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On the Menu | Too ‘fat’? How America’s Next Top Model and our Chinese aunties gave us body image issues
A Chinese millennial woman talks fat and fortune as she contrasts the toxic culture of the early noughties with today’s body positivity
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It is a strange, reflective time to be a Chinese millennial woman. This week, as we celebrated the Lunar New Year, the holiday coincided with the release of the Netflix documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Watching it felt like a collision of two very different, yet equally judgmental worlds.
The documentary is a brutal postmortem of a popular reality competition created by former supermodel Tyra Banks in 2003. For 24 seasons, supermodel hopefuls were pitted against one another in increasingly bizarre challenges and regularly subjected to microscopic scrutiny – specifically regarding their weight.
It was around the era of “heroin chic”, where Kate Moss was the blueprint and a perfectly normal-sized Bridget Jones (played by Renee Zellweger) was framed as a tragic, overweight “spinster”. As a teenager, watching waif-thin women on America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) being told they were “too big” for the runway felt entirely normal.
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For many Asian women who grew up in this era, the television was not the only place we faced a panel of judges. We had our relatives.
Who among us has not done the rounds for our lai see – traditional red envelopes filled with money – only to be met with a passive-aggressive, “Oh, gosh, you look so … healthy”? In the coded language of Chinese aunties, “healthy” is rarely a compliment; it is a polite way of saying you have put on weight.
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Over dinner, it creates an even more confusing double bind: you are expected to eat to show respect for the host, yet you will be met with a raised eyebrow if you dare reach for a second piece of nin gou, or sticky glutinous rice cake.
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