1
A Little Bit of Each
It was my first party at some upperclassman’s house. Music was blasting, drinks were scattered across the room, and people cheered as they beat their opponents in pong. My friend had invited me to this party filled with random older kids and I was determined to enjoy the first night out in four months. As the night progressed, my fellow peers digressed into their drunken states. Playful banter rang in the room. I forgot what I had said to the guy when he came close enough for me to smell the alcohol on his breath.
He whispered gleefully, “You don’t think I see that on your eyes?”
I stopped dead in my track, my cheeks no longer flushed because of the alcohol running through my veins. I pushed him away and laughed him off hoping no one had seen the change in my disposition.
Looking into a mirror, my mother’s figure is reflected back. Her oval face shape, her full lips, my dad’s button nose and caterpillar-like eyebrows lay sprawled across the looking glass. My eyes are split between them both. One of my mother’s almond-shaped, double-lidded eyes and one of my father’s slanted mono-lid eyes. A blend of two very distinct Korean traits.
For 8 years, I lived in absolute ignorance of the abnormality of my eyes. I think I was too busy running around and wreaking havoc wherever I went to listen to what people might’ve whispered behind my back. I use to boast to my friends that I had one of my mother’s eyes and one of my father’s eyes, that I was lucky enough to be a true amalgamation of them. It wasn’t until I had transferred into my fourth grade class when I was taught to be ashamed of what I use to be most confident about.
“Hey did you notice your eyes are uneven?” Kate asked her hazelnut, round eyes staring at me with curiosity. Her friend immediately hushed her comment, and I felt the sensation of shame prickling its way across my face. While her question was not supposed to be malignant, it was the first time I noticed that the blatant difference between the symmetry of her face and mine was deemed odd. That’s around the time I stopped telling people how lucky I was.
As fourth and fifth grade passed, Kate slowly faded from my memory but her comment did not. In 6th grade I got bangs in hopes that they would draw attention away from my eyes. This failed because my good friend Andy in Biology class asked me if I had noticed the unevenness in my eyes.I laughed unsure how to reply. I had thought that because we were both Asian it wouldn’t be commented on, that maybe one of his sisters or his mother bore the same eyes as I did. I was wrong to think that I would be exempted of this shame in even my own culture.
By the time I was in 8th grade, I was fully aware (believe it or not!) of the peculiarity of the unevenness of my eyes. My aunts and grandmothers would comment how closely I looked of my mother. This was when my mother would say,
“She’s almost there, we just need to make a small slice here.”
And she would point at my right eye, tracing where the scalpel would slide. They would titter in agreement saying that girls younger than me got it in Korea and it wasn’t a big deal to get the surgery.
I don’t blame her or them for thinking this is normal.She wasn’t trying to humiliate me; in fact, she was well aware of the shame associated with having these “flaws”. My mother grew up as a heavy set teenager. She was taught that beauty was pale skin, oval-shaped faces, thin figure and double-lidded round eyes. Despite having pale skin, an oval-shaped face and double lidded round eyes, she was too heavy. For years her peers would make fun of her and her family would tell her she needed to lose weight. I think one key difference between western and Korean culture is that it’s not just your peers that make comments on how you look, it’s the adults as well. Not just your mother or aunt either, it’s their friends and peers too. It’s not viewed as a form of bullying, it’s simply advice on how to improve how you look.Even now at the middle of my mother’s life after shedding all the weight and being very fit, she watches everything she eats closely and constantly asks me if she gained weight.Her solution to protect me from criticism was to help me fit into this set facsimile our culture had laid out.Throughout eighth grade and high school, my mother would ask me if I ever wanted to get double eye-lid surgery. She would tell me girls at her church were working their butts off at school so that their parents would allow them to get the surgery. She would insist it was a small procedure, just a tiny slice. I don’t think that she knewthat that slice would cut even deeper than she realized.
Time after time, I would firmly refuse my mother’s offer. I felt that if I had gotten the surgery I would be adhering to the beauty laws my culture had laid out and a small part of me still wanted to fight against the idea that I was an anomaly. But comment after comment by multiple people, I began to believe I should somehow fix my eyes. I didn’t want to be the girl in class with the “really” uneven eyes. I didn’t want to be singled out in my family for not having two double-lidded round eyes. I wanted to have both of my mother’s eyes, but that would mean I’d have to erase the one my father gave me. So I found my own temporary solution without completely getting rid of my right mono-lid eye.
By freshman year, I was regularly wearing double eye-lid tape to give me the appearance of having double eye-lids on both of my eyes. It was my secretive way of following the beauty rules but not letting others see my small proclamation that they were right. At first, I thought I was invincible and no one would notice my little secret. But every once in a while, my friends would point it out asking what the metallic latticed shape reflecting from my eyes were. I would quickly mutter that it was just eyeliner and turn away. The added shame of trying to cover up my deformity weighed heavily on my shoulders. This is when maintaining eye contact became really hard.
For four years I believed that I could only look “pretty” when I wore my double eye-lid tape.“Pretty” became a tape that forced my eyes to fold into a double-lid, something literally plastic and unnatural to my body. It irked me that I wore them because they felt like police caution tapes that screamed “Caution, Caution: She’s a fake.” But without them, I felt incomplete.
It wasn’t until my senior year when my boyfriend of one year finally discovered what was on my eyes. It was after a long day and I peeled them off so my eyes would stop watering.
“So that’s what those are. I could never place my finger on what they were.” He said in awe.
“Yeah, I don’t really care that you know now.” I said relaxing in the chair.
“Yeah…well…don’t wear them anymore.”
“No I’m going to wear them still!” I said hitting his arm.
“No I like you better without them.” I kept insisting no, but for the first time in a while I felt a bit of the familiar pride that I had felt11 years ago.
I don’t want to say he saved the day and I no longer wear them. I still do. I still struggle with not fitting in with a culture that places an intense emphasis on very specific ideals.But ever since I came to college, more and more of my friends have told me I don’t need to wear them. I am starting to see that the people around me are no longer the ones that are pushing these ideals onto me and that I have become my own oppressor. I am still in the process of overcoming this insecurity and relearning how to accept the way I look naturally. Quite honestly, I don’t know when that’ll happen. But I do know that I’m glad I never permanently surgically changed my eyes and that I am gradually becoming more comfortable without the tape. When I see girls who talk about getting surgery or wearing the double eyelid tape I wish I could tell them that they don’t need to. I understand it’d be hypocritical but if I could just tell them the small steps we take togethertowards realizing we don’t need to conform to this beauty standard willmaybe help change it. I wish I could tell my mother she doesn’t need to look into the mirror and examine every angle of her face for imperfections. She doesn’t need to pull at wrinkles and lament how shewishes she could fix this and that. I wish I could tell her no plastic surgery could ever come even close to replicating every wrinkle, every mark on her face, everything that embodies the woman I love. I wish I could tell her she’s beautiful and her to believe that fact. I wish I could tell the girls and women that look into the same mirror that I did that they were created perfectly and purposely with love. But it’s hard to completely change a mentality that has been repeatedly put in people’s faces for years.I am excited to one day be free of my double eyelid tapes. Excited to reach a day when I can confidently tell people when they ask, I have one eye from my mother and one eye from my father.