Chances are you don’t know the name Heidi Yeh, but you do know her face. And her story. Or at least, the one the Internet’s been lying to you about for three years.
Yeh, a Taiwanese model, had a successful career when she took up the offer to pose for a cosmetic surgery clinic in 2012. By that point, she’d been modelling for two years, having booked many gigs in fashion spreads, cosmetic adverts, and music videos. What should have been just another routine photoshoot turned her into one of the most widely recognised memes on the web, and all but destroyed her career.
For the shoot, Yeh and a male model posed as a married couple, dressed in formal clothes and a gown, seated with, the viewer is led to believe, their three children, two boys and a girl. There is a clear physical difference between the parents and their offspring, whose faces, Yeh claims, were altered in post production so that they do not has the big eyes and Westernised features of their parents.
The slogan on the final version of the clinic’s advert simply read: “The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids.”
Yeh was told that the print ad would run in local newspapers and magazines, but claims the advertising company then sold on the image and concept to a different cosmetic surgery clinic, which widely disseminated the image on Facebook. Where it quickly became a viral hit, passed around the world, along with an entirely fabricated story about its origins.
The legend surrounding the family portrait claimed that the woman, never identified as working model Heidi Yeh, had been born with considerably more modest looks, and that she had gone under the knife in an effort to bag a rich husband. Unaware of her genetic disposition, the wealthy man had petitioned the courts for a divorce after the birth of his three children, with their modest physical appearance, had revealed his wife’s subterfuge.
“Plastic surgery,” the new version slogan claimed, “You can’t hide it forever.”
Heidi Yeh and the meme version of the ad, which spread all over the world [KnowYourMeme]
Like many people on the internet, whether pretending to play around with a lightsabre or slipping on the ice on the RTÉ evening news, the meme was passed around the Internet, shared all over Facebook and Twitter. Overnight, Yeh became the butt of a global joke, a figure of derision and greed. Her boyfriend, she has told the BBC, refusing to believe that she had not turned to the scalpel to change her appearance, broke off their relationship, and her successful career dried up as no one would hire her to feature in new campaigns.
Now three years after posing for the campaign, Yeh is taking action, and is planning on suing the cosmetic surgery clinic and the US advertising J Walter Thompson for NT$5m (€143,000).
“When I first heard about this from a friend, I thought it was just a one-off rumour,” Yeh said in a tearful interview with the BBC.
“Just because I’m a model, people can hurt me like this and I can’t fight back. I just want to hide. I realised the whole world was spreading it and in different languages.”
“People actually thought it was real. Even my then-boyfriend’s friends would ask about it,” she added.
Maggie Goldenberger was unveiled as the identity of the Ermagerd Girl by Vanity Fair last month [KnowYourMeme]
Yeh estimates she’s lost $4 million New Taiwanese dollars in lost income in the three years since the photograph was taken. She says she doesn’t want money, but she wants the truth of the image to come out, given that it contains images of children altered with exaggerated Asian features, considered a flaw by many in Taiwanese culture.
J Walter Thompson has responded to the controversy by saying the ad was designed to promote plastic surgery in a “humorous manner” and as copyright holders, it maintains the rights to alter the image.
Yeh is just the latest in a growing subculture of people featured in memes coming forward to speak about how they’ve impacted their lives. Last month, Vanity Fair ran a story about uncovering the identity of Maggie Goldenberger, who rose to Internet infamy as the face of the ‘Ermahgerd Girl’, a dorky pre-teen seemingly very enthusiastic about Goosebumps books.
When she was 11 and joking around with some friends, Goldenberger posed for the picture, wearing a vest and pigtails, which was then posted to Reddit years later and widely sent and mocked around the world.
Although Goldenberger mostly brushes off the meme as an occasional annoyance, if Heidi Yeh’s case makes it to the Taiwanese courts, she will be hoping to follow the footsteps of ‘Techno Viking’ – a man who sued a filmmaker for breeching his “personality rights” when he was recorded dancing at an electronic music festival in Berlin.
The so-called 'Techno Viking', who sued and won all the earnings of the viral video featuring him on YouTube [YouTube]
Matthias Fritsch, the video producer who posted the viral hit online, was ordered by a judged to pay back all the earnings the video had made and never use it again, the BBC reported.
But Yeh faces a fierce legal battle; Simple Beauty, the clinic defending itself in the case, has stated that it went through the proper procedures to obtain the rights to use – and manipulate – the image, and JWT is threatening to countersue, citing Yeh’s “untrue allegations” as damaging to the company’s image.
