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But whereas Kwan slims faces by breaking and shaving bones, Lee will shoot 20 units of Botox straight into a patient’s masseter jaw muscles to wither them temporarily: “I hate to use the word side effect, but if you use a higher dose of Botox, not only do you paralyze the muscle, but you can shrink the muscle,” Lee explains, pointing to before-and-after pictures of a square-jawed woman whose lower face he narrowed. “It makes biting and chewing a little weaker. I tell people, ‘If you want a good result, don’t chew gum.’ ” The less you chew, the smaller your jaw. The same tactic can be used to slim the muscles in a woman’s legs, using “several times” the paralyzing agents necessary to slim a jaw. Kwan has experimented with permanent musclereduction techniques pioneered overseas, where there is less governmental oversight. “You actually cut the nerve to the muscle,” he explains, displaying his leg and pointing to a spot below the inside of his knee. “There are some risks to it. There’s a scar associated with it. And you could really cripple someone.” When blepharoplasty goes wrong, the result is usually correctable—a crease that becomes uncreased, or droops a millimeter or two over time. When it goes really wrong, though, a patient may be permanently unable to close his eyes. “Technically it’s not that they can’t close their eyes, it’s just that there’s still a little gap when they do it,” Lee explains. He performs a Google image search for blepharoplasty complications (never do this) and pulls up photos of a man trying and failing to fully blink. To reduce costs and keep patients out of the surgery room, Lee often defaults to injectable solutions. He raises the bridge of the nose with fillers like Juvéderm, the squishy substance commonly used for plumping lips and filling wrinkles. He has also shot fillers into the earlobes of superstitious Chinese patients; large lobes signify luck. “Everybody wants something simple, easy, fast, cheap,” he says. But some accept the price of blepharoplasty as the cost of doing business in America. “One example was a bus driver,” Lee recalls of a recent patient in his 30s. “He had droopy eyes. His supervisor jumped in: ‘Are you sleeping on the job? Why is it every time I see you, you’re sleeping on the job?’ the lashline that many Asians lack. “You’ve got nice big eyes,” he admits, but eyelids more like my father’s would make them look bigger. To some, Kwan’s assessment may seem offensive—an attempt to remove my mother’s race from my face as though it were a pimple. But to others, it will seem as banal as a dietitian advising them to eat more leafy greens—advice having nothing to do with hiding one’s race or mimicking another. Asian blepharoplasty belongs to a range of niche cosmetic procedures known colloquially as ethnic plastic surgery, the popularity of which has spiked in recent years—and is prone to heated arguments, major misunderstandings, alternating whiplashes of sympathy and disgust, and some intensely uncomfortable reckonings. (Including, perhaps, the ones in this article.) The issues at stake are loaded: ethnic identity, standards of beauty, the politics of diversity, what constitutes race, and whether exercises of vanity can reshape it. From 2005 to 2013, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that the number of cosmetic procedures performed on Asian-Americans increased by 125 percent, Hispanics by 85 percent, and African-Americans by 56 percent. (Procedures on Caucasians increased just 35 percent.) This is, in part, simply a mark of rising purchasing power: Plastic surgery is nothing if not a sign that one has money to burn and status anxiety to spare. And doctors comfortable advertising their expertise in ethnic plastic surgery are growing wealthy creasing Asian eyelids, pushing sloped foreheads forward, and pulling prominent mouths back. These are procedures outsiders generally view as deracinating processes, sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks, and Latinos while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews. Some are refinements of formerly rare procedures like the ones that deformed a generation of Jackson-family noses, while others arrived Stateside from the bonebreaking, muscle-shrinking, multi-procedure extremes of Korean and Japanese plastic surgery. And, in fact, many procedures under the “ethnic” umbrella have no Caucasian model at all, as the Asian women asking surgeons to reduce their cheekbones can attest. And yet this new wave of such plastic surgeries has produced something of a principled outcry from people of all races and ethnicities. “Did I give in to the Man?” The Talk host and broadcastnews veteran Julie Chen asked last year, displaying photos from before and after the doubleeyelid surgery she got after weathering workplace racism in the ’90s. So many people replied “yes” that Chen took time to defend her choice the following week. Reports about Asians overseas getting surgery to resemble “pretty Western celebrities” have a tendency to go viral in Western outlets ranging from The Daily Mail to BuzzFeed to “This American Life.” None of this should be too surprising: White standards still anchor our beauty culture, in part because white people still anchor our privileged classes. Procedures to “white-ify” minorities are not altogether new, nor have their politics been resolved: Just this April, the U.S. Army banned many natural African-American hairstyles for women (an outcry produced only a promise of review). But walk down the street in New York, Miami, Chicago, or L.A.—or Macon, or Clovis, or Dearborn, or Kailua—and you’ll see people exhibiting a vast array of personal and cultural aesthetics, some overlapping, others starkly polarized. A tour of the cosmetic-medicine clinics shaping those bodies and faces paints a more complicated portrait of beauty, too—one that includes “white” ideals like thin noses and arched eyes, yes, but also alternative archetypes like childlike chins and exaggerated butts. The patients display an equally wide array of motivations. As they traffic in all these modified body parts, even the most esteemed surgeons in the field can come across as almost blasphemously politically incorrect in casual conversation. (I had never thought Mongoloid was anything other than an insult until a black surgeon used it to praise a mouth, and even the term “ethnic plastic surgery” confuses most accepted distinctions between ethnicity, which is tied to culture and language, and race, which includes physical appearance.) These exchanges can be jarringly retro but also oddly refreshing—discussions of race with strangely post-racial specialists who choose to see beauty as something that can be built, à la carte, with features harvested from peoples all over the world. It feels like science fiction—but utopian or dystopian, I can’t decide. Because, as we all know, race is hugely more complicated than a handful of traits on a face. And many of these new procedures come with horror-show backstories, stretching from the ugly days of phrenology and eugenics to contemporary cultural flash points like hair-straightening and skin-lightening. Practitioners have long defended those treatments, too, as personal beauty choices and not deracination. But the stakes for ethnic plastic surgery are higher than those for a hairdo—most are alterations to the identity-giving part of the body, the face, and often permanent. Still, even as phrases like nice Caucasian features sneak into their language, the practitioners and recipients insist that ethnic plastic surgery isn’t about looking white. To them, this new expanse of procedures is not a
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