Dumpling Potlucks and Eating Disorders
A narrative of Chinese holiday parties, food relationships, and whiteness as beauty.
Food is everything in the Chinese community. In the United States, holidays are rooted around the exchange of presents. Christmas, Easter, birthdays, all celebrated with boxes and gift bags of ribbon-tied somethings stuffed with last minute Toys-R-Us or Amazon buys. But I’ve grown up knowing that every time anything celebratory comes around, one of the Chinese families in the neighborhood would throw a big potluck.
The same families were in charge of the same holidays every year — it grew into a routine that the community had worn in like an old sweater. Some aunties received special requests, taking pride in their cooking and grinning when somebody requested their liang fen (cold rice noodles) or zhu ti zi (marinated pig trotters). Chinese New Year was always a torrid affair, kids squatting around a single Gameboy, eyes glued to the screen in an increasingly hot bedroom. While the kids sanctioned themselves off into various bedrooms — usually allocated by age rather than gender — the parents milled around, some barefoot and others teetering on kitten heels.
When I occasionally ducked out of a “kid room”, I would skitter to the long kitchen counter covered in foods, hoping to snatch a coveted almond cookie or sticky rice cake. The journey was always arduous. I had to first step over all the outstretched, squirming legs of all the kids, careful to avoid interfering with their digital gaze. If I managed not to trip a single time — which was rare — I would open the door, only to be hit at once by a wave of Chinese karaoke noise. Reeling from the impact, I would then close the door in response to the cries of the children inside, and begin making my way through the sea of aunties and uncles. After a ten minute round of how-are-you’s, you’ve-gotten-so-tall’s, and even what-college-are-you-going-to’s, I’d finally make my way to the counter. Here I was subjected to the harrowing decision of what pre-dinner snack to choose.
Would I go with the cookies, take one and inevitably give in to another two, thus spoiling my appetite? Would I grab a handful of grapes, only to drop them on my way back into the kid cave? Or should I slip my hand into the tantalizing bag of chips Ma never let me eat, stealing away like a criminal in the night?
I’d make a selection, feeling a bit guilty, and hope the aunties wrapping dumplings around the dinner tables wouldn’t notice me and expect any small talk. Sometimes, I would watch them from the outskirts, laughing together as their fingers fluttered in a blur. One scoop of filling into each wrapper. One finger, drawing a thin line of water around the edges. A few swift movements, pinching the edges together into a crescent. Flour settling over the entire table and into the fingers of everyone working, casting a powdered haze over the readied dumplings. The process was always magical, and it was a scene I watched quite often as a child.
After taking off, reprieved of my hunger for the moment, I’d return to the kid room with a pocket of trail mix or sweet bean cakes, sharing my spoils with the underaged clan. Around 7pm, a parent would knock on the door and open it, saying “Chi fan la, come eat.” Salivating, we’d jostle our gangly elbows and knees up and out the room, scrambling for the first plate.
By then, all the mismatched potluck containers were open for all of us to see, containing everything from roast duck to stir-fried bok choy. There were lots of Chinese classics, including platefuls of steaming white dumplings, fresh from the boiling water where our mothers dropped them in. To appease the random white husbands in the mix, there were always a few things to tickle the Western taste and the pickiest of children: chicken wings, apple pie, mashed potatoes and such. I ate everything and never refused a dish in front of me. I would heap up my plates with greedy utensils, going back for seconds and thirds until I’d had my fill of the delicious homemade buffet.
I was never insecure about my indulgences until I watched all of the kids grow up. The boys grew taller than their fathers, fueled on first-generation American rice and comfort. The girls, thin and mostly petite, all slim waists and piano-playing fingers. My late elementary, early middle school chunkiness settled in just as my bitter mission of perfection did.
Those parties weren’t that fun for me anymore, and I’d begun to receive comments about my weight. I was no heavier than the average American kid, but this was the Chinese community where the women were small and the mouths were free to comment. Every party, mothers would pat my head and say, “Wa, ni zhang pang le! (Wow, you’ve gotten fat!)” Weight is often everybody’s business in many parts of east Asia, and those around me, from my grandma to the most distant of family friends, felt like press interrogators. Even the other kids who I grew up with would sneer at me and my body, taunting me as I recoiled deeper into myself.
When I visited my family in China, I was awkwardly shaped. I was already much taller than the average five foot tall Chinese woman, and carried an unfriendly distribution of weight. Relatives grabbed onto the fattiness in my arms, my legs, my love handles, telling me I was “so sturdy” or “so American” or “big boned”.
When I was twelve Ma encouraged me to begin exercising — always telling me the goal was to feel healthy and lose weight. I began to mirror her actions when she marched across treadmills, lifted weights, and returned home to stand on the scale. Those years, I went to the gym at least three times a week and weighed myself multiple times a day.
I laugh now, imagining the enormous weightlifters at the gym, grunting through their reps with a little Chinese girl huffing and puffing on the bench next to them.
I read Cosmopolitan magazines while I stair-climbed, taped Teen Vogue “beachbody” workouts on my wall, longing to be tall, slim, and white like all the other girls in the gym and on the television. Standing in my mirror, I would pick at my fleshy stomach, staring at my slanted eyes and long, thick hair that never curled right. Even though I eventually shed the baby weight, I never stopped counting calories after that.
I was one of the only Asians at every school I attended. I had crushes on the Matthews and Dylans who dated Katies and Rachels, and I swaddled my insecurities with books. I felt safe in the embrace of black ink pages, raising myself through literature in a time when my parents were preoccupied with my little sister Anna, who had an abundance of medical issues I didn’t quite understand.
My habits with food continued throughout middle school, and calorie counting became an obsession. I’d keep little journals throughout the day, later switching to apps as technology evolved. This is not to discourage food tracking as health management, but rather to emphasize the difference between hard stats and balanced meals. Whether 300 calories came from chunks of cheese or avocado, I treated them the same. When I wasn’t at school fulfilling my “brainiac Asian girl” stereotype, I was trying desperately to escape it.
I told Ma I’d give up my smarts to be prettier, when I knew I meant whiter.
It would have been easier to fit in my other friends, who were nearly all white at that point in my life. I would go over to their houses, eat the crudités and cracker packs that Mrs. Johnson or some other left on their pristine kitchen counters. The dads watched sports on the TV and they had dogs with standard names, a sense of all-American normalcy that had been taught to me from birth.
While millennials nowadays shudder at the thought of settling down, all I ever wanted as a kid was a plain 2.5 child family. They seemed happier — the kids had constant playdates and sleepovers (the latter of which I was never allowed to partake in) — and all their parents were best friends. Their families gathered on long weekends, taking their boats out by the lake and going tubing. They had block parties and matching white-shirts-and-jeans photos on the beach, ironed on smiles and I-love-yous on the phone.
It wasn’t until later in high school that I recognized the beauty of Chinese communities. They may have seemed crass to outsiders, characterized by piles of shoes littering the doorstep and off key karaoke late into the night, but in a way it was our own version of white-picket fence block parties.
By then, though, I’d developed an eating disorder as a reaction to lifelong internalization of whiteness and thinness as beauty. I struggled with my many identities and craved stability and control. While I outwardly preached acceptance and protected my Chineseness with nothing short of ferocity, I spent just as much time mulling over my numbers and statistics. I loved myself conditionally.
During junior year, my instability peaked. I was in the process of applying for college, standing just outside the golden gates of the universities I’d always dreamed of attending. I’d begun to lose track of what was important as my life was consumed by after school jobs, clubs and over a dozen classes worth of coursework. I did what I thought I needed to do in order to get in, scraping by the skin of my teeth and everything else. As my future hung over the precipice, I felt my stress ripping to escape the seams.
I was afraid to fall apart, because I wasn’t supposed to.
At school, I laughed along with my friends as we compared sleep deprivation and homework loads, pretending that all was well as long as I got the A’s I needed. Junior year fall and spring were the most important semesters. After all, colleges would use those SAT scores and course grades to determine acceptance along with each candidate’s holistic background.
Of course, the strength of your holistics relied on passing the minimum bar of fitting into the pack of overachieving fellow applicants. On the most stressful days I would eat for comfort, then berate myself for doing so. In a cycle of binging and purging, I was trapped. I’d even developed several habits resulting from the disorder: carrying spearmint Icebreakers 24/7, eating my food in certain patterns, drinking an abundance of water to replenish much needed fluids and to clear my throat. I wore red scars on my right knuckles that split almost daily, and cleared my throat continuously as the acid wore down the lining.
For years I struggled, telling only a handful of people — including my mother.
Mental illness and any kind of disordered eating is highly stigmatized in Chinese culture. In China, millions of those suffering from various mental disorders go untreated because their experiences aren’t taken seriously. When I first explained purging patterns to Ma as a form of dieting, she accepted it without another word and never brought it up later. She’d even walked in on me and the pathetic curvature of my back, huddled around the toilet like a guilty criminal. She walked out later, not recognizing how serious my disorder had become.
I tried to come clean to her when I was older, emphasizing my discomfort in my own skin. The process was long and weary; she, like many other Chinese immigrants, had never addressed mental illness before. It was, and still is, a taboo discussion among people and a source of deep shame for family members. The negative perceptions maintain the status quo and result in a massive and silent suffering. More than that, however, I understand that it is a survival tactic in times of hardship. After a long family discussion, she understood the severity of the situation and asked me to go to a psychiatrist many times before I finally agreed.
Because I was a minor at the time, a parent-psychiatrist session was required for me to start any therapy. Ma was out of town at the time so she asked my father to go in her place. He was never quite in the loop on what was happening to me, but recognized my need for help and thus did was he was asked to do. Parental approval acquired, I arrived at my first session.
The office was cramped and furnished with one of those stereotypical couches that it seems every therapist is required to own. As I folded myself with discomfort into the stale cushions, I allowed the nice white lady with the degree to prod at my psyche. She asked me questions that no one had ever asked before, none of which seemed useful to me anyway. None of it was even interesting until she brought up her conversation with my father. “He didn’t seem to think mental illness is real, Annie,” she said with caution. “It seemed to me like he didn’t take you seriously.”
For the first time in the session I broke down in tears. I’m not quite sure what I expected from the classic emotionally-repressed Asian father, but her words were somehow startling yet disappointing. He was born and raised in a culture where people were taught to keep their head down and fulfill their duties to family and country; his generation was taught to not take your problems to the outside world and risk losing face. In a time where everybody was poor and everybody worked hard, my complaints would have rendered me weak and foolish. After prescribing me a list of habits to change overnight, the psychiatrist ended the conversation with an apology on behalf of my father.
I’ve been battling my disorder for nearly five years now, and have made major leaps in the long process of recovery. My eating disorder arose from an amalgamation of sources: academic pressure, personal pressure, and societal pressure. I ended up getting into my dream university, so I still have a complicated relationship with my decisions in high school. Would I have been accepted otherwise?
While my need to succeed was the foundation of my eating disorder, one of the reasons it continued as long as it did was because of the Chinese community’s toxic relationship with mental illness and other disorders. I do not blame my culture for its historically-necessitated obsession with resilience, but implore the community to be more outspoken and open-minded when their friends, family and classmates seem a little off-kilter.
At our Christmas, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year and birthday gatherings, I have watched the people I grew up with graduate elementary school, get through college, enter the workforce, marry and have children. We celebrate the milestones and joys over homemade dumplings to the soundtrack of off-key karaoke and the clacking of majiang tiles.
I share this story not because I’m done. I’m still fighting negative habits and negative head-spaces. But the Chinese community cannot be silent about these issues anymore.
If you or someone you know suffers from an eating disorder, contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) hotline available Monday-Thursday from 9AM to 9PM ET, and Friday from 9AM to 5PM ET. 1–800–931–2237.
