Imagine the self-entitledness of writing an entire essay about getting fat-shamed in China as a foreigner, as if you have some right to demand that a culture adjust its entire norm structure on an ad hoc basis to not have your fee-fees hurt over your weight.
This is the mindset of the American millennial/Zoomer, and it’s why people give them so much hell.
Via Vice:
When I arrived in China for my senior year abroad, I had many expectations of what my home for the next year would be like. What I did not expect, however, was to become a public art installation, a metaphorical monument to China’s ‘outsiders.’
As a bigger, biracial woman, I was used to being a walking lesson against stereotypes. My existence itself subverts the concept of what a Chinese woman, what a black woman, and what an American and Singaporean “should” be like. Growing up in Singapore—an equatorial borderland of diversity—I was an outsider among my own friends and family. Curly-haired, tall, and more curvaceous than my relatives and classmates, I was often teased and bullied for my differences, and was assigned to a ‘FAT Club’ at school where I danced my little ass off to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive (not literally, I’m afraid). At family dinners, surrounded by relatives differing in brownness but not in thinness, I was often dissected and torn apart.
I find it weird that this woman is leading her essay with tales about growing up in Singapore before getting into her fat-shaming in China as if Singapore and China are quite so distinct culturally. The Chinese are by far the largest ethnic group in the tiny nation — roughly 75%. It’s basically China plus palm trees, minus the Cultural Revolutions and Great Leap Forwards, etc.
Anyway, continuing:
I thought that my experiences in childhood would prepare me for my time in China. I did not expect, however, for my 20-year-old self to feel just as vulnerable as that chubby girl who would hold her breath in fear of a word about her weight. In China, it often felt like I was an Instagram post made real. I was public and accessible, open for strangers to comment and criticize as they saw fit. As I left my apartment, I could feel an uptick in views as heads swiveled my way and eyes tracked my trek across the city to work. I would be approached by strangers on the street, who would call me pang zi (fatty).
A close friend of mine told me of another experience that I didn’t even witness. It made me wonder how many anonymous comments I had racked up on my being that I would never be privy to. She was pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair outside the senior residence where we volunteered and the old woman was muttering to herself, grumbling, and saying over and over, about me, “So fat. That girl is so fat.”
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Amazing.
Asians do not suffer the same sort of walking-on-eggshells routine to accommodate individuals of unusual heft. There is no such thing as #bodypositivity or fat liberation or whatever social engineering nonsense the fats are pushing these days in the West.
The Asians see a fat person, and they might just point it out. Literally. They like to point at foreigners and say stuff Social Justice™ people would find unkosher.
They do this because a normal human female who is 5’6” does not weigh weight 250 pounds. Some find it noteworthy, especially in a nation not overflowing with obesity. No amount of mandating people not notice things is going to make it untrue.
The article goes on from there to actually doing a decent job elaborating on the essential cultural differences between the West and East that might inform these different attitudes toward “fat shaming,” so credit where credit is due.
In the conclusion, though, she predictably references a “responsibility we have now to change the unrealistic body ideals we’ve had a hand in perpetuating.” Nowhere does she accept any personal responsibility for living as a human-walrus hybrid or any desire to change it — if not for the social benefit, then for her own good.
