Fat, Part 1

With my grandma and my mom, probably about the time I was in 7th grade

[Disclaimer: I'm writing this series to organize some thoughts. There may or may not be insights hiding in here, but if you're interested in the topic, read on.]

"Waaaah, you getting so fat, ah! You never get boyfrien' like dat, lah!" That remark from [the ironically-named] Christian Lee on the badminton court behind our church fell into my world like a proverbial bomb, setting off the conscious phase of a personal war that will probably never be over.

Back in the early 1970s when I was ten or eleven years old, I started becoming aware that I was fat. I don't remember anyone specifically informing me that I was overweight, but in several ways my perception that I had a weight problem took shape and grew. No one person could have designed this collection of thoughts to be quite so insidious and pervasive as it turned out to be. It almost seems like a perfectly evil, orchestrated campaign brought about this sense of unattractiveness, inability to meet an acceptable standard, helplessness and distrust of myself. I will likely struggle with these challenges in my head, barring a miracle, until my dying day.

Let me describe what went into the mix.

Mama, age 14 (around 1940-1941)

First, I suppose, there was my mom's own struggle. She had been a roly-poly child with thick ankles who never saw herself as pretty, although I see in pictures that she was and still is beautiful. Others agree with me, but she never believes it. Not even close. She has fought an ongoing battle with her weight all her life, and at five-foot-four, it has not been an easy one to win. During the year that led up to her wedding, she once told me, she had lost a lot of weight so that she would look slim on her wedding day.

And she did. The pictures show her to have been a little pint of a thing, looking gorgeously "hourglass" in her wedding dress as she stands slightly in front of her handsome Dutchman. But it didn't last. The fight with weight was always on for her.

My parents in 1961

Then there was the issue of my own genes. Being a Caucasian in an Asian world, I literally stood out from the crowd. I was always taller and larger than my local friends. My clothes were always made by a dressmaker, because buying fabric and drawing the designs for the dressmaker was an artistic release and relaxation for my mom. But about the time I became interested in shopping on my own terms, I realized that I not only was a living mannequin for my mom's hobby, I had to have my clothes custom made because I couldn't fit any ready-made clothing in the shops. And not only did I wear dressmaker-sewn clothes--including swimsuits--but my feet grew to a size six, then seven, then eight, and I had to have my shoes made as well. Fortunately there was a good shoemaker in our city. But all of this set me apart, and left me feeling just plain big.

Asians love western-style weddings and often included the missionary kids in those occasions at our church, but I never got to be the flower girl. Ever. I was just too tall, too big. My petite little friend Julia always got to carry the basket and drop the petals, and to pose prettily in the pictures with the wedding party. After Julia moved away it was some other little girl. I topped out at a height of 5'9" in the eighth grade. Even before I reached my full height, I could watch parades go by just by standing in the back and looking over the heads of grown Asian adults. In choir photos at church I stood in the back row. In singing groups I stood in the middle so that people could stair-step down from me. My 8th grade teacher, a sweet Chinese woman just out of teacher training, was half as big as me. That's just how it was.

Second from the left, in 8th grade at 5'9". My brother passed me up in height that year.
That's our teacher standing in front of us.

And so the realization expanded that I was big. And heavy. And fat. I can painfully see how this affected me, looking back at a cartoon I drew of myself in the eighth grade. My schoolmates are drawn as stick figures, and me... I drew myself as a hippo.

The reminders were always there at home, as well. My dad is a natural critic, and I remember him saying to me when he noticed me biting my fingernails, "What's the matter? You still hungry?" Looking back on that, I realize my dad meant it to be about my nail-biting (I really believe this, because I can't remember him ever once saying anything about my mom's weight). But I heard the second question loud and clear.

And then there was that one memorable phrase of a song by Carole King. Let me set the scenario:

At the back of our house was a servant's quarters, a small long room with a "squat pot bathroom" behind the door at the far end. After our servant Cecilia died of stomach cancer my dad turned her room into a spare room where the TV was kept, along with a bunk bed. My dad renamed it The Doghouse. We kids, including any neighbor kids or friends from our church youth group, would pile into that little Doghouse sitting several on a bunk, and watch TV (which wasn't much because there were only about two hours of English programming in a day in Malaysia). We watched "Wonderful World of Disney" and "The Waltons" if we were choosing well, and "Scooby-Doo" or "Thriller" if we weren't.

I remember one afternoon when I jumped off the top bunk to the floor with a thump. My "Chinese brother" Sam busted out, singing, "I feel the earth...move...under my feet...." I felt embarrassment hit me like a physical punch in the stomach, and could almost imagine the crack in the cement floor where I had landed. I slunk out of the Doghouse and back to the main part of our house to do something else.

Char Kway Teow (photo from the web). One of my favorite dishes, growing up.

Then there's just that wonderful taste of delicious food. Good food and fusion cuisine is extremely important where I grew up on Penang island. International foodie magazines now cite my home island as a foodie heaven. Don't I know it? The food I grew up eating was varied and wonderfully tasty. I could eat a couple of bowls of Lucky Charms for breakfast and then chow down on a whole delicious plate of  piled-up fried rice or char kway teow (wide rice noodles with soy sauce, bits of scrambled egg and veggies) over a lunch break from school. After watching badminton in the evening I could pop over to the night market and get some of those sweet rice treats that were for sale at the food stalls, such as the sweet glutinous rice topped with a coconut and brown sugar topping and wrapped in pandan leaves.

And then there are those blatant comments. Asians are remarkably frank about size. They will tell you when you've gotten fatter (as if you couldn't read your scales or see yourself in the mirror), and when you've lost weight. At least, that's how it was in Malaysia. They still do it to me to this day, right here in California when we get together for Malaysian potlucks. My American self hates the comments ("You looking more fat now, ah"; "You lose weight or somet'ing?"), and my Asian self says, "Ah well; this is just how Malaysians are."

Case in point: As I have been drafting this post, I spotted a comment from one of my childhood friends posted on a picture I took of her brother last May.  "Wah, Johnny. Did you put on weight since last year? I saw you just last year."  On Facebook. In front of everyone. See what I mean?

That upper right-hand package is unfortunately familiar

And then there were the pills, around the time I was twelve. My mom started taking them as a desperate measure to get her own weight down. With both parents being medical doctors, I had no sense of prohibition about pill-taking. Pills are a tool for helping when you need something fixed in your body, right? I don't recall if my mom noticed I was getting pudgy, or if I complained to her about it. But I remember standing by the sliding door in her bathroom, and her handing me some of her pills, and saying that I could try them and see if that would help me manage my appetite and eat less. So I did take them, for a while.

One might be horrified at my mom's actions particularly in light of her role as a doctor, but please remember that this was the early 70s, she and I were both concerned about my weight, and she didn't want me to have to fight that same unending battle she had fought all her life. Things were different in those days about quiet shame and body image, different about the regulations on medications, and different in all kinds of other ways. Who knew in those days that the Fenfluramine she and I were taking would be later be tied to heart valve disease, pulmonary hypertension and cardiac fibrosis?

Here's how they advertised it on the back of a postcard from those days (found on eBay)

I don't recall whether I felt more full or ate any less while taking the pills . . . or whether I lost weight, for that matter. Perhaps I lost a little. The pills had a side effect of making some people drowsy, and they certainly did that to my little twelve-year-old self. Never one to like naps, I got drowsy in school, and the kids would tease me about it. One of them even made a remark or two after we were adults and crossed paths again. "Remember when you were taking Ponderax and you'd fall asleep on your desk?" I winced. Thanks, Tim.

A couple of months ago I did a baseline treadmill test to establish where my cardiac health stands now that I'm in my early fifties. I figured my heart wasn't in any trouble, but since my mom had double bypass surgery eight years ago at the age of eighty, I thought it would be smart to do this. I passed with flying colors. But the cardiologist told me that there was evidence of a benign heart valve issue. I need not worry about it, he added quickly. Sure. These heart valve things are just something that happen with no particular explanation, right? It wasn't until I was writing this post that I wondered: might that benign murmur have something to do with the Ponderax?