On Body Image: Growing up in Doylestown, PA as a Chinese American Girl (Part 1)
Growing up as a Chinese-American girl in a primarily white community, I, like many other people of color, particularly women, faced the pressures of not just Eurocentric beauty standards but the beauty standards of my culture.
In my case as a Chinese woman, that’s a triple standard. Not only did I wish I was thin, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, but I also strived to be an honorable Chinese (grand)daughter which means never refusing food, finishing what is put on your plate, and not getting fat. In part, I feel lucky that one of my most prominent concerns and subjects of teenage turmoil was not being able to look like the “pretty girls” that everyone at school and online glorified. I had supportive and loving parents, brothers to fight with who made me stronger physically and mentally, and although I got a job as soon as I could, money was never a concern. I was smart, athletic, funny, well-liked, and in good health. I have always loved myself - I knew I was awesome, still am! - but I have not always loved my body. Some time around 8th grade, the combination of those beauty standards, underrepresentation, and my family’s brutal honesty that has positively shaped me into who I am today, cracked me. I began to over-exercise and under-eat because although I couldn’t change much about my facial features, I could control my weight.
The article below describes an Asian American’s contradictory relationship with food… and how that contributes to eating disorders in the Asian-American community along with the cultural factors of familial obligation, shame, brutal honesty, and deeply engrained stigma around mental illness.
Excerpt from “Eating Disorders in the Asian-American Community: A Call for Cultural Consciousness” written for Multi Service Eating Disorders Association by Lauren Kim
Food is our love language – the one thing that transcends the language barriers, the cultural differences, the generation gaps, and all the other things that keep us from saying “I love you” out loud.
But by twisted logic, food is also the enemy. If you’re Asian American, you also know that being fat in an Asian family is tantamount to falling short of making the honor roll.
…
Eating disorders continue to be an issue that is typically attributed to white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied women of high-income backgrounds… The lack of Asian Americans represented in the national discussion on eating disorders seems to indicate that many are still suffering in silence. According to Dr. Szu-Hui Lee, a clinical psychologist and director of training at the McLean Hospital at Harvard Medical School, Asian Americans tend to under-report mental health issues. She explains: “There’s a big stigma with seeing a psychologist. [Asian American] parents are more likely to send their kids to an academic counselor than a psychologist.”
I’d come home from soccer practice at 9pm and jog on the treadmill for 6+ miles on an incline and count and limit my calorie intake well below a healthy amount. I memorized the number of calories in everything I consumed or thought of consuming. I would only eat “healthy” foods, and I even became anxious watching others indulge in foods that I associated with making me “fat”. I was afraid to eat rice. I had never heard of or been taught about this behavior in eating disorders before. I wasn’t anorexic and I wasn’t bulimic, and when I later came across the concept of bingeing and purging, that did not apply to me either. Exercising is healthy, right? Eating healthy foods is healthy, right? In my mind, eating disorders were not applicable to me (see orthorexia). I had always been uncomfortable talking about my weight. No one ever pressed me about my new habits, and I never brought it up. My pediatrician, who usually told me to monitor my weight as I remained around 75th percentile, was pleased to tell me that year that I was now around 50th! I got “skinny”! People told me so! They smiled, I smiled.
It never affected my school performance although it did my athletic in the sense that my build changed so I was more easily able to be pushed around on the basketball court. I spent a lot of time working at the game so that was disappointing to overhear, but it was never my intention to play after high school so it didn’t seem like a big deal… Although when I got ACL repair surgery they had to drill extra holes in my bone due to low bone density, and at 23 I am now realizing that there might be some connection there (see Amenorrhea). I made sure I was in it alone. My problem could not and would not be anyone else’s problem - that would be selfish and my mom would be so sad if she knew. If my friends ever exhibited unhealthy eating habits or unrealistic thoughts about their body image, I was the first to call them out and tell them how beautiful they were as is. I wasn’t missing out on family or social events... if we went out to eat I’d get a salad and “work it off later”. My time-management skills have always been above average. I have a severe case of FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to living life, and when you’re interested in doing everything and fear missing out on anything, you find time or you make time and that’s that. I was a teenage girl going through teenage things, and I liked who I was as a person. How many other girls my age could say that?! I was fine.
Then I started to notice my body wasn’t functioning like it used to. I was always cold, contrasting to my usual “little furnace” status as my mom would call me adoringly. My hair was thinning, my skin was always dry, I bruised easily, and I stopped getting my period, which had been coming regularly for almost two years by then. My body was telling me that I wasn’t taking care of it, that there was no way I could nurture a child. To this day I’ve never talked to a doctor or medical professional, or anyone, really, about what was happening to my body. I knew exactly what was going on. I was abusing it, failing to give my body what it needed to function, and so it was beginning to fail me.
But it wasn’t these signs that got me to start living healthily again… It was my FOMO and my fondness of food and feeling as though I was hurting my mom which again goes back to the same cultural upbringing that partially contributed to my condition in the first place. To be completely honest, I needed the external motivation to do better because doing it for myself was not enough. For a long time, I would prioritize the wellbeing of those I love over myself because I knew I could handle anything. I would rather have felt 3 times the pain than hurt someone I loved. Now I know that that in itself is selfish and that by prioritizing myself, I do what is best for everyone involved.
I was lucky and had the opportunity to take a trip with my dad almost every year in middle school. London was coming up and who knew what food opportunities were going to be presented to me! (Turns out not much but that’s besides the point at the moment.) It was enough for me to get real with myself, to make myself recognize how much privilege was being wasted on me and how much I was actually missing out on, including my mom’s cooking which I would eat in bite-sized portions, and so I began my healing journey. I actively stopped letting exercise and calorie-counting consume my mind and energy, I began to listen to my body and it slowly returned to its normal functioning, including my period, and I was happier. But it wasn’t until I went to college when I really learned to love my body…
Further reading on the effects of Euro-centric beauty standards on people of color:
We Don’t Need to be Skinny and White to be Beautiful by Allison Gaines
https://medium.com/an-injustice/we-dont-need-to-be-skinny-and-white-to-be-beautiful-a0ab9e2cafa3
Asian Eyes: Body Image and Eating Disorders of Asian and Asian American Women by Christine C Iijima Hall
Is Beauty In The Eyes Of The Colonizer? by Leah Donnella
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/06/685506578/is-beauty-in-the-eyes-of-the-colonizer
