Bitter Melon (22 page)

Again I am touched by their support, but I’m slightly worried too. It’s not like I’m the president. If we stopped doing business with everyone who didn’t acknowledge my win, we might end up very isolated indeed.

“Do you think we should watch the American news too?” Mom asks. “What if they feature Fei Ting?”

“I could bring in the other TV,” Nellie offers.

“But which channel should we watch, seven, four, or five?” Mom says.

“Maybe we should tape them, just for keepsakes,” Theresa suggests.

Before long, we are sitting down to dinner with three televisions turned on. The little kitchen TV is playing CBS. The medium-size bedroom TV has been moved to the living area and is playing ABC. The large living room TV is playing Channel 26. That one is playing the loudest. All three are hooked up to VCRs. This attention on me is slightly nerve-racking. I want to be featured on the news, but I dread seeing myself looking ugly or stupid.

Towards the end of the Chinese news, a clip appears, showing the inside of the CAA building. We see Emerald Yeh, Wendy Tokuda, and David Louie on the screen.

“Turn it up!” Mom screams. Theresa does so. The TV shows
me shaking the VP’s hand. Then it cuts to a shot of the VP standing next to me, Stewart, and Tiffany, each holding a trophy, very similar to the photo of us in the newspaper articles. These images last maybe a second each, easily missed with a blink of an eye. Both Nellie and Theresa pat me on the back with excitement.

Then the TV shows a close-up of Ms. Taylor, who is answering a journalist’s question. I catch the first few words in English, which are quickly dubbed over in Cantonese. The Cantonese vocabulary is somewhat advanced for me, but she is saying something about more opportunities for Asian Americans.

“Why did Ms. Taylor get more time than Fei Ting?” Mom says. “If they wanted to ask questions, why not ask Fei Ting or me?”

“It’s okay,” Nellie says. “They featured Fei Ting. That’s the important thing.”

“Ms. Taylor rigged this,” says Mom. “She’s just using Fei Ting to get attention for herself.” I quietly cringe at this unfair accusation.

“Let’s see if Fei Ting was on the other channels,” Nellie says.

“No,” Theresa says. “I checked.”

Mom looks hurt, a milder version of how she looked at Mr. Lai’s butcher shop.

“Let’s rewind the tape and watch Fei Ting again,” Nellie says. Mom brightens. Theresa rewinds the tape a little, and we watch those few seconds again.

“Fei Ting, is your face really that chubby?” Mom says. She sounds surprised, like she’s seeing my face for the first time.
“Theresa, rewind the tape.” Theresa hesitates, but Mom waves her hand to hurry her along and she obeys. “There.” Mom points at my face. “Don’t her cheeks look fat?”

Stunned, Theresa, Nellie, and I stare at Mom for a moment. Then Nellie says, “Not fat. Just a little round. Very cute.” She pinches my cheek as a show of affection. But she pinches too hard, bringing tears to my eyes. At least that’s what I tell myself. It would be too humiliating to cry over this.

Now the picture changes to the anchorwoman. “Look at her,” Mom says, pointing at the anchor. “She doesn’t have fat cheeks. And Emerald Yeh and Wendy Tokuda, they don’t have fat cheeks either.” Mom holds my chin and turns my face towards hers, studying every contour. “Fei Ting will never get a TV anchor job looking like that. And look at that nose.” She points at it, her index finger just an inch from my eyes. “Too flat. I always wished she had a sharper, prettier nose. And she has no double eyelids.”

“Fei Ting looks okay,” Nellie says. “You’re just hypercritical because she’s your daughter.”

“No, you’re under-critical because she’s not your daughter,” Mom says. “Because she is mine, I don’t need to be polite. I can speak the truth. Dieting can fix the chubbiness. I bet plastic surgery can fix her single eyelids. How much would it cost?”

“Are you kidding?” Nellie shrieks. “That’s dangerous! What if they make a mistake?”

“They’re professionals,” Mom says. “Professionals know what they’re doing.”

“But what if they sneeze or have a stroke?” Nellie argues. “Then Fei Ting will be deformed. Gracie, banish the thought!”

But Mom ignores her. “I wonder if freckles show up on camera,” Mom says, squinting at my cheeks. “Fortunately, foundation can fix that.”

After the dishes are washed, and the TVs returned to their original positions, Mom and I leave Nellie’s house. As we’re on our way out, Nellie pats my cheeks and says, “No plastic surgery for you.” Then she says to Mom, “Right, Gracie?” She smiles wide, to make it seem funny, but underneath her jovial delivery is a mild worry, because she knows my mom. Mom ignores her and walks past me out the door.

Once we get home, Mom walks straight to the framed articles, scrutinizing my photos, her eyes darting back and forth between the two very similar pictures of me holding the trophy. “Gee, her cheeks do look big, bigger than the other competitors’,” she mutters to herself. “Why didn’t I notice that before?” Then she says to me, “The next time you accept your award, don’t smile so big. It makes your cheeks look even bigger.”

I blink back my tears and swallow the swelling in my throat. I scrutinize my face in those photos. I always knew that my face was round, but now it seems grotesquely swollen. The shine from my oily complexion makes my face look even bigger. In contrast, Diana has an oval face with sharp, chiseled features. Did Derek ever think that my cheeks were too big? How many times did I smile, making them even worse?

For half a day, I was Mom’s hero. I had writing and speaking
talent. That was all that mattered. Everyone else thought so—Ms. Taylor, Nellie and Theresa, even all those journalists and the CAA. If it’s good enough for them, why not for Mom? How did my speech career suddenly become a beauty pageant? No matter how hard I work, at speech or my looks, I will never amount to those girls in
Seventeen
or
Cosmo
. Once again, in Mom’s eyes, all my hard work is worth nothing.

The following Saturday morning, I feel my blankets torn off me, exposing me to the cold air. Mom pokes me in the arm. “Time to weigh,” she says. Mom pulls the scale from under the bureau and stands behind it, waiting.

“Why?” I ask. She hasn’t weighed me since I was fourteen, when I stopped growing.

“Because you need to lose weight if you want to be like Connie Chung, Wendy Tokuda, and Emerald Yeh,” she says. “Now hurry up.”

Slowly, I climb down from the bunk bed and approach the scale. Before I can step onto it, Mom begins unbuttoning my pajama top. Her fingers removing my clothes makes me feel dirty. I step away from her and close the opening of my pajama top.

“How can I know your true weight if your clothes are making you appear heavier?” Mom says.

How much can my pajamas weigh? Nonetheless, I obey and remove them. I am shivering in my undershirt and panties. Mom doesn’t believe in using the heater in the wintertime. Why spend money on frivolous luxuries like electricity or gas when we could be spending it on my schooling? Then I stand
on the scale. I shiver from the November cold while she bends over to read my weight.

“One hundred twenty-seven,” she says. Her voice drips with disgust. “You should be one hundred fifteen. No wonder you look so fat.” I flinch at the word.

“Get off,” Mom orders. I do so. Mom kicks the scale back under the bureau. Then she writes my weight on a piece of paper on a clipboard. She pulls out a measuring tape from her pocket and wraps it around my bust, then my waist, then my hips, just as they do in beauty pageants. The tape feels like a creepy extension of Mom’s fingers. Mom writes
34″-30″-35″
on her chart.

“You should be thirty-six inches by twenty-four inches by thirty-six inches,” she says.

Even if I did starve my waist down to twenty-four inches, how could I diet my bust from a thirty-four to a thirty-six, or my hips from a thirty-five to a thirty-six? Unfortunately, this logic escapes my mom.

Mom takes her clipboard to the kitchen and sticks my chart to the fridge with a magnet. Next to my chart, Mom adds a photocopy of something written in Chinese.

“What is that?” I ask.

“Your new diet,” Mom replies. “This is the diet that Siu Fong Fong uses to stay thin.” I have no idea who that is, but I’m assuming that she is one of those Hong Kong celebrities in Mom’s magazines. I hate those magazines, with their skinny girls with fair skin and big eyes. Do their mothers weigh and
measure them? Is that how they got to be so perfect, or were they born that way?

Mom twists a banana off the bunch sitting on the kitchen counter and tosses it onto the kitchen table. It lands with a thud. The edges of the banana are still deep green.

“That’s your breakfast,” she says.

That’s it? I’m used to eating frozen waffles with margarine and syrup or a Tai’s Bakery sweet bun with creamy filling. Nonetheless, I dutifully peel and eat the green banana. It tastes like paste rather than a sweet tropical fruit.

Halfway through the morning, my stomach growls voraciously. I try to focus on studying, but all I can think about is lunch, which would have been takeout
chow fun
. Instead, Mom serves me one slice of diet toast, one slice of diet cheese, and one tomato. The toast is dry. The cheese is tasteless and slimy. It looks as though it is melting, even though it is cold. The tomato tastes like cardboard.

That evening, Mom boils a chicken breast. She serves that to me—with no salt or pepper—along with the diet toast and a small salad made of iceberg lettuce, tomato, and nonfat salad dressing. She serves herself the same dinner. I’m glad. If I have to starve, then she should too. Maybe she will get tired of suffering and forget about this stupid diet. But Mom seems not to notice how bad the food is. Am I really spoiled, as Mom claims, or is Mom just incapable of tasting the difference between good and bad?

Then I remember what Mom said about eating bitter melon.
If I keep eating this, will I get used to it? Will I learn to like it? Somehow, I don’t think so.

I expect Mom to serve me different low-calorie meals each day. Instead, she gives me the same low-calorie breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. By Monday, my gastric juices are eating me from the inside out. My thoughts become frayed and frantic. Unable to bear my hunger any longer, I yank open the freezer door to sneak some Eggo waffles behind my mother’s back. But the waffles are gone. Like a homeless person, I dig through the cold, wet trash under the kitchen sink, hoping to find the waffle box there. Unfortunately, Mom has already taken out the trash. My lonely green banana mocks me from my place mat. I attack it, ripping off the peel and stuffing the banana into my mouth. My tongue leeches what little sugar it can from the under-ripe fruit. I then grab the last banana on the countertop, which is supposed to be tomorrow’s breakfast, and devour it.

During my morning classes, as my teachers lecture, all I can hear is the nagging in my stomach, which has escalated into a scream. As they write on the chalkboard, all I can see is
chow fun, cha siu
, and dim sum. My stomach growls so loudly that the other students turn to see where the noise is coming from.

Lucky for me, Mom did not factor in that Theresa and I always share our lunches. During lunch, Theresa opens her plastic container, revealing fried rice and barbecued shrimp. Its
spicy, savory aroma fills my nostrils. I salivate so suddenly that I am unable to stop the small stream of drool that falls to my blouse. I hurriedly wipe my mouth with my napkin and remove my tomato, diet cheese, and diet bread from my brown bag. Theresa blinks in surprise and looks at me. I avoid her stare, discouraging any questions. Theresa hands me a small plastic fork. Eagerly, I attack her fried rice. I don’t even bother to peel her shrimp as I shovel them into my mouth. Usually, I am careful not to eat more than half of her lunch, but this time, I can’t stop myself from vacuuming up the whole thing. In just a few minutes, the container is empty, without even a stray grain of rice sticking to the edge. Theresa has probably had only a few forkfuls.

“Sorry,” I say, red with shame.