Korea

“Thank goodness you have ssang-ku-pool. Your parents saved a lot of money,” said a close family friend when I was five years old. Ssang-ku-pul is the line above the eyelid, which most every Caucasian has but is rare among Northeast Asians. According to Sandy Cobrin, only 25% of Koreans are born with the double eye-lid crease, and she describes eye-lid surgery as “stitching a permanent crease into the eye-lid.” After observing the Korean trends and Korean pop culture idols for many years from a Korean-American perspective, I think I have figured out the meaning of Korean beauty. It is a very complicated and profound one. Beauty means having big eyes, a pale complexion, a sharp and pointed nose, a taller height, and a small chin and mouth. Essentially, South Korean beauty meant looking as “white” or Caucasian as possible. I never quite understood how having lines above my eyelids saved my parents money until the summer of 1998 when I visited Korea. I knew that the lines above my eyes supposedly made them appear larger than other “Asian eyes,” but I did not see the financial connection until I saw my aunt in Korea whom I hadn’t seen for years. She just had eyelid surgery a year before, and I noticed how the lines above her eyes opened them up so that they appeared a bit rounder. She was beaming as she was telling me how she got a discount on the surgery, paying only $700 because she knew the surgeon. Then she was telling my sister, who wasn’t blessed with ssang-ku-pul like me, to get the surgery through the surgeon she knew. She was going on about how the majority of the female Korean population gets this eyelid surgery and how lucky she was to have connections. I felt fortunate; I had saved seven hundred dollars. But instead of yelling this aloud, I remained silent. For the first time in my life, I felt a bit ashamed of my race. The moment I stepped out into the city from my aunt’s apartment, I noticed cosmetic surgery clinics