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In Defense of the Short and Fat

It’s hard enough fighting racists, but how do you beat the “height-ists” and “flab-ists”?

Last week through the wonders of the Internet, I caught radio talk host John Williams on WGN-Chicago. WGN is a very white-bread sounding station in the middle of the whitest part of the country, where it only gets whiter this time of year because of all the snow.

As talk show hosts do, Williams was going through the news and commenting on the stories of the day. When I listened he was fascinated that China was considering a manned space flight.

A Chinese person on the moon? Williams pondered that thought and came up with a line that exposed his general image of Asians.

It’s a standard one.

He said that the thought of a Chinese person on the moon brings to mind the first words he or she might say.

And that would be?

“One step for small man.”

Ba-da-bing.

At least he didn’t say “moo-goo-gai pan,” or something egg foo stupid.

I immediately e-mailed Williams and pointed out that Yao Ming, the fellow who currently has more NBA All-Star votes than Shaq O’Neal, not to mention any member of the current Chicago Bulls squad, is a modest 7 foot 5 inches.

Even Yao Ming’s mother, for goodness sakes, is 6 foot 3 inches.

His father is 6 foot 8 inches.

My point to Mr. Williams: The day of the short Asian joke is over.

To which Mr. Williams gracefully replied: Touché.

I like a good loser.

Williams’ sin wasn’t worthy of calling some mass boycott on the Tribune Corp., owner of WGN radio. Nor is Williams this year’s Abercrombie & Fitch. But his joke comes out of the kind of thinking that Asians see again and again. It’s the kind of joke you can easily excuse. But of course, you know what Mr. Freud said about jokes.

It doesn’t help that this mentality is rampant in places where Asians generally pop up, in standard Asian Pacific American ways. You know, running restaurants, laundries and karate studios. Or spoiling the curve at the average suburban high school.

We often feed our own worse stereotypes. But that tends to be balanced by our achievements and forays in other endeavors, especially in the parts of the country where we’re prominent — mostly in Hawai‘i and the West.

So it’s perfectly understandable that a media person like Williams, in the dead of a white winter in a big city like Chicago, could make a short joke out of the Chinese going to the moon. It’s not cool, but it’s understandable. And his response shows that the one example should be enough to assure an attitude adjustment.

But it does show us it may take a bit more than a good season from Yao Ming to shake the “short” thing.

NOW WHAT ABOUT THE “FAT” THING?

If you were one of those who made a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, exercise, eat better, this section is for you.

Don’t give up.

I grew up in San Francisco’s Mission district around Dolores Park and had a Chinese American friend named Gordon.

Unfortunately for him, most of us took Spanish in junior high, so you can imagine when you’re fat and your name is “Gordon,” your nickname doesn’t become “Flash.”

In a display of our blind cruelty, we made Gordon fat in at least two languages.

I don’t know what happened to Gordon, if he ever started eating smarter or exercising, but I know he made it out of ninth grade alive. Beyond that, all bets are off.

I thought of Gordon when I read a Reuters report this week on a University of Minnesota study. Many like him aren’t making it out of high school.

Researchers at the university found that binge eating among teens was linked to self-esteem issues, which in turn, could lead to suicide.

Five thousand public school students in Minnesota’s middle and high schools were interviewed for the study, which showed that adolescents who binge eat tend to be overweight, get depressed about it and sometimes try to kill themselves.

All in all, the study published in the journal Pediatrics, found that nearly 30 percent of boys and girls who said they were overweight tried to do themselves in after binging.

After eating amok, they went amok!

Doesn’t that make you wish you’d buried all those Christmas candy tins your family got during the holidays?

The real cause for alarm isn’t the suicide part, though.

It’s that of all the participants in the survey, APA boys were most likely to report over-eating. Whites were least likely. Among the girls, African Americans were least likely to report overeating, Hispanics the most likely. APA girls? They must have been rails.

But the APA guys?

To put it politely, those husky boys couldn’t stop stuffing their mouths.

In Minnesota, could this be explained by young Hmong eating doughnuts after-hours in the family shop? Or is it just the psychological issues of snowbound immigrant transplants, trading Asian diets for their new society’s fast food, and over-eating their way into a new American shapelessness?

The study doesn’t say, but with obesity at record levels in America, and with high-blood pressure an ongoing issue in our community, we shouldn’t dismiss the findings as insignificant.

Frankly, I admit to being a little sensitive to this subject. Though my Body Mass Index would put me at pleasantly overweight, I’m pretty normal. Neither hunk nor chunk.

I wasn’t as large as my junior high school pal Gordon either. But at the elementary school level, I admit to being a “husky boy.”

What happened? In part, I grew a bit. Ate less. Exercised and played ball a lot. But perhaps too I was motivated to change my ways by a fellow Edison Elementary school fifth grader who called me “tubby.”

Why after all these years does that memory still linger?

Perhaps because there’s nothing like a weight issue to play with one’s notion of self-esteem and self-image. Fortunately, most people can do something about their weight if they choose.

Race is another story.

Still, only recently have I realized that being called “tubby” was just as scarring as any racial epithet anyone could have hurled at me.

Reach Emil Guillermo at emil@amok.com.