ALWAYS THE ODD ONE OUT

Sharlene Teo on discovering that beauty comes in many forms

Growing up in Singapore in the Noughties, I attended an allgirls’ school. Every term, we’d go for health check-ups, which included a weigh-in. After stepping off the scales, the nurse would take a caliper and pinch under our arms, tutting dramatically. The year I turned 10, I was deemed to be slightly overweight and was made to join the Trim And Fit (TAF) club. Every break, we had to run around the track, and were denied the packets of milk that the other girls got. Everyone made fun of the TAF club, and it took me a week to figure out that TAF was fat spelt backwards. I remember someone pointing it out to me, the crestfallen feeling of ‘oh’.

I used to frame this anecdote as a joke but, now that I’m older, I don’t find it funny at all. Singapore is deeply sizeist and fatphobic towards girls and women. For a country that prides itself on its tremendously diverse and delicious cuisine and hearty eating culture, there is still a pressure on girls to be rail-thin. The earnest and relentlessly demure female protagonists on the local Channel 8 drama serials

I grew up watching were all willowy and slim. There seemed to be a contradiction between the food-obsessed Singaporean culture and maintaining this ascetic norm of beauty. In Singapore, slimming adverts are everywhere: on television and plastered across print and billboard adverts. The message is clear: to be thin and delicate is to fit the culturally entrenched aesthetic ideal. Asian femininity means being super-small and slim.

Exposure to these messages starts early, and the fact I didn’t conform to type made me feel like a misfit who met a failure in the mirror every day. The social shaming around the TAF club was the cause of many an eating disorder. I never fully developed one, but I did cultivate a deep and abiding guilt around food and my inability to control my appetite. Beauty was having the self-control and wherewithal not to ask for a second helping nor make any messy demands of anyone. I wished I were Thumbelina-petite, as elegant and blameless as a ballerina. I wished I pirouetted instead of galumphed through life. Most girls in my school were stick-skinny, with rabid appetites and seemingly supernatural

metabolic rates. Their wrists were half the circumference of mine. They could shovel down piles of noodles and eat any snacks they wanted, it seemed. Swimming PE lessons were another horror – I couldn’t hide my body, and we judged each other ruthlessly.

After school, I’d wander down Orchard Road – a long glossy strip of mega-malls and designer boutiques – with my friends. We would trawl through Far East Plaza, a maze of clothing stalls where my UK size 10 was considered an XL. Feeling outsized compared to everyone else equated – in my head, at least – to not being good enough. I felt like Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, gigantically out of place, a body-dysmorphic giant lost in a land of tiny people. Boys could be any size they wanted, so it felt. Sometimes I wished I were a boy, not bound by the strictures and expectations of being a girl and all the demands and denials girlhood entailed. I felt all wrong. Like an awkwardly oversized body housing a worrying brain, a bundle of nerves. I wished I didn’t have a body sometimes. I craved obliteration. If I shrank to some impossibly small frame, maybe I’d feel less shame, or at the very least I’d blend in more, and be less conspicuous in my shame.

When I was 19, I moved to England for university, and relocated to London after graduation. With a wider diversity of bodies and less fixed archetypes of beauty and desirability, I came to be more accepting of how I looked. Beauty comes in a huge, wonderful, random array of colours and sizes.

Here, I started to recognise that it was not thinness I craved, but confidence. Over the years I’d internalised the sad, toxic messages that hunger was greed, and feeling big equalled feeling bad. When we feel bad about our bodies, what we really mean is we feel uncertain about ourselves. I didn’t feel at home in my awkward body in Singapore, yet, in London, even with its far broader spectrum of cultures, sizes and shapes, I still don’t feel like my body fully fits.

Recently, I went to Singapore for Chinese New Year. Relatives commented in good-natured tones that I had gained weight. I wilted inside, remembering the shamefuelled TAF club runs. I want to get to the point one day where I’m totally unfazed by remarks like that, or even a little proud. We inhabit one body our entire lives, and it transforms itself every day in quiet and radically discernible ways: we shed and renew cells, we widen or narrow, lose hair or gain weight. This is not something to criticise, but to celebrate. We are various and mutable.

I take solace in the fact that every ‘body’ is different – I might not necessarily feel like my body fits in anywhere, but I am learning to be grateful for and to fully inhabit it. Self-acceptance is a long, snaking process; poor self-image takes decades to undo. I’m glad the conversations we have now are more tender-hearted, accepting and supportive. This is a gradual development, an open dialogue, a work in progress. I’m trying every day.

Sharlene Teo’s debut novel, Ponti

(Picador, £14.99), is available now

‘BEAUTY COMES IN A HUGE, WONDERFUL, RANDOM ARRAY OF COLOURS AND SIZES’