Mysteries of the Ting Sun dynasty

P&G is a place where there's something new to learn every day. That's especially true for me, having gone through college with zero business units, and having spent six years in a company that didn't do much thinking. In just over a year in P&G, I've learned what an "index" is and how to compute for it, how to do correlations (imagine my MBA boss's dismay when he learned he'd hired someone who didn't know what a correlation was), and all the little acronyms and processes that make up this company's self-contained subculture.

A few weeks ago I learned a new kind of thing.

Nats Lim, fresh from her maternity leave, came to our floor with a photo album of her two-month-old twin girls. A bunch of girls flocked to her (as girls do), me along with them (as girls do), to "ooh" and "aah" at the photos. The twins were adorable.

My co-flockers happened to be Chinese (not surprising, since P&G is a virtual Chinatown). One of them asked, "May ting sun ba siya?"

"May what?" I asked.

"Ting sun," replied Tin Tang.

"Is that a Chinese word?"

"Yes."

"What does it mean?"

"Double eyelid."

I had first heard of double eyelids some months back in a Dove TV commercial. (Apologies to P&G, but I love those classy Dove ads.) The commercial shows a succession of girls in their early teens, each with superimposed text: "Wishes she were thin", "Wishes she were tall", and so on, leading up to the Dove self-esteem fund, a part of Dove's campaign for real beauty. I had seen the Caucasian version of that ad, but what struck me about this ad was one Chinese girl with a statement I'd never heard before: "Wishes she had double eyelids."

What was a double eyelid? I had read before that some marine creatures (frogs, I think) have a second eyelid, a translucent film over their eyes, to protect their eyes while in the water even when their eyes were open. But I guess it had to be something different.

"What's a double eyelid?" I asked Tin Tang.

"It's the fold on top of the eye."

Leave it to a P&Ger to demonstrate ting sun through a side-by-side.
(Tin Tang's photo used with permission.)

Aah. So that's what it was. I looked from the photos of the twins, to their mother Miss Lim, to my Chinese co-flockers (Miss Choa, Miss Sze, Miss Tang, and Miss Lao). Hardly any folds on them, if at all.

"So what's the big deal with the ting sun? Is it a lucky Chinese thing?"

It was an honest question, but they rolled their eyes at me.

"Not having a ting sun makes your eyes look smaller," Tin Tang explained. "It makes you look like your eyes are closed all the time, especially when you smile."

"Is it a big deal?" I was genuinely curious.

"Yes!" they all said together.

Miss Sze shared that relatives of hers -- boys out of high school, at that -- had undergone surgery just to give themselves ting sun.

"Do I have ting sun?" I really wasn't sure.

"Yes you do!" whined Tin Tang, "ang laki nga ng sa 'yo e, nakakainggit."

Having an enviable physical trait was new to me. Receding hairline, wide forehead, dark circles around the eyes, big nose, crooked smile, improminent chin, weak jaw, a tummy that won't go away -- but at least I have big ting sun. Haha. I took a self-photo with my camera phone just to see for myself. Yup, they were big all right.

I pressed on. "But isn't it nice? Doesn't it make your face look cleaner?" I meant it. I hadn't meant to come across as patronizing.

"Nooo!" Tin Tang was really whining now (nothing new, nothing to worry about). "I want ting sun!"

"I think you look fine," I said matter-of-factly. And that was that.

Going back to my desk, my thoughts drifted back to high school, when my male classmates would pine for chinita girls, whose eyes for some reason were so appealing to them ("Pare, chinita!"). I recalled how I'd heard, over and over, people wishing they had Chinese blood, if only to have fair complexions and skin that would never age. I thought of literary classics we had read in high school, where people of the far east were constantly described as exotic, and delicate as porcelain, with mysterious almond-shaped eyes.

Who'd ever thought that these China dolls wanted something the rest of the world had? God is fair -- you can't have it all.