I often forget I am an Asian-American woman. Does it affect how people perceive my abilities? I’m starting to wonder.
For the most part, I go about my days without a second thought to differences in gender, ethnicity, age, or other factors. Everyone I work with is a different personality type in my mind, but I don’t consciously associate that with any other qualities. And likewise, I don’t think they treat me any specific way because I’m female or Asian. But then I read books about the Asian-American experience (particularly Asian-American women) and it gets me thinking if the way I’m treated is not just about my personality and behavior, but also largely affected by my appearance.
Just a happy-go-lucky gal who loves the simple things.
I’m working to set myself up for success again and focus on attainable goals. It’s all too easy to be harsh on myself and judge everything I do as not good enough.
I naturally do not have double eyelids, merely single ones, but as a child, if I rubbed my eyes a lot, sometimes I could get a temporary crease. When I went back to China after high school, I took some glamor shots at a studio, where they taped little clear crescents onto my eyelids to simulate the look. It was fascinating to me that they would do that and I’ve always wondered if it really does look better. It certainly gives my eyes a little more dimension and now eyeliner applied along the top layer of lashes wouldn’t get buried in the depths of my eye when I opened them. It makes for more “Western” eyes, which, perhaps, is the point? It feels weird though, to have this crease in my eye, with skin folding up around it and sometimes I wonder if it’s one of those things like a displaced joint that needs a little boost to get back into place. There’s certainly a kind of pressure there and opening my eyes larger makes that feeling even more pronounced.
Sometime while I was in Singapore (and I didn’t notice at all), I somehow developed a double eyelid. That’s right, just one. So now my eyes are uneven (much like everything else in my body) and I wonder if one eye looks bigger because of this incongruency. It’s kind of cool and it has been pretty permanent, but I wonder how long this will last. Will the other eye change too? Will this one go back? Or am I stuck with one single eyelid and one double eyelid? Since I have no idea how I got the first one to begin with, I have no idea how to make my other eyelid like that, or undo this one. I guess it’s fun though, to observe the differences side by side and feel the differences when I open my eyes.
