Interview with Fay Chiang
(cont'd)
By Jennifer Tan, Staff Writer

My mother forgot that she grew up in a different environment, in the tiny Portuguese colony of Macao on China's south shore. She had six siblings who squabbled over food at the dinner table. Finances were tight, so money for treats was rare. On the other hand, I was raised in fast-food filled suburbia California. I was brought up over-stuffed with won-tons, egg rolls and pork dumplings she wrapped herself, three or four different stir-fried meat and vegetable dishes and countless bowls of white rice for dinner every night, and "after-school snacks" consisting of leftovers served over huge portions of steaming noodles. School lunches were never simple affairs. My mother packed Tupperware with sushi or put hot pasta soup in a thermos, making me the envy of classmates. Going out for soft-serve ice cream and sundaes at McDonald’s after dinner was not uncommon. Mom complained all through my childhood about my size, but when I didn’t eat, she would freak out. She never caught the connection between my weight and her obsession with my eating habits.

My mother was immersed in an image-conscious culture for most of her early life. She thought that for a young Chinese female, weighing over double digits meant something was wrong with you. The Hong Kong magazines she read had advertisements on every other page with, before, and after photos of girls who had miraculously lost fifty pounds attending diet-camps. This was proof to my mother that such weight-loss was not only possible but also essential. Because of this, she sought out far-fetched schemes to help me take inches off. There were three-day diets, fat-burning teas, and one particularly painful procedure involving a "tightening crème" and elastic strips that resembled over-sized rubber bands. The harder she tried, the more I resisted. I resented her holding my physical appearance up to scrutiny and comparing my waistline to that of my stick-thin Asian friends, speculating how many pounds I would have to lose before falling into the realm of "attractive."

By some odd hormonal imbalance, unknown freak happenstance, or divine intervention, I had lost twenty pounds one summer home from NYU, and my mother was ecstatic. Overjoyed, she told me she wouldn't mind replacing everything in my closet. I came home from shopping trips with handfuls of credit card receipts, expecting her to scold me for wasting money, but she didn't look twice. She dragged her sewing machine out of the garage to help me alter clothes. She told her friends, who called me to bombard me with questions on how I had accomplished the feat.

I was happy that I had lost weight, and not entirely for my own sake. I had made leeway in the fulfillment of my mom’s dream of having a slender, pretty daughter, yet the glow of my success had scarcely dimmed before she again began to worry again. What started with general inquiries on what I had consumed during the day gave way to lengthy lectures on making sure I was eating right. Pretty soon, my mother was on a rampage, buying multiple economy-sized bottles of vitamin supplements from Price Club and insisting I take them regularly. Every day, she grilled me on what foods I had eaten, how much had been consumed, how much I had paid for it, and who had been in my company. She always managed to find something lacking and therefore worth worrying over. I came to the realization that I couldn't win.

Weight was never the issue that I thought it was. She was and is my mother, and a Chinese mother at that. She worries no matter what I’m doing or how I look because I’m her only child. I’ll just have to learn to cope...at least now I can do it in new clothes.

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