Big or small eyes, both can be beautiful

Three Squirrels, one of China's leading online snacks retailer, is drawing fire at home for using a female model with slanted eyes in an ad posted over two years ago, which is seen by some as being racist, and pandering to old stereotypes about Chinese in the West.

Some netizens have posted on social media saying that it is not uncommon for Western brands to use such stereotyping in their advertisements, but they feel particularly disrespected and offended as the ad was for a domestic company.

They say that they are tired of brands always portraying Chinese as always having small and slanting eyes, as not all Chinese people have narrow eyes nor do they all love them.

Shattering Chinese even Asian stereotypes is undoubtedly a good thing. Especially as some foreign brands' stereotyping of Chinese women in their ads is based on outdated and racist colonial notions of exoticism.

But there is no need to regard all Chinese faces featured with small eyes with single eyelids as an insult to China. Given cyberbullying against her, the model for the Three Squirrels snack ad, pushed back on Monday, saying her eyes are maybe even a bit smaller than they looked in the poster.

There are many traditional figures with small eyes in murals and sculptures. Their beauty is never in doubt. And in modern times, some stars like Huang Xuan and Zhou Dongyu, are widely regarded as good-looking, despite their narrow eyes. Lucy Liu is a famous Chinese American actress. She impresses audience with not only her looks, but also her arduous efforts to succeed in Hollywood without changing her looks.

It's unfair to say or imply that people with small eyes and single eyelids are ugly. If we hate the Western brands presenting all Chinese having look-alike faces with small slanted eyes, we are doing the same thing if we reject all images of Chinese with such eyes. It's another kind of discrimination.

Laoze, the ancient Chinese philosopher, once said the concept of beauty came into being because people could only tell beauty from ugliness. And we look at people with our imaginations as much as our eyes. Viewing people through the lens of what we consider beautiful, however the ideal of beauty may have been formed.

Big or small eyes are not the criteria for beauty. It's ridiculous. Beauty can't be defined in absolute terms. Everyone can have their own aesthetic taste, and it should be free from vicious slander when it goes against the mainstream, unless it is indeed presented with the intention to deliberately discriminate.

While we are eager to break the stereotype of the beauties in Western eyes, we should not impose a simple criteria of beauty of our own.

The author is a writer with China Daily.