Julie Chen Says She Wasn't Trying to Look Less Asian With Eye Surgery

I wasn’t surprised that there would be haters judging me for what I did. What was hurtful was that the hateful comments that I read where people were judging me were people within my own community. It was comments like, ‘Way to give in to the Western standards of beauty.’ ‘You’re denying your heritage. You’re trying to look less Asian.’ Guess what? I don’t look less Chinese! I’m not fooling anybody here. That’s number one.

Number two: half of us Asians are born with the double-eyelid. My mother was born with it. My father has one lid that was creased, one lid that didn’t get its crease until he hit his late teens. I have one sister born with the creases, one sister born without it, so it wasn’t denying my heritage.

It’s kind of like if someone gets a nose job and gets the bump taken out, and some people say that’s an ethnic bump. Are you denying whatever your heritage is? No.

Chen also dropped a fun anecdote about a woman WHO IS NOT ASIAN letting her know that she decided to get eye surgery just because her eyes are old and droopy, more proof that Chen’s plastic surgery was not about race. And over the weekend, Chen also addressed the issue to People:

The goal was to simply have bigger eyes so the camera didn’t make me look sleepy, bored, angry or disinterested in my interviews. The goal was to look, in my opinion, more alert and more interested on camera for my work/career.

Sharon Osbourne chimed in on Chen’s eye surgery, comparing it to her rhinoplasty. “I got rid of my Jew-bump on my nose and I still tell people I’m half a Jew. I just didn’t want it!” she said. “You are what you are. I love being what I am, I embrace being what I am, but did I want that nose? No!”

Chen obviously knows the racial implications of her choice, whether or not she consciously or subconsciously acknowledged them at the time: she set up her entire original “secret confession” with an anecdote about her former boss telling her she would never be an anchor because she was Chinese. If her surgery isn’t connected to that incident, why bring them up together?

And for those who still have questions about Chen’s potential other plastic surgeries, she’ll be talking about whether or not she’s had other work done on Tuesday’s episode. #ratings.