When most people hear the name Emmy-lea Agustin, they think of a character from the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. This reality show features some of the most beautiful and glamorous celebrities in the National Basketball League and shows how they cope with being both tall and short, just like the rest of us. Height Miracle is a popular program that utilizes these famous faces to educate the world on what you can do to change your height and your life for the better.
What actually happens on Height Miracle is that Agustin and her spouse have been watching their partner’s work closely. It’s clear from the first episode of the show that both are quite impressed by how their partners manage to maintain their professional and personal lives while being both very short and very tall. In one scene, Agustin even pulls her husband aside to tell him that she finds it surprising that her husband and her have such different opinions about their bodies. After further explanation, it becomes clear that her husband feels it’s unfair that she has to deal with the public scrutiny of being both short and tall and, in particular, that he feels as if she’s forcing him to act taller than he feels comfortable with.
As the show progresses, viewers get to see the inside dealings of these two women as their romantic relationship develops. As it turns out, the reason why Agustin and her husband feel they must deal with public scrutiny of their height isn’t because of their size or their nationality or their ethnicity – it’s because both of them have different nationalities and different views of beauty. So much time is spent discussing the physical characteristics of the couple’s body – what height they should be, what their skin tones should look like – and so much more, but their Nationality is never brought up. So much time and energy are wasted trying to explain what sort of a difference having a different Nationality makes when there’s absolutely nothing to explain! This lack of interest in Nationality becomes incredibly frustrating for viewers who want to know what the big deal is with their Height or Nationality.