Julie Chen recently spoke on The View that her Dayton Ohio newsroom boss told her that she would never get to be an anchor because her single-lidded eyes made her look disinterested on camera and too Asian for the market. A top talent agent also refused to sign her without the blepharoplasty surgery but promised that she would go to the top if she had it done. In the end, after much soul searching, she decided to go in for surgery, and her career took off.

A lot has been written on the cultural and racial politics churning under Chen’s story. Was her boss racist or just being honest about the cruel realities of broadcast journalism? Should Chen have “given into the Man” (as she only half jokingly says during the segment) or walked out on her dream career? Did she sell out her Chinese culture the way that some of her relatives suggested, or did she take her career into her own hands?

I won’t hazard an opinion here on what Chen should and shouldn’t have done. Instead, I’ll share my own relationship with the double eyelid beauty standard, one that I had internalized for a long time. I’m no longer under that spell, but for over two decades I was convinced that Caucasian-looking eyes were normatively better.

Why did I feel this way?

For one, my mom started talking about me getting the surgery around the time I was 14. I had one double lidded eye and one single lidded eye. This looked odd because it made me very asymmetric (and we probably all will agree that symmetry is beautiful regardless of race), and it really did make putting on makeup hard. She would also talk about lifting the outer corners of my eyes to make me look prettier and more alert. My dad was super opposed (then again he was also opposed to braces and thank god mom fought for that!). I never went through with the surgery because I’ve seen crap surgery jobs that make it look painfully obvious that you’ve fiddled with your eyes. I was scared that would happen and also terrified of the idea of going under the knife for something that had nothing to do with health.

Second, my mom also has naturally double-lidded eyes—the type of eyes that are big and bright. As a result, I simply grew up not thinking that Asian eyes were single lidded. They aren’t. My mom and many other Asian men and women are a testament to that. In fact, the implicit assumption that Asians have small single lidded eyes is in and of itself actually quite the stereotype.

Over the years I made a big fuss about my lack of double eyelids. I used to point it out to friends a lot. My Asian friends would get it right away: “Oh! Yeah, that eye is a single,” they would say. “Have you thought of getting surgery if you don’t like it?” White friends, especially men, were clueless.

I had to draw diagrams on napkins and show them images on Google, and I’m still not convinced they got it.

They just eventually nodded to shut me up. This only goes to show that Asians care about this a lot more than others do. Unless of course, you happen to be Julie Chen’s former boss.

I found that sometimes if I swam a lot or rubbed my single lidded eye a lot, it would briefly turn double lidded. I would try not to blink to preserve that elusive fold, but it always went away within minutes much to my disappointment. Eventually I stopped caring so much. I learned how to put on makeup in a flattering way despite the asymmetry. I embraced how I looked, putting the question of surgery aside forever.

Then, in 2010 I went with some friends to Montreal for a Halloween weekend. I must have been up for 20 hours; we had a silent dance party in our hotel rooms after the clubs closed. (I’m pretty sure a couple people fell asleep on the carpet.) The next day I woke up, and my albatross of an eye had turned double-lidded.

I was so excited I kept showing my friend and talking about my eyelid. My friend, a very patient woman, has luxuriously lidded eyes herself. She patted me on the back and went back to flat ironing her hair. In a miracle of miracles, my single-lidded eye of yore has remained double lidded since that fateful silent-dance-party night. Granted, they are small little folds but dammit they’re there.

And that is the story of my Halloween miracle eyelid.

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By River
Image from Fanpop