I watched a singular episode of love island USA with my neighbors yesterday. That was cute, shoutout to the girls upstairs…<3 I like the concept of love island or something generally consumerist like Barbieheimer or White Lotus bringing the American public together to critique, laugh and react.
If politics infiltrated every sphere of media, I’d probably off myself.
That being said, I think this season is bad. I’m sure a lot other seasons are bad too. Everyone in the cast has Instagram face, but I suppose that goes for a lot of young adult media? Sometimes, if not generally, you have a good mix of natural hotties, campy filler girls, and IG baddies, but the prevalent Instagram filter facial structure on this season was hard to watch. It’s called Reality TV, I wanna see real people. We are at a point of no return where when real people are shown on the silver screen, it feels abnormal. It feels strange that they’re…not porcelain.
As much as I love facial enhancements, and have them myself, I do think there needs to be a societal shift in thinking about plastic surgery as an add-on, rather than the entire order being changed, if that makes sense. I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but it would be cool if people did come to that realization. It has gotten to a point where watching certain shows feel monotonous, not for the fact it’s not entertaining to watch, but for the fact that I don’t see expression on their faces. I see 3 syringes of Juvederm and 2 syringes of cheek filler and dissolved chin filler.
Here is a snippet of a zine I made when I was 20, during my internship at the Vincent Price Art Museum:) It felt relevant to put here.
They are just like me…
One zine that really resonated with me was the voice of yello kitty. Yello Kitty is a collection of writings, interviews and illustrations about the Asian American experience. Perhaps what I find most interesting is that basically, everything the writers talked about has not…changed. Orientalism and Asian-chic just have evolved into different forms. Blatant comments about why our eyes are so small or why we eat so much rice has involved into casual xenophobia and microaggressions.
Elisa Paik wrote a piece called “eye-dentity” crisis, recalling when she had started using double eyelid glue and getting blepharoplasty as a young adult. It’s the funniest thing that none of our unique-feeling experiences are unique because I had gone through the exact same thing.
I’ve always had uneven eyes, one double eyelid and one monolid. I started using Daiso eyelid tape in eighth grade. I didn’t like using the glue very much because it made my eyelids sticky and crusty. My application of the adhesive strip was not the best either, so there was always a little corner of plastic showing on my left eye. Surprisingly, it worked. Over time, a double eyelid had developed on my left eye and I was happy. I was happy to finally have the eyelids my mom wanted me to have. She always complained I got my dad’s genes of having smaller eyes. The one downside was that if I ever cried for too long and my eyes got swollen, I would have to use tape again to retrace the “memory” of the fold I made.
When I was 17, my mom decided that it was a good time for me to get eyelid surgery. To be fair, I wanted it too because I had the same issue as Elisa. Pulling on a very sensitive part of your skin is not…good. If I had kept up with the tape use, I’d imagine one of my eyes to be incredibly saggy and wrinkly when I’m older. We visited a doctor in Costa Mesa for a consultation right before my senior prom and I had my non-incisional double eyelid surgery in K-town days after I graduated high school. At the consultation, I remember the doctor asked me how big I wanted the crease. I really just wanted my eyelid to have the same crease and that it would come back after I would cry and my eyes were swollen shut. Months after my eyes had healed, my mom always talks about how she wishes I had gotten them done bigger. My mom had always been very supportive of cosmetic enhancement which felt like a very cool mom thing to do, but some part of me wondered what it would’ve felt like if she ~radically~ ~fully~ accepted me.
I had only shared this with my close friends because I am embarrassed. Most people can’t tell I’ve had surgery since my eyelids look pretty much the same. Getting cosmetic surgery is more common now, but I felt embarrassed to have fallen into the trope of monolid-asian-girl-gets-double-eyelid-surgery. I wanted to embrace my uneven eyelids and see myself as I am. Why could you not love me as I come? I felt guilty because I have always fronted or aspired to embrace and love my identity.
Elisa described this surgery as a “neo-colonial practice”. To expand on that, in an essay by Jiajia Zhang, they described blepharoplasty as “the most modern manifestation of imperialism: ‘body colonialism,’ which I define as an internalization of Eurocentric beauty standards that leads individuals to perform acts of ethnic erasure and, specifically, double eyelid surgery”.
I had believed in Western supremacy since I was a child. I didn’t want to go to a Chinese university because it wasn’t “world class”, I wanted to go to Stanford or Yale or Harvard or anything American. It is only that I am an adult that I am reflecting on my longing for whiteness as a byproduct of neocolonialism and eurocentrism. I have a lot to credit to Asian American writers and ethnic studies for finally making me realize why I have been subconsciously thinking these thoughts.
I still don’t know how I feel about it. I’m happy my eyelids won’t be all saggy and wrinkly at 26. I am happy that I can do my eyeliner evenly, but I think of my younger self who had treated creating a crease as a form of a ritual, a necessity. I think about being 13 wondering why monolids are so bad. Yello kitty was published in 1998 and I got my blepharoplasty in 2019. Two decades later, the surgery remains to be more popular than ever.
Seventh or eighth grade me
shari wei 