by Heekyung Eun
“Is she still going to the same church?”
“No, she switched to the Full Gospel Church. She said she couldn’t stand watching those stuck-up Gangnam wives puckering their lips like goldfish each time they sang, so she switched to a church where she can bawl out hymns at the top of her lungs.”
“Your mother is so feisty.” B laughed loudly.
Since it was a Sunday evening, the bus wasn’t too crowded. As I placed my new books on the empty seat next to mine, B’s words came to mind. It was true that every time I took a seat on a bus, I was careful not to touch the person sitting next to me. Several times I’d been unable to bear the misunderstanding of some young woman and got off the bus before my stop. I smiled wryly. B was different from me in every way. I was unnecessarily complicated and sensitive; he was simple, cheerful and devoid of malice, befitting a son brought up in a loving environment. I didn’t know him as a child, but he must have looked so bright and innocent.
I turned to gaze out the window. The road outside was darker than usual. There weren’t many cars; the streetlights traced patterns across the dark asphalt. My mother had always wanted to change her boring life but was never able to. The only thing she could change was the church she attended. She’d never been a feisty person with a stomach for drama. In fact, had she answered the phone call that morning, she might well have replied flatly that it was the wrong number, that the person they were looking for didn’t live there. But then, not only would her hands have been shaking too hard for her to prepare lunch, she’d have been unable to look me in the eye when I asked who called and would’ve gone to bed early to avoid answering me.
I’d gotten the call a week ago while she was at church. It was a young man. He said he got the number from the restaurant, and asked whether he was correct in assuming that I was the son. Then he mentioned my father’s name and told me the name of the hospital and the room number. It was a short conversation. It was thanks to a kindly nurse on duty at the hospital that I learned what was wrong and when they were planning to operate.
“Are you family?”
“Yes, I am,” I answered drily, like the young man who had phoned.
A week went by, and the only thing I did was call up the restaurant to tell them to stop giving out our number to strangers. I asked them not to tell my mother that someone had called there looking for us. I tried to remember what my father looked like, but I drew a blank. Instead, what I pictured was a fat kid, lost in sad thoughts, hurrying after his father for fear of losing him.
Our Daily Bread
DR. ROBERT ATKINS, a cardiologist, discovered an interesting fact while performing autopsies on deceased soldiers during the Vietnam War. Thick slabs of fat were attached to their internal organs. These layers of fat were common in older people who eat too much meat and don’t get enough exercise, but what were they doing in young soldiers in combat? It was due to carbohydrates, the staple of their diet. The human body is one big chemical factory. Excess carbohydrates in the body turn to fat, but fat, no matter how much is consumed, can’t be stored without carbohydrates. That’s where the theory of the Atkins Diet comes from—eat all the fat you want but no carbohydrates.
My mother, who had run a small restaurant that served rice soup for over twenty years, naturally held the opposite theory. When I told her that I’d lose weight by eating pork belly, she was dumbfounded and asked where all that grease would go. I tried telling her that once food enters the body, it metabolizes into different substances, but it was no use. She was especially unyielding when I said I’d completely cut out carbohydrates like rice, bread, noodles, and rice cakes. She insisted that rice was healthy, homegrown produce eaten by generation after generation of our ancestors, and that noodles contain only half the calories of rice, while buckwheat noodles are widely known as a diet food. She had been watching daytime TV almost every day without fail. When I told her I couldn’t eat fruit or drink juice either, she retorted, “Even sugar-free juice?”
“Fruit is high in sugar. And don’t buy potatoes, either. Starch immediately breaks down into carbohydrates.”
She raised her eyebrows, full of confidence. “Can you name one food that’s as nutritious as a potato?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, trying to cut her off, as I wasn’t accustomed to explaining things to her. Everyone knows how much sugar and potatoes have contributed to human history. The problem is that this is no longer an era of nutritional deficiency when people need to generate energy at low cost. On the contrary, this is an era in which, in the U.S. alone, billions of dollars are spent every year on dieting and keeping in shape.
The scale I’d ordered online arrived the following day. People think the hardest things fat people have to deal with are struggling to walk upstairs or spending too much money on food, but that’s not true. What’s far more uncomfortable is the fact that we can’t do anything without being noticed. One of the major advantages of online shopping is that, just as a bachelor can quietly purchase a blow-up doll, a fat person can shop for extra-large clothes or a scale without feeling like everyone is staring at them. Standing on the first scale I’d ever owned in my life, I gazed down at the needle as it sped blithely past the numbers. Later that day, I bought a small spiral-bound notebook with pages ruled in blue from the stationery store next to the bus stop. The notebook was held closed by a fabric-covered rubber band and contained fifty pages. I tore out eight of the pages and numbered the remaining forty-two, one for each day of my diet. My preparations were pretty much complete.
The Second Week
I STARTED THE first day by recording my weight.
For breakfast I ate vegetables with either eggs or tofu. I had to change my entire cooking style to be able to eat without getting bored. For vegetables, I alternated between tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers. Dinner was meat or fish. I ate grilled pork one day and sushi the next, followed by grilled fish, fried bacon, boiled chicken, grilled sirloin, and so on. From anyone’s point of view, they were decent meals to be sure, but it took more patience than I thought to eat the same food every day. It was a particular struggle to eat all of these things without rice. Up until then, I’d always chosen my meals based on the main items and thought of rice as something that automatically came with them. Now it was completely different. My appetite demanded only rice, and just the thought of that warm, glossy rice sent my body into a frenzy. It wasn’t simply because I liked rice. The body can only store fat if carbohydrates are consumed with it. So my body’s instinct was to plead and clamor for carbohydrates.
Lunch was the hardest. I offended the restaurant owner by eating only side dishes, not even touching the rice. I ordered plates of dumplings and left the peeled dumpling skins behind. When I ordered bibimbap, I skimmed off the hot pepper paste, which contained added sugar and glutinous rice powder, and ate the vegetables on top without mixing them into the rice underneath.
When I ate out with coworkers, they’d talk through the entire meal about the fact that I’d started dieting, the incomprehensible aspects of the diet I’d chosen, and all the terrible things that everyone knew would happen to someone as fat as me if I didn’t go on a diet. One guy who’d joined the company the same year as me made the most scathing comments regarding the side effects of dieting and the yo-yo syndrome, feigning friendly concern. The only one among them who didn’t speak was the new female employee, but I could sense that she was using her chopsticks quietly so as to not miss a single word. It was all outward encouragement. But I didn’t enjoy the attention, knowing I was only this week’s gossip. Eventually, I started eating out alone. I pushed all my dinner dates back six weeks.
I started noticing changes in my body after three days. I felt dizzy, like I’d become anemic, and had trouble concentrating. Whenever I saw a chair, I sank into it even if only for a short while. I lost enthusiasm for everything, and even my daily routine at the office became difficult for me to handle. When the new female employee overtook me as I was walking slowly up the
stairs holding onto the handrail, she carried my files for me like she couldn’t just stand by and watch.
“Are you okay? You look pale.”
I hated the fact that I was drawing attention to myself, but I pointed at my head and smiled wryly.
“My brain is angry with me.” “What? What about your brain?”
Since I didn’t have the energy to explain further, her wide, innocent-looking eyes began to grate on my nerves. The brain, the most sophisticated part of our body, doesn’t bother with tedious tasks. Instead of producing energy for its own use, it gets its supply of glucose from carbohydrates, but recently it had been getting none. Dr. Atkins said you shouldn’t satisfy your brain’s demands. Over time, the brain can’t help but adapt to the new system. However, you clearly risk a certain degree of danger by not feeding your brain, even for a short time.
My mother, of course, noticed the change in me. On the fifth day of my diet, she tried to serve me samgyetang, a soup made from a whole spring chicken and medicinal herbs.
“You can eat chicken, right?”
She tried to sound nonchalant, as if no one had ever told her that the chicken in samgyetang was stuffed with sweet, glutinous rice. I, in turn, was speechless, unable to do anything but stare blankly at the chicken, the steam trailing off of it, the savory aroma of cooked rice. Yes, I could eat meat, but the instant I chased it with a spoon of rice or a bite of noodles, I would start gaining weight—this explanation was so patently obvious that it refused to leave my lips. Instead, my mouth pooled with saliva. While I hesitated, my selfish, greedy body had already tucked in the napkin, and was sitting there holding a knife and fork, looking at me with an expression that said: Come on, hurry up.
“People have to eat grains to stay healthy.”
As she stared at me, my mother’s words were so terribly tempting. She wasn’t wrong. You only had to picture a farmer’s rice bowl mounded high like a grave to realize it: next to sugar, grains are the food most easily converted into energy. But in my state, forced to burn up all my surplus reserves, I absolutely had to avoid consuming any.
After a light meal of canned tuna and tofu for dinner, I had an unpleasant taste in my mouth, so my mother brought me fragrant honeyed water in a clear glass with ice cubes floating in it. “It’s the only way. Listening to your body is the key to health.” Her words, as sweet as the honeyed water, were also true. Like a baseball coach, the body sends us all kinds of signals to control the game called survival. The problem is that when it comes to fat, there is an absolute difference between the satisfaction my body craves and the health I desire. As for my brain, it was increasingly not on my side. My brain was the one ordering my stomach to stock up on glucose in order to secure energy for itself, regardless of what damage it did to my other organs. Frantic to go on storing more, the brain is always three minutes late in telling the body that the stomach is full. Even as I reluctantly waved away the honeyed water, I could feel at the same time someone inside of me struggling desperately to get out, one shoe dangling off in his haste, to grab the glass from her.
The grilled mackerel and pan-fried tofu that I’d asked her to make were served for dinner the next day. But there was also a bowl of glossy rice and fried squid with noodles on top, which I hadn’t asked for. Everything was in very small portions. My mother declared that everyone knows it’s bad to eat an unbalanced diet, and she ordered me to eat a variety of foods but to stick to half-size servings of each, just as the daytime talk show host advised. I ignored her, so she changed her tactics again the next day. In addition to salt and pepper, she used a sweet marinade for the meat, and she even added sugar, which was pure carbohydrates, to spicy chicken soup and fried squid. The less I was able to overcome temptation, the bigger my discontent with her grew. Eventually, I started losing my temper at the table.
It began with me shouting that she had to discard her old-fashioned ideas about food and other things. I grumbled that she should let me handle my problems my own way, especially when it came to my own body. But the grumbling grew into nervous criticism. I even told her bluntly that I’d never be able to get married, as she so desired, if I failed this diet, and would therefore never give her any grandchildren, who were obviously bound to have been fat themselves. I implied that her current, hopeless life was fate’s inevitable revenge for her one immoral act. I knew exactly how to hurt her. But my mother had enough dignity to despise those who hurt her. Whenever she couldn’t get her way, she reminded me of her absolute authority and self-sacrifice on my behalf when I was just a helpless, wretchedly abandoned unborn child, and she did so with enough force to stuff me back into her womb like a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant.
“Why did you give birth to me?”
“Why did I have a son like you?”
Had we been a chicken and an egg, we still would have growled at each other like this.
The diet was difficult because I had to struggle against the millennia-old system of survival instincts built in to my body. Ever since the Stone Age, the human body has been programmed to store fat. But today’s standards of beauty and health call for burning off all of one’s body fat. Dieting creates a dilemma between our primitive body and modern culture. That dilemma confronted me daily, testing me at every corner of my life. One day, upon returning to my desk, I found a paper plate with a slice of mousse cake topped with sweetened whipped cream and a bright red strawberry waiting for me. A cup of soda sat beside it. A co-worker, whipped cream already stuck to the corners of his mouth, waved a fork as he told me it was the new female employee’s birthday. I sensed all my coworkers watching the plate and me, as if they’d placed bets.
“Have mine, too.” I moved the plate to my colleague’s desk. Looking intrigued as I handed him the soda as well, he playfully quizzed me.
“Why is soda bad for you?”
“Eating sugar and fat at the same time makes your body store the fat.” I kept my voice slow and calm. “If you wonder why bad things taste so good, it’s because you have the body of a millennia-old primitive man who goes crazy at the mere mention of fat.”
I called the other person living inside my body Primitive Man. I started feeling hostile toward the animal instinct for survival and the way my body was programmed to cling to its instincts. Human beings don’t have sex just to preserve the species anymore. My birth was proof enough of that. And yet, my body’s programming insists that I am an animal no different from Ice Age man. Why is it that hedonistic humans have resisted the instinct to preserve the species but still submit to the pleasure of instinctively storing fat? Is that our dominant gene? Seeking out pleasure?
The weight came off little by little. There were days when I weighed the same as before, but even on those days, my body felt lighter. My watch hung loose on my wrist, and I had to tighten my belt by three notches. While buttoning my collar, I discovered that my weight loss had started in my neck. When I glanced at my reflection in the mirror while taking a shower, it seemed as though there was more space in the mirror, and when I bumped into someone in a narrow hallway, I only had to turn slightly to get past them without touching the wall. Even catching cabs became easier. There were more and more instances in which the new female employee, who had previously been so hesitant to respond whenever I pointed something out, smiled and replied promptly. Once I’d lost eight kilograms, I became convinced that this diet was proof that modern humanity represented a new stage of existence, having abandoned the natural choices made by animals for the choices of enlightened civilization. But more importantly, I found satisfaction in the thought that I was resisting my genetic inheritance. In the meantime, three weeks passed.
Things You Can Choose and Things You Can’t
B MET ME at work for lunch one day.
“You can eat everything but carbs, right? Doesn’t seem that hard.”
But B and I had to keep passing up restaurants. Ox bone soup, hangover soup, sushi, fried rice, curry—these foods are unimaginable without rice. Even lig
ht noodle soups like naengmyeon and udon are nothing but carbohydrates. Same for pasta. B stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant.
“They serve meat.”
“Yeah, but Chinese food is full of starch.”
Standing on the sidewalk and looking at the signboards of restaurants around him, B’s gaze settled without much hope on a sandwich shop across the street.
“I guess that won’t work either.”
“Bread is bad enough, but mayonnaise has sugar in it.”
“Well, I don’t care if you eat or not, I got to have something.” Complaining that he was losing his appetite, B finally hauled me into the nearest fast food restaurant.
B ordered fried chicken, a soda, and a biscuit, and I ordered a burger without any sauce.
“Aren’t you going to end up malnourished if you keep skipping rice?” he asked. “Seems to me that diets work by forcing you to lose weight through malnutrition.”
Since every person who talked to me over the past few weeks had questioned me about diets, I was sick of the subject, but I tried explaining that dieting is more a matter of metabolism than calories: Though lions eat only meat, they don’t have problems with their nutritional balance because they synthesize carbohydrates inside their bodies. On the contrary, even though cows eat only grass, they have a lot of fat. Camels hold fat in their humps and are able to cross the desert because that fat converts into water when it burns.
B snickered. “Listen to you! You sound like a broken record.”
A boy waiting for his mother who’d gone to order was sitting by himself across from me and staring hard at me. I don’t like fast food places, and it’s not just because whenever a fat person appears, people immediately think of lawsuits against McDonald’s. It’s also because people can see up close what others are eating, and because those places are usually full of children. Young children, being candid, stare openly at whomever catches their eye, and most parents, acknowledging only their children’s right to innocence, fail to teach them about respecting others who don’t wish to be stared at. If they see me eating just a salad, the parents will whisper to their child, “He has to watch what he eats because he’s fat. But he’s still fat even though he eats so little. Don’t you feel sorry for him?” And yet, if I’m eating french fries, a double burger, and a coke, they don’t automatically look the other way because it makes sense for my size. They give each other looks that say, “That’s why he’s fat,” and try to stifle their laughter, then quickly look away when they feel me looking at them. Fat people don’t stick out because we’re big. We get stared at because people feel there’s something different about us. The boy watched closely as I ate the insides of the burger and tossed the buns onto the tray.