Unhappy and Fat?

The bumper sticker stared back at me from the FX taxi ahead as I waited at the stoplight. It was an ad for a weight loss program, and it made me wonder if "unhappy" and "fat" really go together. We are conditioned to worship thin–thin as defined by western fashion designers and magazines, thin as defined by Hollywood movie stars and American fitness gurus. This means reed thin, waif thin, toothpick thin. I don’t know when or how this came to be the ideal; it wasn’t always so, and it is by no means a universal ideal.

I had an aunt who rejected prospective daughters-in-law who were thin; can’t have babies and not good for prosperity were the reasons cited, and she tolerated no arguments to the contrary. There is a Chinese saying that translates roughly into "Fat wife, large fortune", and particularly desirable is the wife with a substantial bottom (which, I suppose, is the repository of wealth).

Children are likewise supposed to be well nourished; thin kids indicate poor parenting skills or, more to the point, incompetent mothering. My friend was suspected of spending her marketing budget on flowers instead of food, since all her three kids are built like models (the irony here is that she is a good cook; her kids are just finicky eaters). In grade school I was forever getting yellow slips from the school nurse for being underweight, despite the fact that my mother was a wonderful cook in the traditional manner (she did not believe in canned goods, processed food or eating in the school canteen); my grandmother used to say that I had the stomach of a sparrow.

Of late I seem to have acquired a reputation around the office as one of two resident gluttons–a reputation certainly undeserved, the result of a dark conspiracy, black propaganda spread by sinister forces linked, I am sure, to the al Qaeda terrorist organization. These forces may have infiltrated my inner circle, because a couple of months ago my god-daughter declared, as we were having Sunday lunch, "You’re so fat; how did you become so fat?" Did that make me unhappy? Hardly, although I did announce that I would go on a diet. Unfortunately, nobody believed I was on a diet, and I kept getting fed–and very well too, thank you.

But I guess simply saying I would go on a diet did the trick, because last Sunday my god-daughter announced, over lunch, "You’re thin na!"

Bring out the Peking duck, please, cooked three ways.