Four Chapters From My Body

1.

The week the macarena landed on MTV, I danced to it obsessively every day. That weekend, our family gathered at my grandmother's for our weekly family dinner. I hustled my cousins into the living room, got someone to put the CD on, and proceeded to teach everyone the dance.

There I was, hair plastered to my forehead in sweat, my fat body sticky, arms swinging, fay and swishy, swooping from hip to protuberant waist, hip thrust, hip thrust, one two three. My shirt has ridden up, my tummy jiggling in syncopation. My eyes, half open in childish ecstasy, connect with the eyes of one of my aunties, whose lips are pursed in a mixture of embarrassment and irritation. She says "aiyo Joel, pull down your shirt, your tummy is so obscene!"

At this time in my life, my weight was a family project. I was a very fat kid, and would remain very fat for most of my life. My Christian family projected all kinds of meanings onto that young boy's body. They recited the seven deadly sins at me, but always stressed gluttony and greed and sloth for effect. I was too young for lust and wrath and envy, which would more than gluttony, greed, and sloth, come to define my body in later years, but rarely pride.

My extended family would never leave me alone. They took it upon themselves, aunties, uncles, to pull food out of my hand, to shake their head at my mum as I ate, to never miss an opportunity to point out how much fatter I was getting.

It's always open season on the fat body, and most especially the fat bodies of children, because if it is a disease, it's best to nip it in the bud.

I didn't actually have a shameful relationship with my fatness until it started getting written into my body by the world around me. I didn't even think I was fat until people told me I was. 

And people just assumed it was greed, which of course it was, but no one ever thinks, with children, that something sad, or complex, or horrible, sits at the heart of the eating. Because most adults don't think that children have complex emotional lives. And you can keep batting the food out of the kid's hand, but the batting is more dangerous, more long-lasting, than the calories.

The truth about that Macarena story is manifold. After my performance, streaking proudly through the house, another auntie shakes her head at me and goes "Joel you're so girly, it's not good you know". And then my older brother rounds on me. At this time in my life he is a force of intense violence and anger. He grabs me by the shoulders, pulls me roughly to a stop, I flinch, he snarls, "can you just shut up, and man up, fat slob".

It's taken me many passes over my childhood to realise that it was not an entirely happy one.

To think about my childhood is to think about weeping at night under the sheets, my body recoiling from the shock of being recently hit across the face by my brother, my heart boiling over with the injustice of being disciplined for nothing, my heart sick with dread and desire at the queerness that was already beginning to form.

Of all the people in my life only my mother saw it, as mothers do, though working as hard as she did to raise us, I think all she could ever do to help soothe the pain was feed me. For that I love her so deeply, because there is nothing evil about food and comfort, and when a culture doesn't know how to talk to its children, this quiet Chinese love can be, and often is, the next best thing.

2.

In my twenties, I've come out to myself, come out to my friends, and am just beginning to come out to other gay men. The last is always the most difficult. No one tells you how difficult it is to say "I'm gay" in a room full of other gay men, no one tells you that in the spaces where you think you are free you will continually twist and turn into knots and odd, painful shapes for the men you desire.

And most especially, no one tells you how to be fat and gay, because the stories the culture tells itself are filled with men in healthy, muscular bodies, and tight fitting clothes that don't reveal womanly protuberances, but tease instead the possibilities of architectural lines, pornographic contours, hard flesh, hard masculinity. 

These are my days of lust and envy and wrath.

The phenomenology of passing through a gay club in the fat body of my 20s is this: the eye lingers on a handsome face who looks through you like you're invisible, the only touch you feel is a hand on your shoulder trying to get past, the profuse sweat that forms on your brow and back starts to raise a familiar childhood embarrassment, indeed hair begins to plaster to the forehead; the body that once moved with grace to music, now shifts in awkward jerks to hide its tectonic movements, the arms stay resolutely by the side to suppress the worship of feminine energies, a tight pulling in the gut tells you you want to be fucked, which is why you stay, but everywhere the dramatic love-making on the dance floor is reserved for thin boys, fit boys, muscly boys, the shirts off boys, the Abercrombie and Fitch boys with the nice chests and nice arms.

This experience every weekend, after the next, after the next, is like taking sandpaper to my heart.

Here is a fun memory from those times. I was at yet another gay dance party somewhere in the city, dancing chubbily with some friends, and I was in a state. I'd had too many Long Island Iced Teas.

I could feel that horrible drop in the gut coming, that familiar sense of needing to cry, like I invariably did every time I went out. This night, I didn't want to cry, I was so tired of crying.

In front of me I see two guys dancing shirtless on a podium, the whole club's collective fantasies projected onto their flesh, so seen, and felt, and adored, and worshipped, and in that moment I feel, shirt sticking to my back, sweat streaming down my face, so, so, hideous, and perhaps I am, because I grab a jug of recently-emptied drink, clutch some ice in my hand and yell, "GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE", flinging little melting bullets of hatred at them.

It's funny on hindsight, it was funny then, but it was an act of pure and violent hatred. If I could have hit them I would have, and I was prepared to, in fact I wanted them to confront me, and if my friends hadn't pulled me away perhaps we might have fought.

I think back on all these nights of rage, of wrath. I touch my palm, where I can still feel my fingers digging in with a white-hot intensity.

The other night of rage that stands out is the one where the boy I love, so deeply with misguided passion, and who at the time doesn't know how to say "I don't love you that way," looks at me after we've made out for an eternity and says "I can't have sex with you. If you lost 15kg, maybe I could". And this time I turn the rage inside, and want to burn it all away. I've had enough. That night, I weep one last time, and the next day I start to starve myself.

3.

I lost 20 kilograms, and that still wasn't enough for him. But in this new body, with its beautiful clavicles and shard of a jawline, with its waist you could put your hands around, with its fine wrists and gaunt cheekbones, I could move on. I got enough validation from the world around me, a litany of praise and delight. An older gay man looks at me approvingly as I turn up at a party, and proclaims as if bearing witness to some divinity, "you're a virgin again". How not to feel like an immaculate being of light and grace? I literally floated through the world on a sea-wind of compliments.

The body can shed fat but it stores memory, haunting, fear, and anger. The body can change, but you can still act like a wincing, frightened child, craving touch but recoiling from it.

At the height of my new swanlike beauty, I meet a boy so beautiful that I am convinced he is heaven-sent. He is seventeen when we meet, I'm twenty six, and against all better judgment we fall into what we think is love and remain together for four years, during which time he cringes to my touch, and our bodies, then our hearts, pull away.

This relationship is a cold and sexless, horrible thing. But I cling on to it the way freezing people cling to snow, willing it to be a bed of some sort. To keep myself alive, I start to eat again, and eat, and eat, and I balloon twice the size, much fatter than ever before, as if eating myself a new lover.

And this time I think I find some pride in it. "Look at what you made me do," my body said to him, "why don't you love me the way I love you?"

4.

I'm 30 and, heart bleeding from the break-up, move to London.

Leaving Singapore is also to leave behind its toxic body culture, where the only healthy bodies are thin bodies, because they are productive bodies, embodiments of our culture of efficiency and obedience. And in London, where an incredible number of languages is spoken, so too are there multiple languages of the body.

I quickly find myself in an environment of queer people of colour actively owning, performing, celebrating the full range of their desires, their misbehaving sexualities, their messy genders, all expressed in bodies of incredible diversity, individual beauty, and sexiness.

I find myself gratefully easing into this bath of messiness. It is the sexiest, most desirable I have ever felt in my fat body. I learn to hold a stranger's gaze across a room, I learn to hold my own at any size as I walked into a space, I learn to dance with my hips, I learn to ask for pleasure, and ask how to give it.

Early in my time in London, someone holds my body and says he loves its curves. I'm almost paralysed by the compliment. I feel in that moment like his hand on my waist is a gesture of benediction, and slowly a dark curse seems to be lifted.

Something has been exorcised from my body. I think it is shame. With each new hand around my waist, each benediction, each queer body I encounter that's so confident in its messiness, I feel more and more shame lift. There's a new sensation to the sex I have, of unfurling in the presence of my partner, what feels like an unclenching of my body. It's an expansion of flesh, rising against gnarled ropes. In the best moments, these ropes snap, and I find myself, the full fleshy parts of myself, the jiggling bits, the softness, rolling over, enveloping the bed.

I'm 32 now, and in the two years of healing from that toxic relationship, my body has like a ripe carbuncle of regret and self-loathing, gradually shed itself of weight. This time, I've not starved myself, nor even started exercising. It's almost as if the body is recalibrating itself, is resetting itself to meet a healing interiority.

My body has gone through so many changes, thin and fat and thin and fat, it's as if I've inhabited multiple bodies. But the fact is that I've only ever had one body, and it's only moving from one chapter to the next. But the way people read my body, it's like a new book each time, and the story they're mapping onto me now is that I'm finally happy, that I can finally stop talking about fatness, that in fact I'm disqualified from it.

But here's the truth: even in writing this, in moving through these chapters of my body, I've had to feel it all again, the words, the glances, the discipline. It sits in my body as a physical record. There are some hurts so deeply buried in the flesh of my body that they will probably never be released. Because the body keeps score, and even now, in this supposedly healed state, every day there are new notches. Now that I'm thin again, how should I eat? I catch myself sometimes skipping meals, or obsessing over calories. I catch myself every day looking in the mirror to see if there are new mounds of flesh and fat, I touch myself to determine if I'm still too soft in places.

The body is a changing, hurting, remembering thing, it remembers the pleasures of being thin, it remembers the shame of being fat, it oscillates like a bar of iron between two magnets, the tension always threatening to pull you apart. And so little of how it feels comes from within. So much of it is violently inscribed, literally carved, onto the body by the world around it. And it's all we can do to bear it, and move on, and live.