As a queer feminist researcher, I have always been interested in beauty practices and the relationship humans have with our appearance.

Despite my years in this field, and my childhood fixation with fashion and aesthetics, my own relationship with beauty has always felt unmoored and uncertain.

I was born in Melbourne to Chinese migrant parents. We were poor, but I am privileged to have never known war, poverty and revolution.

And yet, it is in war, poverty and revolution that my relationship with beauty began.

Image: Left, author’s mum and brother in Footscray, early 1990s. Right, author’s mum’s high school ID photo, 1970s.

My parents grew up in the throes of revolution in Mao’s China.

Mum was one of six children. Lunch was half an egg, dinner was watered-down rice porridge. Mum’s parents had migrated to Shanghai in the aftermath of the second Sino-Japanese war.

Initially drawn to Shanghai’s promise of glittering opportunity, they were instead shafted into her migrant slums. There, they raised their six children – impoverished, but as mum recalls, with joy and love.

This past is where my mum’s – and thus my own – relationship with beauty began.

Mum has never seemed to care much about her appearance.

Her clothes have always been gifts or hand-me-downs – items unwanted or discarded by family and friends. She wears them until they’re threadbare and falling apart.

In my lifetime, she has not bought herself a single item of clothing. Yet, for her first job in Australia, she sewed clothes for a small Vietnamese business in Melbourne’s inner west. 

Skilled in sewing and knitting, Mum has always had an eye for flair, style and fit. I still ask her what she thinks of my outfits, her opinion on new trends, and her advice on what colours and patterns go well together.

Meanwhile, her go-to outfits consist of a pair of bright red track pants she originally bought me for my Year 9 PE classes and an assortment of misprinted corporate T-shirts discarded from a factory my dad’s friend once ran. I offer to buy her clothes, but she says she doesn’t need any.

Even as a child, I knew mum carried with her the intergenerational trauma of war and the experience of upheaval during the revolution.

I grew up watching Chinese period dramas and wuxia films, where actors clad in opulent head pieces and colourful flowing silks would glide across the screen.

Set in Imperial dynasties ranging from the Tang (618-907) to the Qing (1636-1912), they depicted a world of colour, excess and extravagance that had since seemingly ceased to be, at least in my reality.

A still from the author’s favourite period drama/comedy, huanzhu gege (還珠格格). Credit Initium Media

Later, throughout the Mao era (1949-1976), gender differences were then suppressed, as state propaganda promoted images of “masculinized” iron women (铁姑娘 tie guniang).

Beauty practices were vilified as signs of bourgeoisie indulgence, so women dressed plainly, cut their hair short and gave up makeup.

An example of tie guniang /铁姑娘, 1974.

My parents left China for Melbourne in the ’80s, during the Opening Up and Reform era, when foreign influences, pop culture and movie stars began to put beauty back on the map. But these changes never reached me.

My sense of beauty remains hazy, haunted by the spectre of revolutionary China: a world I know intimately and yet not at all.

I never witnessed the time of the tie guniang but, across generations and continents, its influence grasps me still.

When you’re born so far from your homeland, you live your life in a cultural time capsule. My home is a microcosm of Mao’s China, transplanted from the migrant slums of Shanghai.

Through flashes and vignettes over phone calls and dial-up internet connection, I watched from afar as China rapidly evolved. Generations bearing the scars of war, revolution and hard labour aged into retirement.

An intensified interest in beauty emerged, and China became one of the largest markets in the world for apparel, cosmetics and luxury goods. Meanwhile, my parents continued to practice the only version of Chineseness they knew.

Shunning indulgence, Mum has always followed the tenets of ascetic discipline: a principle of abstaining from luxury. In a way, so have I.

Would mum ever know the euphoria of curating one’s appearance? Will I ever know it?

It might be easy to say that Mum’s aversion to beauty practices is underscored by the historical, cultural and political context she was born into. But to me, she is not a sociological object. She’s Mum.

I think that’s what makes beauty so difficult for me to write about. These practices are cultural, political, social, geographical and historical, yet they’re so intimate and personal.

I have never found the words to articulate my own unsettled sense of beauty. It is so knotted up with uncertainty, always located in a sense of perpetual ‘awayness’.

Mum carried Maoist asceticism away from its cultural, geographical and historical context and passed it on to me. But I exist decades away from Mao’s China. Away from the vibrancy of our ancient past. Away from the revival of beauty practices in post-reform China. Yet, I feel I also exist away from the classed and raced norms of so-called Australia.

bell hooks wrote that when we are away from the centre, we can find home in the margins. I find comfort in these words. But when I think of beauty, even in the margins I feel adrift and unattached, with no time, place or cultural touchpoint to house me.

I never knew what I was supposed to look like.

Mum’s aloofness to beauty, my disenchantment with Western norms, and my uncertainty about my gendered body all contributed to this.

But this wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, I never felt much pressure to conform. I was able to do a lot of exploring throughout my teenage years.

Growing up, my dad cut everyone’s hair, and luckily he was never perplexed or reluctant when I asked him at 13 years old to cut my hair short like a boy’s. 

A recent photo of the author.

I spent many of my teen years asking myself whether I should have been born in a different body. But I also liked feeling pretty like a girl. Maybe I wanted to be every gender at once, or none at all.

I had a scene phase, an emo phase, a Harajuku phase, a goth phase and a K-pop phase. I tried wearing thrifted bow ties, waistcoats, Oxford shoes and button-up shirts. I wore cheap sports bras to compress my chest and painted my nails different colours every week. I bleached my hair platinum blonde.

I followed scene queens on Myspace, then drag queens on Instagram. I was entranced by excess and drawn to hyperfeminine spectacle.

Still, I always felt that sense of awayness: away from my birth gender, from straightness and from queerness. I also felt so far away from the way my mum was, but her sensibility permeated through it all.

Mum tried nothing, while I tried everything. I tried everything because in a way, none of it mattered. She never made me feel like there was a ‘right’ way to look, so I was simply left to my own devices.

Even now, I’m not sure what feels right. I like playing with my appearance. It’s fun. It makes me feel good. I know that experimenting with beauty is an important way for humans to explore, communicate and celebrate our identities.

Yet, somehow, not caring about beauty feels like the most powerful identity practice available to me. 

In a world so full of uncertainty, being unafraid of my own “ugliness” anchors me. 

I had severe acne and bouts of depression in my early twenties. When I finally decided to see a dermatologist, he told me that I’d be so happy about having clear skin that my depression would be cured.

In reality, I was never that upset about my acne – it mostly just annoyed me. When it cleared up, I was pleased – but not overjoyed.

When cherished friends disparage their bodies, I want so much to scoop up their shame and cast it away. When my queer pals experience the euphoric highs of doing gender their way, I am deeply elated for them.

But those highs and lows have never been mine. Instead, mum’s blasé approach to beauty feels foundational to who I am. 

Perhaps the sense of awayness I feel whenever I think about beauty practices is because doing nothing, not thinking about beauty, is the only thing that feels like home. 

It is a home from another time and continent: temporally and geographically incongruent with the world in which I live and walk.

At times, I feel alienated and uncertain, for it is a home full of unresolved (and perhaps irreconcilable) tensions. 

And yet, it is here that I return, for it is here that I am reminded of where I came from.

Shirley Xue Chen (they/she) is a cultural studies researcher who primarily investigates the queer and feminist politics of everyday life. They conduct this work upon the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. Suzhou style dried plums are their favourite writing snack.

Shirley Xue Chen is a Research Assistant on Dr Hannah McCann’s (University of Melbourne) Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100989) and this work was funded through this project. You can read more about this project at beautysalonproject.com.