I barely tipped the scale at three digits in pounds when my parents started telling me I was fat.

At first they were warnings.

“Don’t get too fat.”

“Don’t get greedy and eat too much.”

“If you eat too much, you’ll grow and you’ll get fat.”

I was eleven years old when they first started their war against “fat.” It seems to me now a war against the natural development of curves that puberty inevitably entails.

I was also eleven years old when I started binge eating to throw a cloak over my emotions, coming home every afternoon after my unpopular life in middle school to a dark (it’s always dark in my recollection), empty house filled with floury snacks. Entire packages of which I devoured.

I’m not sure if I even ever made the connection that eating equalled more flesh on my bones. I just knew that “fat” was something that I didn’t want to be, and eating a lot made me feel better— at least temporarily.

The instant ramen for dinner every night because neither of my parents were home.

//

No matter how big or small I was, I remember being scared of being “fat.” In my mind, fat equalled imperfect, and imperfect equalled not good enough in the eyes of my parents.

Not good enough meant not good enough to be loved. My father always told me that his love wasn’t unconditional— on the contrary, itwas conditional. He repeated this to me countless mornings as he drove me to school, and the central message was thus: if you reach this and that standard, you’ll be good enough for me to love you.

//

I was eleven when I “started puberty” with my first period. My mom said that she didn’t have her first period until she was sixteen.

“And I never ate too much and became fat, either,” she bragged.

“So don’t you do that, either.”

//

My grades declined in middle school. No longer was I the “genius” I had been in elementary school, or so it seemed. I became increasingly depressed, reaching suicidal and self-harming tendencies when I was 13. 

I ate more to pad my disappointment. I gained. Now, in my parents’ eyes, I was both fat and stupid.

//

In high school, the relatives’ and the family friends’ remarks were plentiful.

“You grew fatter,” they’d comment offhandedly.

The first few months of my freshman year, my heart broke. Food bandaged my wounds, or at least allowed me to ignore them.

The spring of my sophomore year, on my sixteenth birthday, I hung out with a twenty-something Chinese boy I met in my Japanese class who grew up in Britain and had a Chinese-Japanese girlfriend, my other friends all somehow “too busy.”

In the dark of his car, as he put his hands up my shirt and I was too numb to move or speak, he said: “You’re too fat. Why don’t you wear make-up? Then you’d look beautiful, like a Japanese girl.”

//

The destructive dragon roared its ugly head, and I, the brave knight, found my armor not yet fireproof.

I started proclaiming I was fat after that. Finally, after years of inculcation, I had gotten it into my head. I was fat, and that was that. My body was not good enough— I was not good enough— that was that.

//

What follows after that is no longer necessary for me to describe. The starving, the purging, the binging. What matters more is the decision I made to stop, to recover.

As I recovered, I began to gain. I went to Shanghai for the summer at my biggest and the wife of my father’s friend, after we went out to eat dumplings, whispered audibly to my mother:

“Why is she so fat? It must be because she eats so many dumplings.”

I swallowed my frustration and didn’t retaliate.

//

A family friend looked at me in the taxi as we drove on Jinshajiang Road.

“Why are you so fat? You should lose some weight.”

Biting words, but there was no point in answering.

“I’m healthy, and I’m happy,” I managed to mumble.

//

I was at my friend’s aunt’s house in the outskirts of Shanghai.

“My aunt has taught my cousin— her teenage daughter— to throw up after eating,” he told me.

Disgust, disappointment— and most significantly, sadness— arose in me.

I sighed.

//

I was searching, shopping for clothes, in the boutiques of Shanghai.

The only size that fit on me was XL, and even that one had to stretch.

//

Finally, at a recent Thanksgiving get-together at my parents’ house in Northern California, one of the same family friends who once commented on my supposed thickness looked at me with a smile. “It seems you’ve lost some weight! You look good!”

I tried to be polite, even though my face twisted with displeasure. I knew that to him, that to all of them, this was a compliment, this was to be lauded.

I knew that to all of them, speaking openly and “honestly” about other people’s bodies was normal.

I tasted the irony. He was complimenting me, while I was the same size at which he’d once told me I was “fat.”

//

Coming from a Chinese background, and seeing Asian-American friends around me constantly concerned with dieting and losing weight, I note a difference between us and our non-Asian counterparts.

It’s not just “good” or “commendable” for an Asian to be thin and small— it’s expected.

The not-thin Asian is seen as an anomaly, a blemish on the face of Asians worldwide. The legend goes that we’re all sticks that eat lots of rice yet “never get fat.”

I wonder why the friends I relate to the most, the ones who happen to be Asian, are ones blissfully liberated from this expectation. They’re not necessarily one size or the other, but the most common through-line in their values is that their bodies are beautiful, regardless of what any external expectations— “Asian culture”-enforced or Western— may dictate.

I wonder why I should be seen as an anomaly as a five-foot-six woman with thick, cellulite-covered thighs, wide hips, and a squishy stomach— who happens to have come from Chinese parents.

I wonder why the most anomalous thing about me is the fact that I love my body, stubbornly, unconditionally, gratefully.