no pain, no gain

It was warm enough in mid-September that the soot from the New York city air clung to my skin, forming a black film on my exposed legs, arms, face and neck. I never felt so filthy at the end of every day, and maybe from the minute I stepped outside. But I still loved the energy of it all, despite the grime: the excitement of so many kinds of bodies and minds colliding spontaneously, the arty storefronts, the walking to everywhere. Someone once told me that New York is the only true city in America. And it may be true, there is an otherworldliness to it that isn’t quite as dramatic in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago or Seattle.

I had imagined living there that year, until I met the reality of  the dirt and weather. The thought of showering so often and the hassle of owning a full winter wardrobe pulled my fantasies back to easy California. I’m not a neat freak, but I can’t go to bed feeling dirty: even my feet have to be clean and anything I’m wearing has to smell like a spring breeze. All I wanted at the close of every night was to take a cool shower and soak my blistered feet. I must have trekked three or four city miles a day in leather ballet slippers, my idea of a good pedestrian shoe then.

Along with my mom, I stayed at my restaurant aunt’s temporary one bedroom loft, which had a living room with a fold-out and was big for Soho. The trouble was there was only one bathroom and my aunt was usually in it nightly for what felt like hours. We wondered what she was doing in there? Reading an entire Russian novel while soaking in the tub? Perhaps tweezing her brows? Practicing different styles of makeup application before the magnification mirror? When my aunt finally opened the door and a gush of steam poured out, I may have hastily said something like, this is good for my clogged pores. She lit up. “You say your pores need cleaning?” She suddenly looked at me differently, saw a new potential to shape me into her image.

The first thing she explained was her mantra: No pain, no gain. This was spoken without any hint of playfulness, but with the command of the military general she must have been in her past life. If you want to make it in the world, you must be presentable. The gain was world acceptance and the pain, well that was where her fun began. She had often told us that she could tell everything she needs to know about a person in one quick glance. When she hired people, she needed not more than five minutes before she knew yes or no. Presentation was 80 percent in her game of life.  

At 50, her skin was impressive: spotless, wrinkleless, even-toned. It may have looked better than mine at 25. But my mother’s skin wasn’t all too bad and she didn’t do much to hers. So I wondered how much our Korean genetics played a helping role and whether the pain that was to follow was really necessary?

My aunt was the most disciplined one in our family. My mother thinks it was because she was born exactly the time the Korean War started and she was tossed around a lot instead of being cuddled as a baby. She may have heard gunfire and bombs and absorbed that the world was a dangerous place. Whatever the reason, she followed her routines like clockwork, as if all human life on the planet depended on it. She woke up at the crack of dawn to spin at the gym, returning with every article of clothing drenched in sweat; if you didn’t sweat, you didn’t accomplish anything. The day was filled with rotations at the restaurants, meetings and planning, keeping everyone and thing on task. At night, she had a beauty ritual that was a compilation of tips she had read in magazines and gleaned from the finest dermatologists along with some old school habits of my grandmother (like rubbing the insides of orange peel and apple peel to the tops of her hands).

I sheepishly held my drugstore Neutrogena cleanser in my hands. She refused to look at it. For amateurs. If you want to make it in the world, to be truly presentable, you needed a 12-step. I wondered if she had a secret life that none in the family knew, that maybe she had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous every morning all while telling everyone she had been going to spinning class. No, her hamstrings were much too toned. The 12-step was a mere coincidence. She wanted me to get a notepad and write every step, every ingredient, the timing, the progression, so I would never forget, because she would never take the time to tell me again. I explained that I had a decent memory and that the notepad would only get soggy and the ink would smudge. I followed my aunt from the kitchen, who had a cutting board, vegetables, a pot of oatmeal and an ice-pick in her hands. I carried a jar of mayonnaise. Close the door, she ordered. 

Step 1: Steam. This meant transforming the entire bathroom into the inside of a thick white cloud, only achieved by running the shower on its hottest setting for a solid half hour with door and window closed When the room is so foggy you can’t see your face in the mirror, it’s ready. Let pores open.

Step 2: While pores are opening, chop food products: Cucumber slices, avocado, orange rinds. Stir and blend mixtures into three separate bowls for cleansers and masks.

Step 3: Rub oatmeal mixture over face in circular motion and if it starts curdling from the heat, don’t eat it. 

Step 4: Rinse.

Step 5: Glop on forkfuls of mayo for your hair, like a conditioner to add shine (and a sour tuna sandwich smell) to your mane. Use the fork as a comb to blend it through.

Step 6: Mask. Use avocado and yogurt mixture. Ignore the smell.
Step 7: Rest the cucumber slices over your eyes. Try to relax even though your face smells like spoiled guacamole.

Step 8: Rinse

Step 9: Get icepick. Yes, Icepick. (The hefty industrial kind used in the backs of kitchens at big fancy restaurants that only sociopathic owners had access to.)

Step 10: Retrieve Evian ice block from freezer and use the pick to chip away large shards.

            Step 11: Fill sink with this fresh Evian ice and Evian water.

            Step 12: Dunk face 100 times to seal the pores and tighten. Quickly in and out, in and out. Repeat in reps of 10. (It was brain-freeze, like I had bitten into the coldest scoop of ice-cream, but this had no pleasure to it, no tangible reward.)

And all these years I had thought food was for eating. Maybe this was what happens when you live and breathe in a restaurant. You start becoming extra resourceful with what you know and have before you, see the many uses of a thing.

No pain, no gain. Got it. But an ice-pick? Just the thought of an icepick was painful without the odd act of hammering away at an ice block on a steamy bathroom floor. And all that Evian water. I had a passing thought about all the plastic bottles the size of Texas floating in the Great Atlantic. I had another about all the women in other worlds climbing uphill in the hot sun to fetch clean water from a well. And here she was, pouring Evian into the sink like it was nothing, a clean cocktail for her face. We were shallow. We were vain: all this consumption in the name of clean skin. We had been in there for almost an hour. Were our pores that much noticeably cleaner and tighter? I was only 25 and my skin felt just the same as before we initiated this string of pains. What did we gain? My face smelled like guacamole all night and I didn’t like it.

The next night, she told me she left extra avocado mask and ice in the bowl next to the sink, that I was on my own to follow the regimen. She had trained me and now I must follow. I told her I would try the 100 dunk, but only made it to 10. I picked up my Neutrogena cleanser and used it to wash my face in one step in the shower like I always did. When I came out of the bathroom, my pores were too large, my face didn’t share her same sheen. She thought me weak and ineffectual.  

Back home in L.A., when I asked my sister if she knew about the 12-steps, she told me that I got away easy. At the L.A. ghostly mansion my aunt had built something of a home spa. My sister told me she once ventured in and had the entire regimen not just for the face, but the body too. This included a carton of raw eggs for some kind of special tightening mask. Some of it had trickled into her scalp and the heat from the steam cooked it, so she spent hours afterwards painstakingly combing scrambled egg out of her hair.