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ARTICLES:
Eurasian Experience
Diary
of an Anorexic By Sean December 2003/January 2004 It is simple. It is complicated. “It” is my ethnic heritage. Many have written about their own experiences of being mixed, but my own experience is one that I have never seen addressed, nor has anyone I’ve met ever shared. It is a specific disease associated with many insecurities and it remains an enigma to those who cannot understand it. This disease is anorexia nervosa. Many will wonder, well, what does anorexia have anything to do with one’s ethnicity? In my case, it had plenty. It became the solution to many of my insecurities about being part Filipino and all that it entailed. At its onset I was barely aware of its source, but as the years progressed, the disease advancing to frightening lows, I began to seek answers to this problem. I came to the sad conclusion that it stemmed from my feelings of inferiority about the part of me that is not white. It is true that there have been many teens and young women who came out of those years relatively unscathed and unaffected by the media, literature and music geared towards filling their young heads with messages to be thin, desired, accepted and successful. But there are those of us who did not escape unharmed, and this is about one young woman who failed miserably in shutting out these messages. I was further burdened by having to prove to the world that she was strong and completely unlike the stereotypes of Filipino women often seen on TV or in the movies. What are these stereotypes? That Filipino women are poor, uneducated, work abroad as domestics, prostitutes, are treated as slaves and are physically abused. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are the rich socialites who are vacuous, spoiled and intellectually lazy. One who stands out as an example lived in Malacanang Palace owning thousands of pairs of shoes. Where was the middle ground? One can imagine my frustration in trying to find positive stereotypes when on a popular sitcom, a character made a rather racist comment about Pinays being domestics as if this were the norm for that group of people. I now realize that I only need to look around me and there are many positive role models, but at the time I was merely a child who had a very limited imagination. Admittedly, I was and still am rather sensitive. I would like to think that Rosa Parks was sensitive in the same way. Allow me this delusion for I would like to think that I am raising some important points regarding the women from my Asian side. And that one of the small steps to providing young women like me, more positive media images is to object to what is being played as reality. I saw myself not as white, not fully Filipino but a mix of these two seemingly different disparate colors and cultures. I have always known that I was not white enough to be white and not Filipino enough to be Filipino. Someone who is of mixed ethnicity can appreciate this assessment. But I did relate culturally to the Filipino side because by nature, I have always been for the underdog. I am not going to get into a historical diatribe but what is worth mentioning is that Filipinos have been the underdog for literally thousands of years. So, here I was, a pre-teen, virtually a tabula rasa when it came to ideas about the world. And still as a teen, I was just as if not more susceptible to media messages. I remember seeing for the first time the movie, Full Metal Jacket. I still remember the prostitute begging for the Black man not to have sex with her because he was “beaucoup big.” Even though she portrayed a Vietnamese woman, she still resembled someone Filipino. I was not equipped with the sophistication of an adult. In my mind, they were inextricably the same. And so, shame was insidiously hatching subconsciously which will come to full fruition later in the form of the disease. Thereafter, I picked up on little things like reading somewhere that the English Oxford Dictionary’s definition for Filipina is one who is a domestic; that mail order brides existed; that there have been horror stories arising from this sort of marriage arrangement; that other Filipinos deemed native features to be inferior; that Filipinas who work in the Middle East are abused and sometimes murdered; that Filipinos in the Philippines are very poor and are seen by the rest of Southeast Asia as the relative to be ashamed of; that there are so many indignities suffered by many Pinays because they are poor and uneducated. Coincidentally, this was when I started college when I had often been asked “what are you?” At this point, I had started to diet more vigorously “just to lose a few pounds on my waist.” This was what I told friends and family. Then, not being aware of the relationship of the rising shame and my desire to lose weight, I kept on losing more, which made me feel powerful and ironically, invincible. How can one be invincible and powerful while being rail-thin and looking as weak as a hungry third world child? The reason lay in having control over something which at the time was my weight. And that there were not many Filipina-Americans who have achieved this (in my mind, this was something to be proud of). I have read many articles and books about this illness, and they have often indicated that anorexia is a middle-class white woman’s disease. Well, there you go! I had a white woman’s disease! I was that much farther from being and looking Filipino! This was great. Everything was wonderful until I realized I had dropped to a weight so low that people were suspected that I was fatally ill with some incurable disease. Of course, this was not too far from the truth: anorexia is a disease and many of those who suffer from it never recover to a normal and healthy life. What does being asked “what are you?” have anything to do with anorexia? To begin with, I had no real identity I could claim. I was neither and both. In junior high, I was like a freak--an unidentifiable person who happened to be a rather masculine girl. I did not care about make-up, fashion nor did I engage in girly activities. I was too busy playing with the guys and getting mud all over me. Still, there was a kernel of desire to be “pretty” and to be talked about by some of the boys in their secret chats about the pretty girls in school. I then equated this lack of appeal to my being mixed, having gone to an almost all white school. I am listing my train of thought here. The part of me which was unattractive must have been the Filipino part. In that case, that Filipino part had to go. So, by the end of high school when I did finally have the courage to want to be attractive and smart and desirable, I experimented with my weight for what seemed to be inexplicable reason back then. I found that by losing weight on a body that was not fat to begin with, I was on my way to achieving that waspy waist which to me was literally what it was, WASPy: White Anglo Saxon Protestant-y. Considering that I was and is Catholic, this was, as you can imagine, a real stretch. College was an eye opener and dare I say, a liberating period in my life. Not only was I in a diverse environment but I was way from the protective enclave of my family. I was able to lose all the weight I wanted. I was able to re-invent myself. But was I able to, really? In my mind, I was doing just that: re-inventing myself. But to others, I was an anorexic Eurasian young woman who was neither white nor Asian. I can see that now but not then. In college it seemed that all the women dieted: Caucasians, Asians, African-Americans, Latinas. So, it made it that much easier to justify this obsession. And by golly, I was going to be thinner than all of them. By being thinner, I made myself feel superior, a feeling that had been alien and elusive to me since I can remember when. Losing weight became an addiction because who would not want to feel superior and better than everyone else? Except I was not- I was just pathetically thin and I hungry. I was hungry for a legitimate way to be proud of myself. I was hungry for self-acceptance. Mostly, I was hungry to be accepted for who I was: Part Flip and White, a woman who was flawed but demanded and deserved respect. Now, I know and am actually glad that I cannot change my mixed ethnicity. Besides, not accepting this is not an option. Anyone who tries to deny a big part of them, I guarantee, will always feel something is amiss. It was a long road to recovery and to this realization. It was, at times, horrible because my health was in danger. Most importantly, I now know that that part of me which I was ashamed of and the shame to which my own culture’s self-hatred had contributed, is something that I have to convey. I have become a writer and in my first yet unpublished novel, I discuss this shame and this affliction called anorexia as well as other demons that have plagued my ego about being mixed. I can claim to be special or just ordinary. But what I like to claim these days is that I am a woman, a mother, a wife and yes, I am proud to be part Filipino. About
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