Bite Out Your Tongue: A Record of Ugly Youth

Gym Class

In the junior high yearbook, there is an innocuous photo of an overweight Asian American girl running after an errant rubber ball. The balls are standard gym grade, the color of toasted salami, with a pleasing pattern of small stars stamped all over them, slightly raised to massage the fingers mid-dribble. The skin is thick enough to make a satisfying "Tang!" on the ground when kicked or flung. A good grade in physical education was key to a commendable average (90%+); a commendable average opened doors to a prestigious university (top-tier, ideally Ivy); a prestigious university charted the path to a successful career (likely medicine, engineering, accounting, or law); a successful career reaped the hard-earned rewards of a comfortable home, serene quality of life, and conscientious capacity to give back (supporting one's parents in their vulnerable years). Such pursuits of balls, times, points, scores, ribbons, trophies, scholarships, and accolades were agonizing for fat children who puffed and blustered like anthropomorphic paintings of the West Wind, sweating profusely, tasting blood at the back of their throats. The lungs felt microwaved, the muscles sprinkled in salt and pummeled mercilessly. For amused gym teachers and cavalier peers who never had a belly press inconveniently against their thighs when sitting, it was great fun, a pitiable parade of pain.

For the fat Asian, the so-called endurance runs (thirty laps of the gymnasium) were portals into the circles of hell while clad in waistless drawstring shorts and low-cost sensible "WWII shoes," thus described by one more fashionable classmate who was ironically sporting what would have been called "sweatshop shoes." If the affable, overweight Chinese boy Jimmy Yan could pass the gymnastics unit by launching himself into the air with a half-twist and flailing arms (the physical equivalent of screaming "Come what may!" while hurtling down a dark staircase) only to crash into the mats like a calf stunned by a slaughterhouse gun, the kid could go once more around the gym, the track, the circle, the pool, the field, and the schoolyard, in the years that moved by with a tongue clamped tightly behind clenched teeth, and still survive that endless gulping of air and acid.

Head Case

The kid had a prodigious head, the largest in the entire seventh-grade science class, paired incongruously with the smallest hands. Indeed, these measurements were taken, recorded, compared. The point of such an exercise remains a mystery. We no longer live in an age of phrenology, although some of us do need our heads checked for sure, and not just for lice or spiders in the ears. The "scientific" inquiry was remembered with laser acuity by this unlucky freak show. The kid imagined herself to have a bubble brain and small webbed fingers, sticky with the slime of alien difference. When she asked her mother about the odd contradiction, Mother replied, "That's because there is a lot of brains packed in there, so your head is stretched out." The kid imagined a mass of furiously twisted brains with boiling soup ladled over them, then poured into the skull and sealed for decades under concentrated tenderizing pressure from parents and peers. Was the on/off button in the space between her eyes, or more discreetly placed at the base of the skull? "The small hands are a gift from your simian ancestors," joked her clever sibling, who had just read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Monkey's Paw" in English class and found the tale lurid and fascinating. She uttered a crescendo of jungle shrieks for maximum effect.

The soupy skull was perched atop a stout neck that absented itself altogether in photographs, usually thanks to an unfortunate angle that rendered the chin a sort of afterthought, like melted residue on the sides of a baking tin. Mother would declare, "She has no neck at all!" blaming the deficiency on Father, whose lineage of short necks must have evolved in Korea during the era of Japanese colonization to preempt beheading or hanging...