한국 안산의 비즈니스 이벤트 및 컨퍼런스
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I was born in Sydney, Australia and stayed there until I was nine years old. After that, I moved to California, which, until recently, was my home. My mom is a Chinese woman from Singapore and my dad is a Chinese man from Burma, so I am an Easterner raised with the ideals of a Westerner.
Living so close to Hollywood, I definitely felt the effects of trying to achieve a perfect body. From a very young age, magazines, television and movies taught me that thinness is beautiful; anything else was disgusting.
As a child and adolescent he was quite lanky, maintaining a slim profile while consuming copious amounts of pizza, chips, and candy. I never weighed myself, never dieted, and never thought about my weight. At 17, he was 5’6″ and 120 pounds. People were always saying things like “You’re so skinny! It must be because you are Asian.” My biggest body problem at the time was my dissatisfaction with my small breasts.
After high school, when I was in my early 20s, I gained about 15 pounds. I was still eating the same stuff as before, so I knew it wasn’t the dreaded “freshman 15” that people were said to earn in college. My metabolism just started to suck. My friend was on the Atkins diet, so I jumped on the bandwagon myself. It worked great. I lost weight and got down to my high school size.
When I was 21 years old, I tried acting. At every audition, I noticed the slender girls there, they seemed so much smaller than me, even the non-Asians seemed thinner. I had packed on the pounds after Atkins, so being in the “business” made me diet again. I tried not to eat too much and went for a run. This worked too, I got my “skinny” figure back but I was starving. I was always hungry and my head ached all the time.
I ended up quitting acting for spiritual reasons, not because it was hard but because I felt like I was getting away from God. So after my restrictive diet, I went crazy. I got drunk on all things fat and sugar. I went up to about 155 pounds, the heaviest I’ve ever been. I stopped hearing that I was skinny, getting less and less stares from handsome strangers. He wasn’t fat, but he was definitely heavier. One of my closest friends at the time told me that I wasn’t as “attractive as I used to be.” Needless to say, we stopped being so close, but his words made me think a lot about my weight. My dad commented on how fat he had gained weight and that was what hurt me the most. Once he was at a friend’s house, he went out for a few minutes to talk to his girlfriend. He left me alone with his brothers and friends, whom he had known for years but was not very close to. They began to make fun of my appearance and asked if I was “stocking up for the winter.” This was the lowest I had ever felt in my life. I felt ugly.
I ended up losing 10 pounds so now I’m 145. Sometimes I can go down to 141 and other times I go up to 148, but I stay in this range, it’s been like that for about five years. I no longer get comments about my weight and feel like I’m pretty average size for an American.
The only Asian countries I have visited have been Singapore and Malaysia, which is where I live temporarily at the moment. The first time I visited these places as an adult, I definitely stuck out like a sore thumb. I was taller and thicker than most of the girls there. When I tried on clothes, it was large or extra large. I have big thighs and a big butt. While this J. Lo body may be desirable in the US, it’s not here. Chinese girls are expected to be petite and slim. Well, you can say, “Jackie, how do you know this isn’t all just in your head?” I know this because pretty much all my relatives here (that’s like 12 aunts and uncles and 14 cousins) have told me I’m “too big.” Too big for Asia, land of the “skinny Asian girl”. I have seen some bigger girls here but they are few and far between.
Last night, I was advised to lose weight in order to “fit in” and be more successful in my TV production job here. This was a huge insult to me, before I got here my weight was down to 141 and it stayed there, which I was very happy with. Also, what does my weight have to do with job performance? They told me that if I was thinner, I would look more like them, they would accept me and respect me more. I kindly listened to the advice they gave me, but I said that I was happy with my body. If I lost weight, great, if not, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep.
I may seem confident with my body, but there are many times when I look in the mirror and feel repulsed.
One of my friends in Australia, with whom I have managed to keep in touch for over 16 years, brought my poor body image to my attention when I visited there last year. He had said a phrase that many of my colleagues in the United States say; “I’m so fat!” This was said casually while trying on clothes or while eating a handful of greasy potato chips. I didn’t even realize how often I use this phrase. It was just something I said, it didn’t mean I thought I was fat, maybe I subconsciously thought that if I said it to myself, I wouldn’t have to hear it from others. My friend told me that Australian magazines try to reconstruct the body image of women. They feature women of all shapes on their covers. Even my friend, who is a blissfully plump Australian, was photographed in her underwear in the pages of Australian Cosmo. I’m proud that she’s proud of her appearance.
I really wanted to write about this topic, not just as an Asian woman, but as a woman in general. We are constantly bombarded with images that tell us that we have to look one way or another. We all buy it. As a larger Asian woman, I feel that other larger Asian women (ie those who are not a negative size 14) feel much more pressure to be skinny than the average woman. Every race has its stereotypes. White men can’t dance. White men can’t jump. Blacks are thugs. All blacks are basketball players. Asians can’t drive. All Asians are skinny. Well, I disagree and I’m sure many of you do too. Justin Timberlake is a white man with extraordinary dancing skills. Larry Bird was a white man who could jump. Barack Obama (2008 US presidential candidate) is a black man who is far from a thug. And I, Jackqueline Lou, am NOT a skinny Asian.
And I’m fine with that.
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