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Bite Out Your Tongue

2019; Indiana University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15366936-7775718

1547-8424

Nancy Kang,

Sports and Physical Education Studies

In the junior high yearbook, there is an innocuous photo of an overweight Asian American girl running after an errant rubber ball. The balls are standard gym grade, the color of toasted salami, with a pleasing pattern of small stars stamped all over them, slightly raised to massage the fingers mid-dribble. The skin is thick enough to make a satisfying “Tang!” on the ground when kicked or flung. A good grade in physical education was key to a commendable average (90%+); a commendable average opened doors to a prestigious university (top-tier, ideally Ivy); a prestigious university charted the path to a successful career (likely medicine, engineering, accounting, or law); a successful career reaped the hard-earned rewards of a comfortable home, serene quality of life, and conscientious capacity to give back (supporting one’s parents in their vulnerable years). Such pursuits of balls, times, points, scores, ribbons, trophies, scholarships, and accolades were agonizing for fat children who puffed and blustered like anthropomorphic paintings of the West Wind, sweating profusely, tasting blood at the back of their throats. The lungs felt microwaved, the muscles sprinkled in salt and pummeled mercilessly. For amused gym teachers and cavalier peers who never had a belly press inconveniently against their thighs when sitting, it was great fun, a pitiable parade of pain.For the fat Asian, the so-called endurance runs (thirty laps of the gymnasium) were portals into the circles of hell while clad in waistless drawstring shorts and low-cost sensible “WWII shoes,” thus described by one more fashionable classmate who was ironically sporting what would have been called “sweatshop shoes.” If the affable, overweight Chinese boy Jimmy Yan could pass the gymnastics unit by launching himself into the air with a half-twist and flailing arms (the physical equivalent of screaming “Come what may!” while hurtling down a dark staircase) only to crash into the mats like a calf stunned by a slaughterhouse gun, the kid could go once more around the gym, the track, the circle, the pool, the field, and the schoolyard, in the years that moved by with a tongue clamped tightly behind clenched teeth, and still survive that endless gulping of air and acid.The kid had a prodigious head, the largest in the entire seventh-grade science class, paired incongruously with the smallest hands. Indeed, these measurements were taken, recorded, compared. The point of such an exercise remains a mystery. We no longer live in an age of phrenology, although some of us do need our heads checked for sure, and not just for lice or spiders in the ears. The “scientific” inquiry was remembered with laser acuity by this unlucky freak show. The kid imagined herself to have a bubble brain and small webbed fingers, sticky with the slime of alien difference. When she asked her mother about the odd contradiction, Mother replied, “That’s because there is a lot of brains packed in there, so your head is stretched out.” The kid imagined a mass of furiously twisted brains with boiling soup ladled over them, then poured into the skull and sealed for decades under concentrated tenderizing pressure from parents and peers. Was the on/off button in the space between her eyes, or more discreetly placed at the base of the skull? “The small hands are a gift from your simian ancestors,” joked her clever sibling, who had just read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Monkey’s Paw” in English class and found the tale lurid and fascinating. She uttered a crescendo of jungle shrieks for maximum effect.The soupy skull was perched atop a stout neck that absented itself altogether in photographs, usually thanks to an unfortunate angle that rendered the chin a sort of afterthought, like melted residue on the sides of a baking tin. Mother would declare, “She has no neck at all!” blaming the deficiency on Father, whose lineage of short necks must have evolved in Korea during the era of Japanese colonization to preempt beheading or hanging, even if it did not prevent righteous beatings. “Yeah, it’s from me!” Father would shout back. Short necks are actually a boon in old age, preventing turkey wattles and cellophane skin that the long-necked tribes are heir to once their expiration dates close in, greasy creams and lardish lotions notwithstanding. Her eyes are small and monolid “like slashes in dough,” Mother once observed drily. They virtually disappeared whenever the kid laughed. School portrait days necessitated a serious mien which typically ended up conveying either exaggerated surprise (Photographer: “Yes, open them up as wide as possible! Hold it . . . good! You can blink now. Are you okay?”) or an expression suggestive of mild insanity. Unsmiling photographs were good practice for passport photos—but certainly not mug shots. Better to close one’s eyes in death than that.The sisters had large eyes that easily accommodated contact lenses in a splendid array of colors, manifold mascaras, palettes of hummingbird powders, solid kohl and liquid liners, small stickers in shapes like stars/clovers/hearts/ice cream cones and the like, various configurations of false eyelashes (desiccated insect legs or full caterpillars), and all the other glorious paraphernalia of Maybelline eyes and manga faces. “I don’t decorate myself like girls here do,” admitted Sora Lee, a visiting student from South Korea in the same class, “but if I get into Harvard, my dad will get me plastic surgery. He promised.” To the fat kid, the prospect of having contact lenses spurred much jealousy and subtle longing. When one sibling grew up and welcomed a half-Asian child, the baby’s large eyes were a point of pride—and relief—for the sibling: “Thank God he inherited the double lids.” The fat kid, while grown up, felt something crack and bleed inside, hearing that kind of talk. She thought of Oedipus Rex, walking around with streaming red wells where the eyes used to be and felt a bit better.In high school, the kid finally acquired contacts to fulfill that long-awaited desire for true beauty. Unfortunately, they had to be hard lenses by dint of the astronomically bad prescription, which Mother spun into a point of pride because students who did not study as much as the fat kid certainly did not have poor eyesight. They spent their leisure hours hanging out on the hoods of cars, drinking cold sodas outside the corner store, maybe having sex and profoundly disappointing their parents. “My mom said that if I got a motorcycle or a tattoo, she would die,” confessed a Chinese student that the kid tutored on weekends. The threatening negative integer was also paired with considerable astigmatism. “Bad eyes, good grades,” reiterated Father proudly.At the fitting, the white optometrist was initially appalled at the grimacing and squinting that accompanied the liberal flood of tears, lashings of lubricant, and multiple attempts to plunge the two shards of plastic into the animal-wild eyes. “Well, Asian lids are typically tighter,” the professional mused with a smutty smile. Every time she looked up or to the side, the lenses shifted and cut, as if there were a nylon net that would be dragged over the corneal surface in rapid succession, fishing for floaters and minnows. The urgent and constant reminder of presence made them an impossibly aggravating luxury. Classmates joked that she looked “totally cross-eyed”; one boy, Mark Hollings, even took to spinning his eyes while puckering his lips simultaneously, resembling the Bozo the Clown she had seen on a local advertisement for the Shrine Circus. She avoided the bus stop for a few weeks to avoid this highly coordinated demon boy. Blue-eyed Heather Leacock commented quietly, “But you have absolutely beautiful eyes” after class. The kid assumed she was part of a church group, the kind that had its people approach in an overenthusiastic way and declare, “Jesus loves you so much!” Sulky and troubled, the teen asked Mother for advice on whether to keep them. Mother demanded, “Look at me.” She then declared bluntly, “Your eyes look scary. Like a cat about to jump at me in the dark. Get rid of them. Do you see eye doctors wearing contact lenses? No. They wear glasses. That means glasses are better. Smart people wear glasses. What a waste of money.” The lenses were thus retired after a mere month. The hunt for new glasses, inexpensive and able to accommodate untowardly thick lenses, began.These new glasses were gold-rimmed and mildly geriatric, the lens unnaturally wide, spanning from the tops of the eyebrows to the center of the face. When she smiled, the cheeks formed a fleshy cushion upon which the frames would momentarily rest, like some weary diner waitress taking a seat between shifts. After a while, facial oils secreted by the acne-prone skin burned through the metallic paint lining the bottom of the frames, corroding green and eventually chipping. Small red crescents formed, one on each cheek, as if branded there with little tongs, all thanks to an acute nickel allergy. The awkward duel between cheeks and frames continued until she painted the metal over with nail polish, an obnoxious red because that was the only color Mother had, and it was hidden away at the back of the second dresser drawer. Glasses were expensive given the family’s single income, and these frames were from the “Professional Men’s Collection” at Sears, the only ones that would fit such a wide, broad moon face. No dainty red plastic frames, no designer accents in two tones, no brand names alluring to girlish tastes and the expanding materialist imagination. Having frames that fit was blessing enough.With her short-cropped hair (“You need to look clean, and short cuts do that,” Father advised), men’s glasses, lack of neck, and residual Michelin tires of stomach hidden under argyle vests, tight turtlenecks, and tent-like T-shirts (accrued from volunteering at MS races and diabetes society bingos, folk festivals, film festivals, jazz festivals, and various other scholarship-minded extracurricular ventures demonstrating community involvement), it was no wonder an old white man at McDonald’s ordered briskly, “Young China boy, pass me that newspaper!” She did not correct him even though “But I’m a girl . . . ” lingered under her breath like a lit match that quickly burned itself out. She still passed him the paper with both hands, as she was taught to respect elders, even the rude ones who sipped coffee noisily, littered sugar packs all over the table, and leered at the Sunshine Girl centerfolds of young women sagging confidently out of gaudy bikinis. Not a one had glasses; not a one was Asian. She would understand that the latter were reserved for the late-night porn channels instead, tumbling over lumpy beaded cushions with blunt bangs and lips the color of a red headache. She counted her teeth with her tongue and clenched her jaw in silent annoyance. She hoped these gazing geezers would get diabetes, but only Mother ended up getting it. Years later, the fat kid—now an adult—would climb into the dumpster to find the insulin that had been thrown out by accident, with Mother calling down from the top of the bin, crying and apologizing for the inconvenience. She passed away the next year. The kid’s last memory of the body was that its mouth was open, as if to taste a spoonful of sweetness one last time.For a long while, the kid had the rounded shoulders of the desperately well-fed children of immigrants, used to sitting studiously at a library table or home desk, perhaps munching deftly cut fruit, salty-sweet nuts, or nori-laden rice crackers neurotically across from the “studying so hard” siblings. She was often hunched over a textbook, one leg shaking in nervous tension, tearing at flesh on her hands, fingers, or feet. There was sometimes a sock peeled halfway off the foot for circulation. Or, the shoulders might be curved and sloping from shelling peas or separating twigs, mouse droppings, and other refuse from a sack of dried soybeans at the dining room table after the siblings went to bed. The work was done in an efficient but not entirely invested way. She was aware of the dictum that “One must pay bap khap” (or, in literal translation, labor for the privilege of the meal in the household). If something were free and easy, it should invite suspicion, not delight. This is something the immigrant parent knows; this is something Father knew when he won a Fulbright Scholarship to Hawai‘i but a corrupt government official had Father’s name erased, only to be replaced by that of the official’s own daughter. Imagine, thought the teen, I could have been a beautiful Hawaiian. “Fat chance, Fattie,” another voice responded in her head. “Maybe they would spit-roast you over the coals and the back fat would sizzle,” someone else chimed in. Hearing stories of colonial abuses, war anguish, murdered relatives, government corruption, student protests, unjust incarceration, immigrant humiliations, and dreams deferred—or extinguished altogether—thus prompted the teen to grow up cautious, untrusting, head quick to shrink back into the body turtle-like, self-protective, vigilant, expecting loss or sadness and genuinely surprised by joy when it did come. She knew that the day she was born, her father was not let out of his job because his Ukrainian boss said no (“You did not set up any substitute, so you can’t go”) so her mother took the cab to the hospital alone. The father always uttered the chuck of his boss’s surname (Elaschuk or Minchuk or Simenchuk, something along those lines) with particular bitterness. No one remembers when she was born, as Father only comments, “After the workday was over and I arrived there, you were already asleep.” Whenever he tells this story, the kid thinks of the day he came home and smashed his thermos on the ground in frustration, shards littering the linoleum like candies from a burst piñata. Mother cleaned it up on her hands and knees.On picture day, she wore a red oxford button-down shirt, white suspenders, jeans with the bottoms rolled up, and a plastic cameo pin of a fine lady etched in coral plastic. This was Nerd Life. The close-cropped hair was a given, regularly cut while the kids would all kneel naked in the bathtub and Mother clip-clip-clipped black gold down onto the cold white ceramic. Some deft rounds with the curling iron would make for an acceptable mushroom-shaped halo, in a way like a Franciscan brother, sans tonsure but just as manly. “Nice wig,” whispered Mike Schwartz at school, slapping his leg in glee. Mike almost killed a twelve-year-old by skiing into him, resulting in egregious head and back injuries for the boy, whose name was never published. He also assaulted a girl in Science 20 by pitching her onto a lab bench with his friend Dwayne Kim, each fondling her and pulling on her splayed legs like they were wrestling a mad calf. Everyone watched but no one said anything. The teacher, who was rumored to watch porn on school computers, was not in the room at the time. The fat kid remembered he had deducted five points on a lab report because she did not underline a heading word with a ruler; she had done so by hand. She retaliated by naming a character after him during creative writing class and having him die at the hands (wings, beaks, claws) of his farm animals. It was a worthy end.In the school photos, the teen’s face is unnaturally pale, soft, and deflatable as a steamed pork bun. Father enforced the short cut rule, since short hair prevented the spread of lice and ensured that undue time would not be spent on frivolous appearance management when one’s studies clearly had precedence. Even as an adolescent, she presented the world with the figure of a masculine Asian grandmother, simultaneously young and old, impossibly awkward, solitary, wayward, and seeking.“The Kongers” (as the white students called them) were a small gaggle of immigrants from Hong Kong who rarely—if ever—spoke in English, laughed loudly in the hallways, and wore shirts with incongruous Chinglish phrases on them like “Absolutely no! A thousand times yes to a Bleu Day Trip.” These boys rated her a “one or two” out of ten among the Asian girls in the grade, apparently based on her “Northern peasant” facial features, masculine hairstyle, nonexistent personal style, and unsavory body shape that resembled someone wearing multiple layers of padded fabric to circumvent the countryside cold. The joke was, of course, that the layers were not clothing at all—but fat, ha ha! These revelations were excitedly divulged by one of her Chinese American girlfriends on a cold October day, the sun reflecting against the snow, bright and sharp and blinding. The friend had regretted it immediately upon seeing the teen’s stricken face, crying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should not have told you!” The friend’s apologetic breath blew out in a rush of cold smoke as the teen walked away, smiling and waving to say it was all right but erupting with an internal conflagration that reminded her of the Pepto Bismol ad where a pink rose is lowered into a glass of acid and comes out shriveled and grey. Her whole body felt like wrinkled pigeon’s feet resting mutely on a shit-encrusted grate in the rain.In spring, crew-cut Robbie Stone accosted the teen, his prodigious belly bouncing like a down pillow under a tight plaid shirt, in the field on the way home. He yelled, “C’mere, I’ll beat you up! Do your people really eat rats and cats and dogs?” He let loose a volley of crazed cackles that reminded her of a soldier on television who went insane after a particularly traumatic battle where his buddy was shot in the head but he couldn’t stop laughing. She had a vague recollection that maybe they had raped a village woman in the mud before that battle, and the image of the woman’s bent legs flapping and squelching there in the darkness lingered in her mind with particular acuity.English immigrant Mason Crombie had growled at her—growled as would a caged lion or cornered bear—announcing, “I love you . . . I love you, rawr!” in oddly threatening tones to wild laughter all through math class. These antics stopped after she dealt him a succession of stunning blows with the math textbook. Joe Chin, a Chinese American boy with a salamander’s bone structure, homely countenance, and the expression of perpetual languor associated with late risers or prolonged substance abuse, was among her worst bullies. He sabotaged her in French class by turning up the volume of her presentation tape to full blast; he instructed her proudly in front of the language arts class, “Go kill yourself already”; he made audible vomiting sounds while pressing himself up against the lockers in mock horror when she passed him in the hallway. Corey Scottsdale thumped like a dinosaur through the dry prairie grass after her one day as she fled the school on a late fall afternoon. In a cavernous voice, he emitted noises aping copulation, groaning, “I want you to have my babies!” while continuing an X-rated monologue about the engorged state of his private parts. She started walking a different route, through some shaded woods, grateful for the sanctuary. Mother caught her eating lunch there after a few months, as the company of trees was preferable to the madness of these sex-crazed young people. A box of cold dumplings, a packet of soy sauce, prairie wildflowers underfoot, silence on a stump: a rare delight, a sanctuary, even in winter.Again in gym class, the perpetual incubator of youth sadism, Lorenzo DiMangano leaned over and asked her loudly about her private parts (Were they slanted? What kind of hair did they have?) while everyone was sitting obediently in a line awaiting instructions. This thread of discourse was hardly new. Brett Benson had made pointed commentary to the same effect for the comedic pleasure of the fellow swimmers, surveying her body during the two-week swimming module held at a local pool. Her bulgy shape was starkly accentuated by the ill-fitting white bathing suit, one that she had borrowed from a thin sibling because there had been no funds for any swim gear of her own. One classmate, Kitty Lew, had even called her at home in the evening, offering to lend her a spare swimsuit because “The boys are talking about you, making fun—I’m not sure if you know.” Kitty was a size S or XS and had a white boyfriend. Although they were not friends and not even in the same class, the teen appreciated the sentiment all the same. It is easy to feel sorry for someone you will never be, after all, but you still get points for asking.Now Lorenzo had alarmingly long, camel-like lashes, the angular facial structure of a Northern pike, and blue eyes the color of moldy veins in Gorgonzola cheese, but he had baptized himself an “Italian stallion” and was rumored to have “bit a chick on the tit.” The teen had nothing to say about his gynecological queries or his perverted penchants. She knew that Lorenzo had asked a classmate named Bettie Pinsent out and Bettie had accepted, assuming perhaps that he admired her unbridled confidence. This trait had emerged in her ability to execute a frenetic jazz dance set at the school talent show in a tight black leotard. Some of the moves had resembled a seal slipping out of water in pursuit of a joyful rubber ball. She had worn an assertive red ruffled blouse the color of Bing cherries and lipstick to match. Bettie was sorely overweight but with her platinum blonde hair tied up in a perky side ponytail, she was consistently cheerful and well-adjusted, never once conveying a sense of illegitimacy based on her shape. The story goes that Lorenzo willfully stood Bettie up on the designated date night and when queried about his absence directly at school the next day, shouted out in a stentorian voice, “You think I would actually EVER go out with someone like you?” The Asian teen was ascending the steps to the third floor of the building and heard the exchange herself. Rumor had it that Bettie had looked Lorenzo in those rapacious blue eyes and stated, “Your loss, asshole.”Later that same gym class, perhaps vexed by her insensitivity to provocation, Lorenzo threw a basketball right into the teen’s skull with such raised-over-the-head force that it knocked the golden glasses clean off her face and bent the nose pads at a right angle, cutting the top of her nose very slightly. There was no blood, just a small red C like a slanted smile. Her right ear, which had been impacted directly by the sudden blow, flushed red and rang like a siren for a good portion of the afternoon. She stopped its clamor eventually by wetting her pinkie finger and pressing the bottom of the ear canal until a popping sound was heard. This had to be done periodically over a number of hours, obviously an odd situation when picking one’s ears is awkward enough in public company, let alone among teenagers. There were no apologies, comments, or questions from witnesses or from teachers. Mr. Perkins was too busy gawking after Elise Hawkes anyhow as she pranced through the skill sets with everything bouncing. Casual brutality was the price of unpopularity. Let the weak fall where they may.Assault by gym equipment graduated to subtler weapons by the end of junior high. Track meet was an adventure of sorts because of the blazing sun, the busy stands, the excitement of encountering other schools, fried foods at the concession, and sparse supervision. It was a toe being dipped into a space beyond the insularity of a well-manicured school field and the orderly suburban homes beyond, lining the horizon like rows of good Dutch tulips. Enter Adam Murphy, diminutive boy, elfin with large sloppy lips, crusted at the edges from sour, incessant licking, lichen-like impetigo, and teeth reminiscent of the cinematic hillbillies’ as they trundled into the city on their wooden wagons. He shot small stones through a straw at the Asian teen in a kind of ingenious aerial acupuncture. One hit the back of the neck, another the upper left quadrant of the torso, one the right thigh (with shorts, it bit somewhat less), another on the right bicep (think a sharp mosquito bite, but with a nail tip instead of a stinger). He and his friends chanted “Fat nerd, fat nerd!” as she rustled by to the shot put and discus events, rubbing the tingling spots in shocked hurt. Corpulent Greek boy Jack Kostas (who flounced through square dance class like a jellyfish through the ocean) and Adam reprised their chant during the awards ceremony that completed the year, jeering the same “Fat nerd” chorus every time she went up to accept an award. She won eight awards (“Like sweeping with a broom” Mother praised), but the photos reflect an untoward ingratitude, her scowling face on stage a commentary on the gauntlet of secret yet public abuse, leaving her devoid of any joy or pride in the year’s scholastic achievement. Later in the year, prior to her emancipation to high school, Adam had stopped her on the school steps and asked, point-blank, “Can I ask you something? Do you know you are fat?” What a pathology—the need to be acknowledged, the aggressive entitlement requiring a response. She had walked away, silent, never seeing the boy again but remembering his name and face with diamond acuity, the slant of the steps, the angles of late afternoon light, the weight of words that she never spoke, that old self-censoring clench of teeth and sense of petty torment.Desperation to earn scholarships to ease the financial burden on the aging parents meant she had launched herself through athletics, including track and field tryouts, knocking down successive hurdles like a stout pony bucking through fences at a country fair. She imitated runner Ben Johnson (prior to his cheating disgrace) with straight hands deftly chopping the air for the hundred-meter dash. She looked longingly at the easy striding of Sunny Haines, a rather neutral-looking girl, straw-colored hair whipping past like a palomino’s tail, who wore jeans so tight that they had to be yanked off in the change room by two squealing helpers. Those popular girls never bothered her though. Kristen Needham had laughed at her allergy attacks and commented, “You know you sneeze like a duck?” and made a giddy pantomime of slapping her feet on the hallway linoleum like Donald Duck. Most of these girls were too immersed in their own insecurities, eating disorders, miasmatic family troubles, and traumatic sexual awakenings for any sustained assaults on others. Runty Addie Ho was an exception: she had stolen the fellow Asian’s exemplary biology essay (of all things, on the vanishing habitat of pandas) from a bulletin board, citing that the rival scholar needed to be taught a lesson in humility. “She thinks she’s so great” was the apparent rationale for the crime, a teacher confided later after the mysterious theft was solved. The teen was truly mystified at this accusation of egotism; she could describe nothing really notable about herself. It was all because of grades; the fat teen had the highest, and that made her a source of supernal jealousy from the narrowly achievement-oriented Oriental. Tiny Addie resembled a devil’s doll-baby, decked out in pink ruffled sweaters and ostentatious rhinestone hair barrettes with slim ribbons of various colors, twisted and braided like mini maypoles. Her raucous high-pitched laughter was challenged only by her histrionic crying, which started with a few plangent notes of whimpering and inevitably rose to an industrial wail that summoned the sympathetic ministrations of peers and teachers alike. Addie’s sulky expression exuded the emotional power of an agitated Pomeranian when denied a small rubber ball. Jealousy over grades remains a petty but real phenomenon among many Asian American students, but some buck the trend. There was Jasper Chen who made such a holy mess of the kitchen in home economics class that the teacher, Mrs. Wilkes, screamed “GET OUT!” with the same gusto used for apprehending grizzly bears in the trash bins behind a suburban strip mall. Mediocre Grace Ko’s father insinuated that the fat teen had bribed scholarship officials to win a coveted city-wide award for Korean descendants because clearly, his daughter (with her B average and small-time swimming credentials) should have been chosen. Addie eventually married and became the mother of two generic boys. When the Asian teen—now an adult—ran into her at the local Staples buying back-to-school supplies, the young mother, a babbling son swinging his booted legs fitfully in the shopping cart and another whining offspring trailing behind, looked intently away.These memories testify to a youth spent in constant fear of judgment and ridicule, an enveloping expectation of hurt, shame, and callous commentary that needed to be kept silent, largely out of the assumption that enunciating such troubles would only complicate the life of her parents, siblings, some kindly teachers, as well as herself. She did not know quite how to put words to the feelings, understand the hyper-visibility of the so-called fat and ugly, and how these constraints correlated with the awkward fit of the young person of color in a white-majority school in a white-majority city in a white-majority country. She shied away from “bothering” her teachers because she had been told to keep problems to herself. She feared retaliation by the bullies, always male at that age, but who would be joined by a cadre of righteously evil women in later years, women so mean that even “Fiery Wall of Protection” oil from a hoodoo shop could hardly keep their bitchery at bay. These were, ironically, other women of color whom she met at a retreat for activist-minded minority scholars, women who gave hate stares and did not want her to sit beside them on the bus, all because she was studying what they said she shouldn’t. One even told her that she was stealing a jo