Their feelings about Asian eyes were fraught with centuries-old, cross-continental beliefs about attractiveness. Below, hear from 13 Asian-American men and women about slants, folds, taunts and self-acceptance. It goes to show Westernized beauty is something Asians are very mindful of.
Basically, all I wanted to do when I was younger was get old enough to get eyelid surgery, marry a white guy and change my last name immediately. I would sleep with eye tape on every night, hopeful it would make my eyes get bigger. The way I look is now part of who I am. I want to be a mother who celebrates their child. But part of this is history.
Wow, they curl down. Some of what we feel about our looks has to do with how we were invaded by Japan, which was attached to Western ideals and culture. Korea had to let go of culture and traditions because they were held to it by a gun. Part of this is history. Our strength is very introverted. So basically, partially because of what had happened in the history of Korea, and partially because in Korea, confidence is a gained merit and not a given merit, it took me a long time to appreciate my own beauty.
This is how you look. I have double eyelids. I totally validate any kind of feeling around it. Asians tend to internalize a lot of things and not talk about the real issue. I used to use Scotch tape to make my eyes bigger. When I started experimenting with makeup and watching YouTube tutorials, I rarely found any makeup gurus with monolids like mine.
So growing up, I was never the only Asian person in my classroom. That being said, I was made aware of my Asian eyes every time I left the confines of my town.
I specifically recall an incident where I was visiting family in Pittsburgh. A group of boys around my age pointed at my sister and me and stretched their eyes with their fingers to mimic ours.
I never thought much about my eyes until I started exploring my gender identity. Too often, we see European beauty models who have the perfect canvases for eyeshadow. Yet, the Eurocentrism of beauty standards has both undermined and exoticized Asian beauty for far too long.
Plus, I think smoky eyes look dopest on Asian eyes. I was the one Asian kid in my class and I felt a sense of self-hatred because I was different than what guys thought girls should be like. In college, I became more open to other viewpoints, and it helped how I saw myself. When it comes to looks and acceptance, it all goes back to intersectional feminism and messaging to women that there are so many types of beauty and ways to be you. Women get more criticism for not being as light or having smaller eyes.
When I got to the U. Guys can skim by without looking great. They have the weird pressure of getting your eyelids done. Korean people like pretty-looking guys versus American macho guys. It made me feel a bit more self conscious about my appearance. I also have two different eyelids. My optometrist asked if I wanted to fix it. If she had asked me way back then, in high school, maybe I would have considered it.
My eyes are large by Korean standards, although now they are much smaller as my eyelids droop with age. To be honest, a lot of Korean people are obsessed with large eyes. They just really think big eyes are attractive, as people in many countries do, I suppose. When she drew blood, she blotted it away impatiently, waiting for it to clear so that she could continue poking into her skin, flicking away each hard bead of concealed oil upended.
It'd been two weeks since she left the People's Liberation Army Hospital. There had been a school-holiday special on double-eyelid surgery: from 3, renminbi to 1, renminbi, how could she pass on that? When she moved her eyeballs from side to side, it hurt. She took to swiveling her whole head rather than just her eyes when she had to look at something. She was told that the scarring would take a few months to fade, she was prepared to wait it out.
She wasn't told about the possibility of double vision, of the bright lights that would follow. She was irritated—and hurt—that they ascribed it to vanity.
For this wasn't vanity, this was getting ahead in life. Didn't they know that merely having a university degree wasn't the be-all and end-all anymore? The happiest day of my life , her mother said on the day of her convocation, and she was touched but also she had the undercurrent of an urge to take her mother by the shoulders and shake her, to say, Really?
Is your life that small, Mother? Did they know that the chances of employment for a grad with double eyelids and wider eyes are 70 percent higher than those of a grad with single eyelids?
That, ceteris paribus, with the same grades and portfolio, the prospective employer will unswervingly choose the one with the double eyelids? Eyes with double eyelids give the overall impression of a person being more energetic. A more energetic person will contribute more productively to the company.
There was also the Wuhan study that showed that women could expect to earn 1. So when they say, Serves you right for being vain , she wants to say, What do you know. She didn't even ask them to pay for it—and even that wouldn't have been too untoward; she had friends for whom the double-eyelid surgery had been gifted by their parents as natural consequences of completing the gao kao. Weren't you fine before this , they say, with the pair of eyes that heaven above consigned you.
When will you get it? Why would you ever think that "fine" is enough? She blinks away the tears, tries to unsee the bright balls of light.
The post-surgery ptosis is throbbing, like it sometimes does. She won't hold anything else against him, but it's not fair that she has to live with this droop that was never there before. If she has to, she can live with the rest, the tearing, the temporal scarring, the whiteheads, the bright lights, the double eyelids achieved at the expense of looking perpetually shocked.
But the ptosis; can he just please fix the ptosis? Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America. A matter of periocular anatomy. It isn't just the eyes per se we are talking about—there's the flatter nose, the lower-based nasal bridge, the higher amount of preaponeurotic fat in the epicanthic fold.
More precisely, the orbital septum fuses to the levator aponeurosis at variable distances below the superior tarsal border, and there is no extension of the capsulopalpebral fascia. By the by, to term it "Chinese" eyes isn't quite accurate, for the condition isn't unique to the Chinese, but a definitive racial trait of the Mongoloids—though the word is pejorative now, it was utilised in early ethnology and we still use it in academic formality; we mean no harm, but things move so slowly here.
The epicanthic fold was one of several adaptations to the cold, the bitter conditions of the Mammoth steppe during the Middle Pleistocene, some , to , years ago. The others: short limbs, flat faces, short noses, lower surface to mass ratio, cyclical vasodilation, and vasoconstriction of the peripheral capillaries. Rue de Chabon, Paris, France.
She is the first Chinese model to be on the cover of Jalouse. She's lying in Pierre's bed, smoking. He doesn't care that she gets ash on his pillows. She prefers it here—she prefers it at anyone else's—to the models' apartment.
She has a sign on her door that says Fuck off I'm sleeping in a childish hand. An emerald-eyed Latvian blonde threw away the preserved egg slices she'd gotten her mother to mail her from Sichuan. Why did you do that, she'd asked the Latvian girl. Because it smells, the Latvian girl said, and so do you. Pierre comes out the shower and mouths I love you ; points at her, as if there were anyone else in the room.
She just smiles at him, presses down on the lighter with her right thumb and toys with the flame, lights a new cigarette. These photographer types, their love is aggregated via the camera, developed in film. Relationships last as long as seasonal fashion, then you pack your bags and you're spreading your legs for someone else in a shoot, someone else is pointing his camera at you and telling you your single eyelids and cheekbones are so precise they can cut diamonds.
She looks over at Pierre, the fold of loose tummy fat, wiping his pubic hair and white arse dry before stepping into his Calvin Klein briefs. She's helped Pierre to lay the table. The caviar on the table costs more than her parents ever made in a decade of backbreaking manual labour.
The caviar is served up on custom-made mother-of-pearl spatulas, to avoid tainting its taste. She watches the people coming through the door. There's Emmanuel Alt and Franck Durand. There's Mert and Marcus. There's Filippa Hamilton and Pierre has his arm around her, they are laughing, Pierre in his element, with his little in-jokes and finespun compliments.
She hides an elegant wad of caviar under her tongue the way you would acid strips and she remembers the first time she got high, in that club in NYC when she was nineteen and didn't know a word of English, she couldn't stop singing patriotic Chinese songs in the clear alto she'd been trained in, she was so embarrassed even as her world was exploding into slow stars with comet tails and everything was moving imperceptibly yet inevitably, like a revolving restaurant.
They parted her hair and braided it down into two plaits and made her stand on a table, got her to strike a revolutionary pose. She looks out the window.
It is snowing out and she can see the Eiffel Tower.
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