweens-of-asian-american-body-image/
https://dailyfreepress.com/2019/11/13/hello-peril-the-in-
betweens-of-asian-american-body-image/
Additionally, both the East and West reify the stereotype that
Asian women are naturally slim.

4. For those of us that don’t fit neatly into that norm and
internalize it, we are made to feel like
freaks of nature. This alienation makes it difficult for Asian
American women to situate
ourselves into body-positive mentalities.
It leads to thoughts that, although not explicitly in tandem with
eating disorders, create an
entirely unhealthy relationship between food consumption and
body image. If women feel they
need to lose weight, many will begin right away by reducing
portions, sometimes to dangerously
small amounts. We feel as though we have no choice but to
squeeze and contort our bodies into
these increasingly narrow and unrealistic confines.
What begins as a dietary exercise can escalate into an eating
disorder and an unsound
relationship with food. We keep trying to force our diverse
range of bodies into a supposedly
natural size 00 which makes failures hit harder than they
should. And for those of us that
successfully diet and then participate in policing others’ bodies,
we are participating in our peers’
oppression.

5. We are in an era of heightened body positivity and we ought to
partake in it. I understand that we
live in a world of thin privilege, but we don’t need to explain
our bodies. It is our private
domain; whatever you decide to look like ought to be your own
choice.
Earned Value Analysis
To save on time and costs, the company has decided to
outsource the testing of the information system (IS) to Bug
Busters. The following table was received from Bug-Busters.
The cost of Resource A is $30.00 an hour and the cost of
Resource B is $35.00 an hour. All the task activities are
sequential—that is, finish-to-start. Testing or the project start
date will begin on the first Monday in January of next year
regardless of any holidays.
Phase 1: Test Planning
Develop Unit Test Plan
Develop integration test plan
Phase 2: Unit Testing
Code walkthrough with team
Test software units
5

6. Earned Value Analysis for Bug Busters
The team believes that Bug Busters will not be able complete
the project based on the original budget. It would not be
reasonable to move forward with this project as the budget
would need to be increased to get this project completed.
Earned Value Analysis
Cost Variance
($320.00)
Schedule Variance
($12,560.00)

7. Quality Management Plan
Project Description
Husky Air launched for business in January of 2008 when L.T.
Scully pooled his life savings and secured a significant loan
from a midwestern bank. With its headquarters in DeKalb
Taylor Municipal Airport (DKB), Husky Air is a fixed-based
operator facility that offers a wide range of services to the
growing demands for private aviation.
Quality Management Statement
The quality management plan for the Pilot Angels project will
consist of bringing a mature mindset in the processes and roles
of project team members. The project maturity will consist of
the following five levels of process maturity:
1. Initial
2. Repeatable
The Tiger Team will also follow the project quality management
(TQM) plan as the framework of the project. The TQM
framework consist of the following plan:
· Quality control
· Learn improve & mature
Quality Management Metrics
Quality Management Metrics
Type
Metric
Description
Process
Cumulative Flow Diagram

8. Velocity
Ensure the flow of work across the team is consistent by
measuring number of issues over time.
Average amount of work a scrum team completes during a
sprint, measured in story points or hours.
Quality Management Verification Activities
The idea of verification originated from the aerospace industry
to ensure all software performed as intended as any error would
result in a potentially catastrophic consequences (Marchewka,
2016, p. 245).
Quality Management Validation Activities
Validation is an activity that can help determine if the project
deliverable meets the customer or client’s expectations and
ensures the system performs as specified.
References
Marchewka, J. T. (2016). Information technology project
management: Providing measurable organizational value. John
Wiley & Sons.
Media Influence on Beauty Standards
First, it was the invention of motion picture. Then there
was the arrival of television, and now with social media
available for 24 hours, there is no shortage of extraordinarily
beautiful people setting beauty standards for not-so extra
ordinarily people. Despite that human history has been strewn
with struggles after struggles to secure one’s freedom and way
of life, people have never been completely free of the influence
from the media that is ceaselessly reinventing itself. As the
influence of media is ever so present in people’s lives, the
beauty trends in the media have also been dictating what people
should look like and shouldn’t. Both Hao in Hello Peril: The

9. in-betweens of Asian American Body Image (2019) and Hahn in
Toxicity of Beauty Standards (2019) deal with this very aspect
of media manipulating people to subscribe to unreachable
beauty standards. Hao focuses on how Asian American women
are trapped in two competing cultural beauty standards, both of
which pressure them to be thin as the global success of popular
K-pop singing groups who practice an extreme diet to look thin.
In the same vein, Hahn discusses the dangers of following the
beauty standards with blind faith by illustrating the current
beauty trends from diets to plastic procedures. While both
articles shed light on the toxic nature of media’s playing such a
huge role in shaping people’s perception of beauty, Hahn’s
article (2019) is more convincing in two aspects: first, in
Hahn’s article, are there not only more examples and statistical
data, but also those examples were published by reputable
organizations with clear in-text citation; whereas, Hao’s article
(2019) provides s no data ; second, the tone of Hahn’s article
(2019) is much more objective and informative, whereas, Hao’s
tone is subjective and skeptical.
Looking at the number of examples and data that help
illustrate the influence of media on beauty standards, Hahn’s
article (2019) is filled with a wide array of examples from
reputable institutes such as Eating Recovery Center and Los
Angeles Times. Compared to Hahn’s article, Hao’s article
(2019) lacks examples since there is only one example which is
about K-pop singers’ practice of extreme diet. Even the
example of K-pop singers does not come with any citation, but
the author’s own commentary about it. Given that the main idea
of Han’s article (2019) is more specific on the manipulative
nature of media in people’s lives, it might not be a surprising
discovery that Hao’s article (2019) which mainly discusses the
duality of life Asian American women must deal with in terms
of how they should look. Hahn, on the other hand, specifically
addresses that people are dictated by what they are exposed to
daily. Those daily influencers come in the forms of ad
campaigns, T.V personalities, movie characters, and social

10. media. Hahn does not stop at identifying the culprits who do
everything in their power to persuade viewers to buy them and
imitate them. She also provides statistically alarming numbers
of people of all ages taking extreme measures to look like
beautiful people on these media platforms. For instance, she
quotes an article titled, “Body images and Eating Disorder” that
talks about that “40-60% of elementary school aged girls are
concerned about their weight” (“Body images”, 2019, cited in
Hanh, 2019, para.3). Hahn points out that the article also states
that over half of teenage girls tend to resort to potentially
dangerous practices of skipping meals, fasting, smoking
cigarettes, vomiting, and even taking laxatives to control their
weight. Hahn also provides the popular trends in the effort to
stay thin. This point is further explored in the article when
Hahn starts to talk about girls’ trying to bank on their attractive
looks and become an ‘Instagram model’. She points out how
social media has been the number one driving forcing behind
the popular image of beauty by providing another telling result
of a survey conducted by the brand Dove. According to the
result, out of 1, 027 women between the ages of 18 and 64, 25%
answered that social media is the major player in shaping “their
conception of beauty” (Dove, 2019, citied in Hahn, 2019,
para.4). However, 78% of the respondents said that the way
women are depicted on social media platforms is not at all close
to what real women look like.
Another aspect that makes Han’s article (2019) more
convincing on the influence of the media, is how the article is
told, in other words, its tone. Due to that the tone of Hahn’s
article is much more objective and straightforward, it is easier
to see the issue at hand without having to try to extract the
purpose of the article. The tone is informative and objective as
she provides a slew of examples and statistical numbers that
clearly reveal the power of the media. This tone allows the
readers to see the problem and be able to relate to the people
introduced in the article. Compared to Hahn’s article (2019),
Hao’s article (2019) is much more nuanced than less

11. informative. The readers are forced to read between the lines.
Hao’s being an Asian American woman seems to have been
deeply affected by the problem she raises in her article. That is
probably why her tone is much more personal and resentful of
what is being done to Asian American women. Because of this
personal nature of her writing, it leaves little room for the
readers to process her claim themselves and accept it. In
addition, Hao’s subjective tone does not sound very persuasive
talking about Asian American women struggling to satisfy both
their parents’ culture, which believes that thin women are
beautiful and western culture, which now perceives that
beautiful Asian woman must be thin. This claim of Hao’s may
make its readers pause and think if there is even one place
where thinness is not celebrated in this society. If thinness were
not celebrated all over the nation-perhaps all around the world,
no companies would never be praised for their use of plus size
models and adding plus sizes in their clothing lines.
Hao (2019) and Hahn (2019) bring the ugly truth of the
manipulative nature of the media in what seems to be the most
vulnerable aspect in human lives: how attractive do I look?
This being the focal point of the two articles, Hahn’s endeavor
to delineate how strong of a hold the media has on people by
providing a variety of realistic examples readers can easily
relate while Hao provides a personalized account of what K-pop
singers do to stay thin with no specific source cited. Hahn’s
tone in the article comes through as an informative voice which
allows its readers to see what is truly going on for themselves,
while Hao takes a deeply scathing tone for the cultural pressure
that deepens the inner conflict of Asian American women
between the two sets of beauty standards. It was disturbing to
read about how deeply school aged girls are impacted by social
media platforms and the list of the things they do to their bodies
was cringe worth information.
Hanh’s article (2019) does a great job painting a realistic
picture of that the influence of the media spares no one. The
two articles being web-based articles do not provide more in-

12. depth analysis of the role of the media. Particularly, with Hao’s
article being more as an op-ed than a news article, it forces an
agreement on its readers. However, since a thin body has been
celebrated as the most distinct features of an attractive
individual, the argument that Asian American women are
conflicted between their ancestral culture and western culture is
not as convincing as all women feeling pressured to look thin
regardless of their races. Overall, it is Hahn’s article that
successfully informs and warns its readers of how dangerous it
is to follow the beauty standards the media have concocted and
made people ingest the dose of it regularly. Therefore, I
recommend that Han’s article (2021) for readers who are
looking to learn more about what the influence of the media
with clear examples and data.
References
Barroso, A., & Brown, A. (2021a, May 25). Gender pay gap in
U.S. held steady in 2020. Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-
gap-facts/
Hahn, E. (2019, November 15). The toxicity of beauty
standards. The Catalyst. Retrieved November 20, 2019, from
https://millardwestcatalyst.com/10919/opinion/the-toxicity-of-
beauty-standards/