You Got Fat

Growing up, I had thought of myself as skinny.

Now I do remember that during my sophomore year of college I counted my calories, wanted defined abs, and hated my legs (what white girl doesn’t think these things?). But I only started thinking I was fat when I moved to China during my junior year of college. In a country with a recent history of mass starvation combined with modern ideas of a “the skinnier the better” mentality among young, urban girls provided a perfect storm of cognitive dissonance for me. If being “fat” was a compliment, as I had read in some cultural descriptions of China and as some people told me, then why were all of the skinny girls around me plagued with eating disorders and talked non-stop about wanting to lose weight when they were already unnatural twigs? Indeed, one of the most common phrases you will hear out of a Chinese girl’s mouth is, “I’m on a diet” (我在减肥 wo zai jianfei).

China’s recent history of immense food shortages and starvation in living memory of people over the age of 60 remains a part of the everyday culture here, and their anxiety about not having enough to eat is clear; from the common greeting “Have you eaten?” (equivalent to our “how are you”), to the insistence that you eat more and that “no, you are not full yet,” to the habit of putting food in your bowl while you’re eating, to always saying, “I’m full” after eating, to the custom of over-ordering on food in restaurants. There’s no doubt that food anxiety is also part of their habit in commenting on my body weight. Uyghur people, who also experienced the GLF and the CR, are similar.

“You got fat,” people tell me all the time (Ch: 你变胖了 Ni bian pang le, Uy: semirip ketipsiz). When I was in Nanjing, my Chinese mom heartily agreed when I confided in her about people telling me this. “Yes, you’ve gained weight since you first moved here in September,” she told me without hesitation.

With my American ears, what I heard was: “You ARE fat, ugly, and lazy.” I felt like a huge cow walking around.

What they perhaps meant was not “you ARE fat,” but perhaps closer to: “You are comparatively rounder since the last time I saw you,” with a connotation of “you are healthy and living well right now.” Especially for my Chinese mom, this was a point of pride for her. If she had sent me back to America skinnier than before, she mostly certainly would not have done her a good job of taking care of me.

Indeed, these comments that I had gotten fat, which they meant to mean “relatively fat compared to before,” combined with insistence that I “eat more! Eat more! You don’t eat enough!” didn’t help. If they kept telling me that I was fat, why were they asking me to eat more? This confusion combined with the fact that I actually was eating more—the loneliness from being abroad and wanting to try new foods, and cheap, delicious, sweet, and easily available street food meant that I was eating a lot--and certainly not exercising as much as I did in the States.

Suddenly, I was glad when I got food poisoning. “Good,” I thought, “An opportunity to flush my body of food and not eat for a few days.” I grabbed the stomach fat I had and pinched it hard, willing it to disappear. I was convinced that Chinese boys didn’t like me because I was too fat.

A year later, I looked at pictures of myself. I was seriously skinny that year I was in China (2009-2010). 

WHAT? Why were people always telling me I had gotten fat and why did I spend so much of that year obsessing about my weight?

Also, I noticed that people who hadn’t seen me for a week would say that I’d gotten fat. And then the next day, someone would say that I’d gotten skinny.

WHAAAAT??

How was this possible? Clearly, I wasn’t empirically gaining or losing weight in that amount of time. And yet, I couldn’t help but here in those words: You are fat. You are ugly. You are lazy.

This is what we hear as Americans.

It was only with time that I realized: For them, it was merely a greeting, a way of saying that "compared to last time, you are relatively bigger or smaller." And a way of saying, “you are living well” (ie, you’ve gotten fat) versus “You’re overworked” (ie, you’ve gotten skinny).

Now, people did explain this to me and I did intellectually understand that for some older Chinese people, “you’ve gotten fat” was a compliment.

But this intellectual understanding of history and culture was combined with stick skinny girls all around me insisting that they were “too fat” and that they were on a diet to lose weight. It was clear that in the young, urban, modern culture that skinnier was better, especially for girls. All I could think was, if this skinny girl thinks that she’s too fat, then I must be a cow.

And so, my confusion continued. Over the years, I got used to it. I tried my best to ignore it, but still, I couldn’t help but feel a stab of pain in my gut every time someone made a comment about my body. “You got skinny,” they would say. Does that mean I was fat before? I couldn’t help but ask myself. “You got fat,” they would say. Does that mean I’m an ugly pig now? I couldn’t help but think to myself. I knew that empirically I might be the same, but the comments continued about how I’d gotten fat or skinny.

It was similar in Uyghur culture as well.

I decided to investigate this issue by asking people directly: “what do you mean when you say that?” So, the next day, at dinner with two male Uyghur friends, I asked:

“What do you guys mean when you say someone has gotten fat or skinny?”

They laughed, knowing that this was something other Americans and me had struggled with before. They explained, “It’s just something nice (kongulluk xushal) to say to someone, especially when you haven’t seen that person in a while. If you say they are fat, it kind of means, ‘you’ve been living well, huh?’ If you say they are skinny, it kind of means, ‘you’ve been stressed out recently, huh?’ But mostly, it’s just something we say in greeting, like asking, ‘how are you?’ If you look a little sad and tired, we will probably say you’ve gotten skinny. If you’re looking happy and healthy, we will probably say you’ve gotten fat.”

A little while later, another friend arrived, and as an experiment/joke, the other guys asked him, “has Sarah gotten skinny or fat?”

“She got fat (semirip ketiptu),” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

There it was again, that stab in the gut. 

He smiled broadly, knowing that it bothered me, and waved his hand out in front of him, shaking it as if to say “it’s not what you think it means.”

“But but but…” he started. “I don’t mean it in the way that you Americans mean it!” he quickly insisted. Relatively well-versed in Western culture, he didn’t need to elaborate on what we all knew: Americans equate being fat with ugliness and laziness and that’s not what he meant.

“What I meant, was that compared to the last time I saw you, your face has just gotten a little rounder, more filled out.”

“But other people have been telling me that I’ve gotten skinnier,” I said, still just a little bit sad that he had just called me fat.

“They were lying,” he said.

Oh.

“What I mean is, these phrases, you’ve gotten fat or skinny. It doesn’t mean ANYTHING. All it means is that compared to the last time we saw you, you changed in one way or another. But seriously, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying ‘how are you,’ or ‘have you eaten yet,’ or when you bump into someone one the street, ‘where are you going?’ No one actually cares where you are going, but we ask anyway, out of politeness, as a way of greeting. It’s just something we say and it has no literal meaning whatsoever.”

The next day, I went to a blind massage place for a massage. One of the first things my massage therapist said to me after he started massaging me? “You got fat since last time,” he said.

Taking this as another opportunity to pursue my “research” project, I asked him: “When you say that, what do you mean?”

“Do you know Chinese?” he asked, thinking that I literally didn’t understand his Uyghur.

“No, I understood what you said. What I mean is, what do you really mean by that? Because in America we don’t normally say that.”

“It doesn’t have any other meaning besides, ‘your meat has grown in size,’” he said trying to explain.

I laughed. Hoping to go deeper into the matter, I said, “Oh ok. Because in America, when you call someone fat, you’re kind of implying that they are lazy,” I said.

The massage therapist standing at the table next to us agreed, “Yes, it does kind of mean that you are lazy.” But my massage therapist disagreed, “Not necessarily. You could be a really hard worker, but you’re sitting at the computer all day. That would make you fat, but not lazy.”

After a long silence, my massage therapist, who I guess had been pondering it, said, “People from the village really like fat people and think they are pretty, that clothes fit them well, and that they are living comfortably and well. It’s the people from the cities, especially girls, they are trying to lose weight, and they will get angry if you tell them they’ve gotten fat. It’s because in the city physical labor is comparatively less valued, and people here use computers and cars rather than they’re bodies.”

“So, is there a relationship between body weight and being ugly or pretty?” I asked.

“Not necessarily, but in the villages, people think that fat people are good-looking. In America do you think that being fat is ugly?” he asked.

I said yes and he laughed. He said there was no such relationship in Uyghur society. “Well, then is there a relationship between being rich and fat, or being poor and skinny?” I asked. “No,” he said, “Though there might be a relationship, that was not something people thought consciously.”

I know I gained weight while in the States during the winter, and yet more people than ever are insisting that I’m definitely skinnier than last year. So, I still have no idea what is happening.

One night, I went out to dinner with a female friend who is overweight. She mentioned something about herself being fat, and I asked her, “what does it mean when Uyghurs say they’re fat or skinny? I mean, do people in your village think being fat is beautiful? Do girls in the city try to lose weight?”

She said, “Girls like to be skinny, not fat like me. Being fat like me is so ugly. So yeah, girls like to be complimented on being skinny, so we’ll often compliment each other by saying, “you got skinny (oruqlap ketipsiz)” when we see each other. Especially girls in the city feel happy and pretty when you call them skinny, so calling someone skinny is a nice compliment to give someone. It’s just something nice to say. Maybe 20 years ago in the villages girls were thought of as pretty if they were fat, but not anymore.”

“So, what does it mean when people call me fat?” I asked, knowing that I’m empirically pretty skinny, especially compared to her.

“Oh,” she giggled, “In your case they’re just saying you’ve changed since they’ve last seen you; it’s something people say when they haven’t seen you in a while. It's a way of acknowledging that it's been a while since the last time you two have met. It's a way to show that they care about you. Would you bother to tell that to someone you didn't care about? No. You would just say hi and move on with your life. With someone you care about, you want to say something that shows you've recognized a physical change in them. It doesn’t mean you are fat, it means you’re relatively fat since last time.”

“In America, people never comment on such things,” I explained.

“Really?? Why not?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“Weight is just not something we talk about.”

She said, “Take me for example. It’s not good to be so fat. It’s not good for my health. So, if I gain some weight, my mom will tell me, ‘you got fat.’ It’s because we can’t always see for ourselves that we are getting fat. Sometimes you don’t realize it yourself, so it’s important for someone else to point out your faults, especially when it comes to being fat for health reasons. Don’t you think it’s good to help someone out be letting them know that they are fat? Then they will lose some weight and be healthier.”

“Nope, still something we would never do.”

“Even your mom??”

“Especially my mom.”

“OK, let’s take this as an example,” she reasoned. “Say you went back to the States and you weighed like 100 kilos. Wouldn’t your mom say something?”

“Never. Especially if I had gained that much weight…”

She looked at me with her jaw hanging open in genuine shock. “Really?” she asked again.

She started to smile and shake her head back and forth in confusion. “Sorry, but that just doesn’t make any sense to not say something that everyone knows and is thinking.”

She then reiterated to me, understanding a little bit more about how sensitive a topic this was for me, “When people say that to you, since you’re not really fat, they’re just saying you’re living well, you are living comfortably, you’re eating enough and you’re probably not too stressed out and japaliq (working hard). But girls everywhere would prefer people to always say they are losing weight.”  

So perhaps saying you got fat or skinny does have different connotations based on whether you are from a village or city, where villages remain impoverished, and meat and oil are scarce luxuries. In the cities, girls have embraced the anorexic culture of self-starvation and insist that being skinny is beautiful. The combination of these two different worlds—as migrants are moving to the city in great numbers—creates a confusing situation where “you’ve gotten fat” is nothing but a common greeting to say, “are you doing well?” and to show that you care about someone. At the same time, girls also get offended by it and continue with their anorexic-like dieting.

In conclusion, the tension between tradition and modernity, between the village and the city, between wealth and poverty, continues to play out in everyday greetings.