BY JULIETTE YU-MING LIZERAY
*Editor’s note: The following story won 1st prize in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here. Photo: Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray
On Seeing
“You need glasses for Asian faces.”
The shopkeeper said it without hesitation, just as I was about to point to the BluTack I’d stuck to my frames.
Asian faces.
An Asian face.
My face?
I’d been living in New York city for a couple of years and I had learnt through familiarizing myself with online shopping that there are consumer products for every single quirk and desire one could humanly imagine. I was never into online shopping before I came to the United States, but now that I was here, I considered it research into the ethos and inner workings of the country.
I had been increasingly frustrated with my prescription glasses from Moscot, a “treat” I had splurged on—those babies weren’t cheap—for my 40th birthday. They sat so wide and low on my small, narrow face. They dug into my cheeks when I smiled because they angled downwards at a diagonal. And they weighed as much as a small ripe plum.
Maybe. I’ve never balanced a small ripe plum on my face. I’m assuming.
I’d affixed the aforementioned Blu Tack on the nose pads to make them narrower and better able to grip onto my slender bridge. But according to my husband, who wouldn’t notice if my fly is open or if I develop a sudden bald patch, my hack “definitely sticks out a bit,” and there had to be “better options.”
I Googled nose pad stickers for glasses. I thought if there were umbrella hats and toilet bowl foot stools and decorative braces for teeth and portable pee bags and professional cuddlers, someone must have invented this.
And someone had. They are called adhesive eyeglass nose pads. They are anti-slip, made of silicone and sometimes look like butterflies. One ad said they were designed “for Asian faces” and another “for low-bridge faces”.
My mind was instantly filled with questions.
If there are glasses for the so-called “Asian face,” whose face are all the other glasses made for? That was #1.
Number two, why had I not heard about the fact that bridge height was a key factor in determining the fit of glasses, even though I was born and raised in Singapore, which imports many non-Asian eyewear brands and presumably sells them to people with “Asian faces,” and where I (and my mother) have sourced all my preceding pairs of spectacles since the tender age of 6?
Finally (#3), did I have an “Asian face”?
The third question was something I’ve always been unsure about. Before I get into a description of my face, I should say I do not believe there is a singular bone structure possessed by all who originate from the largest and most populous continent in the whole world. Even as metonymic short cuts used by advertisers to mean “a face featuring a low nose bridge,” the terms “Asian face”, or “Asian fit” exude whiffs of 19th century biological determinism and exclude Asians who do not have low nose bridges and do not need to invest in butterfly shaped silicone pads. More accurate phrases might be “for certain Asian faces” or “Asian fit, sometimes,” though I admit these are less catchy.
Back to my face. If you look at it from the side, you may think that I have a high bridge, but things are often not what they seem. You might have guessed from my name I am mixed-race Chinese, or biracial Chinese-White, or, in Tik Tok verbiage, #wasian.
In my own analysis, I have my dad’s bridge but my mom’s bone structure. My nose bridge is high and low at the same time. It is French from Brive-La-Gaillarde and Malaysian from Taiping, Perak. It is the product of long lineages of plow-wheel makers and locksmiths and traders and people who for reasons half-clear and half-elusive, packed up everything they knew and loved, and sailed across the vast and indifferent sea to build new lives from scratch in a place where no one knew their name.
Part of the excitement of being mixed race and phenotypically ambiguous is being auto-enrolled as the subject of the guessing game Where Are You From? The guesses vary depending on many factors emanating from myself, such as my age, how I dress, how I talk, how long my hair is and how much time I’ve been spending in the sun without sunscreen. It also depends on external factors such as my geographical location, who I am with, people’s awareness of world demographics and current immigration patterns and policies. I’m not going to list the countries people have identified me with. You will have to believe me when I tell you it covers almost all the continents, several countries in Central and South America, one in the Middle East and a specific caste in Nepal. Even in Singapore, the closest I have to a homeland, I am asked where I am from.
In the cosmic litmus test of belonging, I often feel like a permanent outsider, and over the years, I have come to accept my interstitial fate.
Discovering eyewear options I never knew existed stirred up questions about my own invisibilized identity. I had spent my whole short-sighted adult life donning ill-fitting blinkers. They say hindsight is 50/50, mine is -5/-5.5 with a dash of astigmatism. Was I supposed to wear “Asian fit” glasses all this while?
Defying the frigid winter weather, I made my way from Queens to Manhattan’s Chinatown. I headed to Chinatown Optical, a family-owned business that has been serving the Chinese immigrant community since 1979. Two pairs of giant black frames adorned its Mott Street storefront, staring, slanted, into an I ❤️ NY Gift Shop and the New Golden Fung Wong Bakery known for its winter melon cakes. I had walked by many times, but never gone in.
I was relieved to enter the warmth of the brightly lit store. Shelves full of glasses stretched down the long and narrow space. Hundreds more were folded demurely inside glass display cases. I eyed their nose pads trying to discern the snouts they were intended for.
That was when the young Asian woman offered me advice from behind the counter. Technically, she said I needed glasses for Asian faces. But it sounded close enough to “you have an Asian face,” which felt like being admitted into an imagined community club. She might have used the term as a stand-in for low-bridge glasses and said this to anyone. I choose to believe she deduced I have (a certain) Asian heritage and felt compelled to initiate me into the liberating joys of using a specialized subset of glasses, while the rest of humanity shops in oblivion.
I’ve never felt claimed by any group, racial or national. By then, I had become accustomed to lurking in the peripheries of the communities I identify with. A kind of funambulist of fault lines. But here was someone who instantly recognized an aspect of my identity with no further explanation besides my own face. I got a glimpse of what it feels like to be claimed, to be told “you are one of us.” It took me by surprise.
I walked out the store that day with a brand-new pair of glasses.
They align with my pupils.
They do not rest on my cheeks.
They fit.
I will always remember this wintry day in Manhattan’s Chinatown, for the unexpected buoyancy I felt thanks to one stranger’s words. A buoyancy that revealed something buried deep in me—a yearning to be seen. I know I shouldn’t need anyone else to validate and authenticate my identity. I shouldn’t worry about how others view me. The boundaries we erect between ourselves will always baffle me. But when you spend most of your life feeling like you don’t quite fit, it’s nice to hear that sometimes you do.
Just like the new glasses that sit comfortable on my face.
About the author
Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray is a writer and comic artist. She won Singapore’s 2023 Golden Point Award and co-authored two books on the arts in Singapore—Semionauts of Tradition and Reimagining Singapore. She created the art x advocacy project SNAKES OF SINGAPORE. Communion, her comic zine about ADHD, was shortlisted for the 2024 Graphic Medicine Award and is sold in over 10 cities worldwide. She is working on a graphic memoir about identity, diaspora and inheritance. Instagram: @julietteyml