All the girls want to look like Farrah Fawcett. The only Asian woman you see speaking English on TV is the lady on the laundry commercial who declares, full of pride, “Ancient Chinese secret!” No one thinks of her as pretty, though she probably is. But Asian girls aren’t pretty, are they? With the slanty eyes and all?

Of course, origami isn’t Korean. But when my mom was in school, she and her friends spoke Japanese. They learned Japanese history. They even learned Japanese paper art. My mom never knew how to be a proud little Korean girl either.

They say it’ll hurt. Please. Someone cuts off some skin and sticks a needle in my eyelid a couple times? So what? Plenty of things hurt more.

What I didn’t know then was that, according to Japanese legend, if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your heart’s desire will come true. And if I knew, I’d have said: what’s folded can be unfolded. To change something, you have to cut.

Everyone tells me to be happy with who I am. That I’m beautiful on the inside, and isn’t that what’s important?

You know how sometimes you keep staring and starting at your face in the mirror, and you notice every pore and every bump and every freckle? Like standing really close to a pointillist painting. After a while, you can’t tell what’s beautiful, what’s ugly. You can’t tell what’s you. You’re no longer there.

My parents actually think doctors do free surgeries for their friends. They don’t know anything about this country.

When the surgeon pulls off the extra skin, if he keeps pulling, pulls hard enough on the eyelids, I wonder if he could turn someone all the way inside out. Upside down. And if he did, I wonder what he’d see.

Me, I hate origami. But then I never was much of an artist. In my first pictures—standard kindergartener scribblings of a family and a pointy-roofed house underneath an orange, spider-legged sun—I’d give myself blond hair and blue eyes.

“No, honey,” my teacher would say, interrupting me in the middle of drawing my hair, taking the yellow crayon out of my hand and using it to make an oval for my face. “You’re supposed to draw you.”

That same guy who wrote The Ugly Duckling, Hans Christian Andersen, wrote The Little Mermaid. The mermaid wanted to be like people—like regular people—and so she had a witch get rid of her tail, cut it into two legs. And with every step it was as if she were walking on knives, but it was worth it. She said, “Pride must suffer pain.”

My parents don’t ask: what is the matter with the way you look now? You don’t think you’re beautiful? Can’t blame them, I guess. Why should they be the first?

What I didn’t know then was that, according to Japanese legend, if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your heart’s desire will come true. And if I knew, I’d have said: what’s folded can be unfolded. To change something, you have to cut.

It’s easy to change something like your eyes, or your hair, or your legs, or your stomach, or anything about the way you look. But your heart’s desire, deep down, that won’t ever change.

In the end, I didn’t do it. Because it’s easy to change something like your eyes, or your hair, or your legs, or your stomach, or anything about the way you look. But your heart, your heart’s desire, deep down, that won’t ever change.