The strangest part is that it was also the first time since moving to New York that I knew I’d be OK. Suddenly, nobody knew anything, and you only looked the hick if you pretended otherwise. Even more, I felt professionally fulfilled. I was challenged by whatever work was available, and there was no such thing as a lateral move. I’d strived in fear for so long that relinquishing the notion that I had any control over anything came as a huge relief.
Less than a year later, I landed a high-paying job at an enormously successful broadcasting company. I paid off my credit cards, went to all kinds of health specialists, took my still-unemployed friends out to eat, celebrated with the friends who’d also landed on their feet, feathered my savings account, and then quit the following year. I wanted a different job—to write full-time—and I felt no fear or hesitation in pursuing it.
This is when I bought the coat.
Being a writer is stupid. If there were an apocalypse and a ton of people died but some survived and we were just slogging away—doctors alongside construction workers—courageously refusing to eat each other, you don’t just get to be the writer. You can’t broach that shit until year 100. Year 99? They’d bash your head in and take your shoes. Mimes and molecular gastronomists would be extinct forever. You’ve got to prioritize.
Which is why you have to accept the urge and be cool. The coat didn’t turn to dust when it left its home atmosphere like some Shangri-La paramour. It hangs out in my crappy closet mashed in with my other stuff. And when I pulled it out from the cool, crinkly tissue that first day, I realized I’d also been given two metal pucks of Rick Owens mints as a gift. The mints looked like Nerds made of pencil lead and tasted like cremains. It was like a Zoolander prank, and I loved the conviction.
Of course, the jacket has since been ripped off by countless less-expensive brands and designers. And when women stop me in the street to tell me they have the exact same one, I don’t correct them. I figure it’s like tithing. On some days, it’s the nicest thing I’ll do. They really should thank me.
*I don’t actually know that there’s a significant difference.
WHEREIN I LEARN THAT BULIMIA DOESN’T WORK / IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN PREVIOUSLY SUSPECTED
When I was born, I weighed 11 pounds and had a full head of hair. I also bore the tiniest hint of a butt chin, like my dad. My mother’s chin, on the other hand, is smooth and small. Her slight, elegant alleles were no match for my father’s. After all was said and done, her body snapped back to a size 2 with an alacrity that could testify only to how alien a parasite I’d been. Lugging my enormous swaddled body around with her on buses and trains and to church must’ve looked like a kind of punishment, as though a royal race of fatsos had risen to power and made wet nurses of the bantam class. The primal chemistry that compels one to breast-feed a burden only so it will grow heavier is just one way that babies are scary.
Eleven years later, my mom and I are at the doctor’s office. We are having our worst year yet. We speak in clipped, acid tones, and my brother and father are sick to death of us. I have a bladder infection—my first—and I am mortified. I avoid telling anyone until the pain is intolerable. It’s only after I almost pass out in a bathroom stall at school and miss a quiz because it takes 20 minutes to pee that I have to explain myself. I may strongly dislike my mother, but I will not get a B in French.
I am furious the doctor is a man. Disgraced by the physical inspection, I fume as I undress. I don’t know why my mother lacks the decency to leave the room while I do. My proto-boobs are dense and misshapen. The doctor takes my medical history, and I am forced to inform him that I have had my first period and also my second. I feel my mother’s eyes on me—I never told her—so I stare straight ahead. It’ll be another two years before my friends get theirs. The whole thing feels ungainly and probably my fault.
When the doctor weighs me, there’s a roaring in my ears. I discover that I am 113 pounds. The number is significant. Ours is not a naked house, but we all know how much our mother weighs. She weighs the same as she did in college, and I am three pounds heavier at a foot shorter. Red crawls up her neck. She stares at me as if her own leg had swollen beyond recognition. I want to die as much as I want to take her down with me.
It’s not my mother’s fault that being around her makes me feel ugly, and that every attempt on my part to look more like her is dark and shameful. My wiring abhors portion control and sensible weight management. I eat until it hurts and then pinch my fleshy midsection until it bruises. It would upset her to know the reasoning behind the wall of radiant anger that stood between us until I moved 2,000 miles away in my twenties. My mother is 63 years old—her thigh gap is righteous and finally, it doesn’t torment me.
To be clear: My mother doesn’t flaunt her smallness. She does not do that skinny-girl power trip where she always pees with the door open or suddenly gets naked or insists we share a fitting room in a store where nothing fits me. She doesn’t complain about her fat legs on the one day I’ve chosen to wear shorts. My mother is engineered to be sleek. She predates manic pixie girl as a romantic trope, but she can never sit still and her hands flit around like butterflies. Sexy MILFs are one thing; Winona Ryder mom is another. Especially in the ’90s.
She also eats all the right things, like fish and rice and dark green vegetables and liters of water and hot tea. In faded photographs with rounded edges, she is beautiful and wearing miniskirts. The first time she ate cheese she was in her twenties, and she didn’t much care for it. All processed foods are deemed too sweet or salty for her taste. Bowling and volleyball are her favorite activities, and when she’s upset she forgets to eat. This would never happen to me however much I long for it.
My preoccupation with food and dissatisfaction with my size has been with me since infancy. One of my earliest memories is despising the number 8 because it resembled a fatty in a too-tight belt. I abhorred Cindy dolls—not just because they were off-brand (like the Gobots to Barbie’s Transformers) but because Cindy’s face was comparatively bloated. Carrying a portly little Cabbage Patch doll only drew attention to my own physique, so I gave her away before anyone could make fun of me.
Eventually, I became bulimic because it suited my needs. (I lacked the type-A conviction to be anorexic.) I binged and purged, sometimes while reading eating-disorder books, taking strange satisfaction in the dwindling lists of foods the girls obsessively logged before they were whisked away to hospital. Each suffered the same second-act problems, and the treatment chapters were dull, but I read it all and learned so much.
From that day at the doctor’s office to my twenties, ED was a kind of pop culture. I read the books, watched the Lifetime movies (one very good one starred Tracey Gold from Growing Pains), and while most carried a warning, I treated them all like a makeover episode of a daytime talk show and went nuts for The Big Reveal—that moment when your loved ones became spectacularly worried. As a teen, I sang along to the lilting melodies of The Carpenters, wishing Karen’s anorexia airborne so I could catch it. Her gaunt cheeks and shiny foal eyes made her untimely death that much dreamier, more “thinspiring.” She fulfilled the destiny hinted at by her pretty face. I, too, wanted to be on top of the world looking down on creation. Karen Carpenter became so beautiful that she wasn’t allowed to play drums and had to sing lead. Lucky duck.
To be consumed by an eating disorder is to live for a vision of the future that will never be as great as you hoped it would be. It also hobbles any chance of enjoying the present, and the secret hobby cuts into learning about and taking satisfaction in pursuits of non-self-harm. Granted, I had French lessons and Mandarin classes and Korean school on weekends and swimming once a week, but I didn’t like any of it. I practiced violin and piano without ever once loving music. Making lists of the food I wanted to consume and unconsume was the ultimate scavenger hunt. Publicly, I was piously draconian: My two best friends and I would share a KFC biscuit three ways before binge-drinking straight vodka. I would save packets of Saltines th
at came with watery soup orders, shoving them in my backpack to fish out later—crushing them and dampening my finger to extract the tiny shards like Fun Dip. I would have dinner with the family, slide into my bedroom, inhale four or five pastries, and then put down a box of Chicken in a Biskit. I spent birthday money on diet pills and food.
I learned how to vomit silently. I can no longer play piano or violin or write my name in Chinese, but this I’m still really good at. I worried all the time that I’d burst a blood vessel in my eye from the strain, but you really have no control over that. If you don’t drink enough water, what you vomit will be cake-batter thick. You have to manage consistency, and it’s best to throw up in your hand so it doesn’t hit toilet water with the telltale splash. The sound is as unmistakable as the flipped lid of a Zippo lighter. The smell is also a problem, so you have to watch your hair.
Use mouthwash, because if you brush too many times a day, the enamel in your teeth wears off. Everyone knows this.
I never did get scary thin. I did shrink enough by the time I was 13 that I could join my friends at a water park without wearing a T-shirt over my bathing suit. There were five of us, and I was no longer the fattest. It was a revelation. We met a boy who was 16, and he was beautiful and blonde and new in town. He flirted with us all but chose me to ask out. My meanest friend was stunned and told me so. I made him laugh, and he thought I was smart. I threw my goggles in the trash because they made me look stupid, and a week later his older brother walked in on us in their parents’ bedroom (the corner unit of a glass turret), me pushing him off, him coming at me with a dick like the Polaris missile. By then I was pretty enough that they’d have believed me, but I told no one. Now that I’m older, I wonder how many of my friends never told me.
I worked harder. I became more secretive. College wasn’t great because dorm food was free and my mom wasn’t there with her tone. Of course nobody tells you, even at a good school, that bulimia doesn’t work.
In my early twenties I arrived in New York. I kept passing out in public places from exhaustion and stopped making myself sick. I didn’t have dental insurance, and my teeth felt porous. I wanted the release from my nightmare of losing and gaining the same eight pounds 10 trillion times. Besides, this town reprioritizes you. And it’s a good thing. It will torment you in other ways, but it makes you so self-involved that you care less and less about what you look like or what anyone thinks of you. It cures you of thinking that everyone sees you when they’re looking at you. And if this scares you rather than sets you free, you should probably live somewhere else. Turns out, nobody gives a shit about what you look like unless you are so beautiful that it will ruin your life. Most men like girls who look crazy or sad, because what they want has nothing to do with you.
Here’s what I’d tell my younger self: You become stronger as you get older, but you also become more forgetful. You stop cataloguing everyone’s crimes against your self-esteem. Lately, I’m surprised by what I look like when I come upon a reflective surface. I work with supermodels and actresses who get younger and younger, and I feel no envy. I’m oldish and close enough to spy the tape, powder, lace-fronts, stitches, and wiring. My mother, with silver hair and liver-spotted hands, is as beautiful as ever. These days we talk more often and we get along. And she’s still so fucking skinny.
THE VERY KOREAN ANGUISH OF LATE-STAGE “ASIANING”
For a long time, I thought Asian kids who exclusively hung out with Asian kids were losers. Fobby church kids were prime examples. Or those nerds who spun mechanical pencils around their thumbs and looked forward to Saturday Korean school. They were outcasts and I despised them exactly as much as my parents seemed to adore them. I envied their idiomatic jokes and easy camaraderie, so I rolled my eyes at it. Often their English was terrible—the too-round words sounded like they were holding hot food in their mouths—but sometimes they were simply excellent at both, unfailingly proffering the honorific, whereas I spoke with the proficiency of a native third-grader who excelled only at lunch.
I dismissed them as mathletes with no inside voices who listened to peppy, treacly K-Pop from prefab boy bands that were in cahoots with the corny balladeers that my father enjoyed. Often underwritten by the same monster conglomerate, or chaebol, they appeared together onstage at the noisy, hackneyed variety shows my parents watched on videocassette, on loan from the Korean grocery store. Everyone was too obliging for me to relate to. It was before the Internet became the Internet and before K-Pop was cool, and it never occurred to me that there was anything beyond the mainstream in our motherland. It seemed these other kids had zero ambitions and didn’t try hard enough to be popular. They settled for what I’d perceived to be the Friend Starter Kit (Oriental flavor). It reeked of defeat. Like teens who brought their cousins to prom.
How stupid I was.
It’s not that I ever wanted to be white. Though I did harbor an equally impotent, guilt-laced desire: I longed to be English. Not an actual English person of English ancestry where I’d be pink and blue and gorging on a truly unusual amount of chicken tikka masala; I wanted to still be Asian but perhaps born in England to English parents of Korean descent who at least would have a clue. At 12, I didn’t know that all parents were impossible. I thought only Korean parents could disappoint.
I am full-blown Korean. My mother is Korean, and so are my father and brother. And by Korean, I mean South Korean, which seems like a given, but I’m asked to clarify more often than you’d think. I’ve lived in America for 19 years, having moved here as a teen, and am the holder of a green card with no plans to become a U.S. citizen. From the time I was 1 until I was 14, I lived in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a British Crown colony, and, as culturally perplexing as it was, I loved living there. The public transportation system was swift, cheap, and clean. Cell phones have worked underground there since cell phones were invented, and the legal drinking age was more a casual guideline than enforced policy. The kids were rich and precocious and ran into trouble only if they got pregnant or hooked on heroin. Even for Europeans who have gone full “bamboo,” abortions and rehab in the Philippines are enough to hurtle you back to your starchy roots.
My best friend was a quarter Filipino, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Welsh, and a quarter English. She was slender where I was stocky, and at my seventh-birthday party, she and another mixed-race girl, who had been vying to be her best friend too (the slut), brought frosted pink lipstick and pale blue eye shadow to share. This way we could all be pretty and fancy to commemorate the occasion. My parents had let me have the party at Chuck E. Cheese’s with pizza for lunch (and a promise that they would not augment the meal with anything homemade and embarrassing), under the condition that I would wear my traditional Korean hanbok, a silk empire-waist dress with a contrasting wraparound shrug in fuchsia and gold. The ornate, crinkly frock was a hassle—it would flutter open at the back like a hospital gown when I dove into the ball pit. Everyone was allowed to wear the makeup but me.
In the photos, my five guests look like tiny smiling hookers, all pink and blue with missing baby teeth. Even the Indian girl with super-conservative parents got to wear eye shadow. I am scowling. A moon-face with a dense, black bowl cut. Here’s a thing you should know about Koreans: We have a state of being—an ambient rage, or else an ineffable anguish—that comes from simply being Korean. We call it han. Some say it’s attributable to our having been invaded so many times and cite it as the culprit behind our high rate of suicide. My han comes from my parents being jerks.
Everyone else’s lives seemed sweeter. The best friend who brought the contraband eye shadow also taught me how to roller-skate—in her pristine white and pink skates, using a neon hula hoop to drag me. I had no roller skates or hula hoop, and later, as she crimped my hair and we watched The Simpsons, it astounded me that she could be so sophisticated but wasn’t allowed to cross the street without an adult present.
I was allowed to go anywhere as long as I was home before my parents. I als
o carried a constant worry that I’d get lost or be kidnapped and that it would be ages before anyone noticed. It was a reasonable concern, as busy as my parents were. Mom was a restaurateur and Dad worked late every night or else was overseas. Once, I did get lost. It was en route to Korean school early on a Saturday morning. It was just a bus ride with a quick switch over to the tram, but my brother was home sick and I was rudderless without him, so I missed the connection. Later, when the police brought me home, my family had a good laugh.
For dinner my brother and I often ate deep-fried one-dollar hot dogs from the chip shop down the road, or else crusty pineapple buns and egg tarts that cost 50 cents at the Chinese bakery. If we couldn’t get enough money together, we’d peer into the cavernous rice cooker and eat whatever was in there with whatever wasn’t rancid from the fridge. Conveniently, very little Korean food ever goes bad. It’s no surprise that to this day, I crave only the stankiest, fermentiest, bottom-of-the-barrel kimchi, and pickles that sizzle like pop rocks. A la recherché du temps perdu, or whatever.
Our parents seemed to worry about us less than we did them, and often I’d wait up, peeking out of our eighth-floor window, hoping to hurry them up the hill. For a while, my father’s mother from Korea moved in with us to babysit. She made simple meals and told us stories about the war. There was one that always made her cry, about how she used a Spam can as a bowl but never knew what Spam tasted like until years later, since someone else had eaten the contents. These stories creeped me out, and they always ended with an impassioned overture about how I should move with her to Korea to keep her company. She moved out after a few years, possibly due to a fight with my mom.
Oh, Never Mind (Kindle Single) Page 2