'Even as a child, I wanted to preserve what I had been given—not for monolids to be more beautiful than double lids, but to be considered equally so.'
A few months ago, I took an afternoon walk with my grandmother in Yongin, just south of Seoul, winding our way toward a stream called Tancheon. It was a warm mid-winter day, and we linked arms. I hadn’t seen her in several years since gradually phasing out my childhood visits to Korea after I had moved to New York from the Midwest, where I grew up. She didn’t look much older than I remembered, but she moved a bit slower, a bit stiffer at the knees.
In Seoul, where we would often travel to see my mother’s family, they were an oddity, too. My sister inherited our mother’s eyes, large and round with a natural “half-crease” or “hidden lid.” At dinners with distant relatives, she was praised for her shining straight black hair and those lovely eyes, fringed with long lashes. They would coo over her one moment, then pick over my peculiarities the next—my slightly wavy brown hair, my single lids.
The next day, my mother made an off-hand remark, echoing her mother’s words from the night before. I asked her what was wrong with the way I was. She never said a word about it to me again.