TWAT BURGER

I have issues. Of that, there can be no doubt. I have body image issues. I have self-esteem issues. I have dating issues. In other words, I am a normal woman. But, I’m also an adult and am fairly aware that the rest of the world does not revolve around the issues that consume me from time to time. So, I do my best to acknowledge when the world is being tainted by the issues in my head and not by the reality of the situation. However, the longer I live, the more I notice that there are a lot of people who would just rather not make the effort.

One of the things I love most about men is their ability to pull me out of the downward spiral of self-loathing when the sisterhood turns ugly and petty. Men help me return to the rose-colored-glasses side of things when the women here turn vicious. I don’t know why but once the sisterhood turns on me, my wonderful and benevolent female friends cannot help. Perhaps it’s the fact that I have brothers and no sisters and growing up in the US, it was within the patriarchy that I found solace when the people I was “supposed” to bond with battered the ever-loving hell out of me. In China, the sisterhood is far less petty than the “Mean Girls” sisterhood of the US. However, that is not to say that the sisterhood never turns on me. Unlike the US where everything is fair game, here I can be assured that the only thing that will be attacked is the vile shape of my body.

Of the men I am surrounded by who are athletes, my body fascinates them all. A woman of my size, my musculature and my general development simply does not exist in China for reasons previously laid out. The idea that I love to play sports that might injure me (read: more aggressive than badminton), that I can carry lots of my own bags and that I don’t get winded at a single flight of stairs both confuses and fascinates the boys. Most women here play badminton between cell phone calls and I have yet to see a woman around here break a sweat while working out. My favorite thing is that every single woman I know who gets on a treadmill, stationary bike, elliptical trainer or even goes into a yoga class brings her cell phone and stops everything to answer it when it rings. The lack of commitment is beyond hysterical to me. I often find myself wondering why the women are at the gym at all.

At the chic-chic gym I belong to all the male personal trainers want to know what sports I played growing up, how long I played them, what sports I play now, how much sleep I get, what food I eat, are all American women like me and so on and so forth. They also want me in all the classes they teach for the cache of a foreigner who can keep up with the class (there are many foreigners at my gym but of all the foreign women, my Brazilian Angel and I have the most endurance). Z wants to try and use me in an advertising campaign for his gym to help pull in females to start learning sports. I think in looking the way I do, I speak to something that helps to de-stigmatize the notion of hard athletics, really sweating and enjoying kicking some ass and taking some names for women. And, when I talk with the athletic men around here, aside from my first visit to a gym, I have never once heard the words “fat” and “slim.” I feel like I can just talk to them; jock to jock. It is with older men (who have a few things figured out) and athletes that I feel in my most natural state and it doesn’t occur to me that I should be considering loathing myself.

However, I must invariably return to the locker room. For the most part, women are really cool about having me around. I am usually stared at in a benign way, as I get undressed; it’s about curiosity because perhaps white breasts are infinitely different than Chinese breasts and I can assure you I have a lot more junk in the trunk than anyone else around here. At first it was a little startling to be naked to such fanfare but now I barely notice because most of the women who watch me return, with great glee, the smile I aim at them when the staring goes on for minutes at a time. Every once and a while, though, I run into a twat burger.

The twat burger of this evening (4/11) is a woman clearly suffering from anorexia nervosa. I don’t say this as an overstatement and I don’t say this lightly. Serious illnesses are no laughing matter but to say that she needs an intervention is an understatement. She clearly had the peach fuzz around her face that happens when your body does not get enough food to stay warm, her forearms had razor burn from the hair removal and the fact that I could literally see the bones in her appendages as she moved gave it away. I would guess her hair was thinning but I couldn’t say for sure as she left her swimming cap on the whole time I was looking at her.

In all honesty, I had not noticed her until she literally shoved me to get to her locker. In a clear aisle that I could have passed through and passed me, she shoved me in order to pass. So I looked up, confused and I was met with one of the dirtier looks I’ve ever seen. Considering that I had just spent an amazing evening in a spinning class with my favorite trainer (he’s small but built like a tank and just is the sweetest thing ever; the dichotomy of his incredibly gleeful and enthusiastic personality with this body builder body is just too charming not to adore not to mention every one of his classes is the best sex I’ve had in years) and then a yoga class to mellow me out, high school locker room antics were the last thing on my mind.

Caught completely off guard and utterly confused, I turned to find an explanation. Instead, I see another woman standing next to me, sheepishly trying to pretend I wasn’t there.

The twat burger then made a comment that loosely translates to something about how the fat bitch was in her way. Her already mortified friend did her best not to flinch.

In real time, I’m very slow. So, I had a very long period of time where the wheels in my head ground to a stop from “Gee, I feel fucking fantastic” and shifted into, “It’s go time, bitch.” However, in the downshifting, I was still in the headspace of, “Did she just do what I think she did?”

Confused, I turned to my Brazilian Angel who was just a few feet away. Her look confirmed that things were as they seemed.

“I presume she meant me,” I said.

“I think so,” my Brazilian Angel regretfully confirmed and then launched into a loving-sisterhood discussion to pay her no mind and her flagrant ignorance. My Brazilian Angel’s well aware of how much I loathe the constant discussion by women and children of how unappealing my body is despite the “great beauty” of my face. At this point, it’s not the statement of my body, it’s the arrogance of an utterly naïve group. There is no way on this planet that it is acceptable to have such an obscenely narrow minded perspective on bodies and still think that you’re “worldly.” Hell, even Karl Lagerfeld is catching flack for not including women of a larger body type in his “too thin” fashion shows and his whole profession is based on hiring women so thin they mimic the two dimensional sketches he creates. In other words, where does one get off being arrogant about one’s own ignorance? It’s the piece of living in China that is, in the long run, turning out to be the hardest element for me. Because you choose the only choice you’re given does not indicate your superiority, it indicates your limitations. Outside of Fox News, I’ve never seen such a huge group of people so viciously proud of their ignorance. They wear their ignorance with great pride and sense of entitlement and by simply existing, I somehow challenge them. Simply noticing I am alive is perceived as some moment of truth for these assholes; I am the moment to test their determination towards blind faith and not reasonable thought. All this drama because I simply refuse to stop breathing. It gets really tiresome when I’m just trying to live my life but people with such toxicity feel it their divine right to take any moment they choose and blindside me with their bullshit drama.

To top it off, the putrid loathing aimed at me and constructed to make me feel like absolute garbage is really about her own body image. It has nothing to do with me, I did nothing wrong and I’m getting really tired of dancing around these issues. To quote Madonna, “I’m not your bitch. Don’t hang your shit on me.” No woman I have met in China looks at my body and sees me. She sees what she fears she looks like. I want to scream, “Stop blaming me for your fucking issues!”

The twat burger then started to undress and it was then that I realized just how skinny she was. Horrified, I spoke to my Brazilian Angel in French.

“Oh my god, she’s…” I trailed off, unable to come up with a suitable word. I have worked in the film industry. I’ve seen women with eating disorders. However, this woman is nothing on the scale of anything I’ve ever seen before. How she is not in a hospital, hooked up to an IV is a wonder to me. I’ve seen flat stomachs and I’ve seen stomachs that were so ripped, you could tell the outline of ribs. This stomach was so concave there couldn’t possibly have been any muscle tone. It was a wonder she wasn’t suffering from major organ failure right then and there.

“Gaunt” My Brazilian Angel said in French.

“No, she’s like one of those children in Africa but skinnier.” It looked like someone took an ice cream scoop and hollowed out where her stomach should have been but just left her ribs and hip bones. Her arms were so insanely thin that I could actually see the divots between the bones and the ball bearing joint of her shoulders.

They spoke in rapid fire Shaan’Xi dialect and so I was actually able to catch some of it. They were, of course, speaking of me and my sin of a body. Not my Brazilian Angel but me. I don’t quite understand why I am the lightning rod and my Brazilian Angel (who’s just as white with her curly, light brown hair) is not. Granted, I get the bulk of the attention (both positive and negative) but I don’t quite get why. I think it’s because I’m so tall.

“Oh my god. It’s like they think we can’t understand.” My Brazilian Angel noted in English.
As their conversation began to grow heated, well, actually, as the twat burger worked herself into a lather over me and her friend grew more and more quite, I figured it was time to put and end to it.

“Ni hao” I said to the friend when she finally made eye contact with me. I figured letting them know that we spoke Chinese would shame them into shutting their mouths.

“Ni hao” the friend said sheepishly.

“You speak Chinese?” The twat burger said in rapid fire, thickly accented Mandarin and the fakest “fuck you” attitude ever. And I realized she was just like the petite girl who used to relentlessly pick on me in high school because I made her feel small and insignificant. Somehow constantly badgering me was supposed to make me shorter or obedient or something. As if I couldn’t snap this girl in two. Who did she think she was kidding?

Reflexively, I stood up fully and put my hands on my hips to make myself as large as I could. “Yes, I can speak Chinese,” I replied, calmly. And then the devil got the better of me, “Do you speak English?”

“You’re that English teacher, right?” God love the gossip mill. A woman I’ve never seen before, in a gym where I don’t socialize with the patrons and yet somehow everyone knows me.

“Yes.”

“Where do you teach?” Her accent at this point got so thick and her speech so rapid that I couldn’t keep up.

The name of my school came flying out of my Brazilian Angel’s lips. The two of them proceeded to have a rapid-fire conversation about me while the twat burger refused to look away from me. She aimed every one of her questions at me while keeping her back to my Brazilian Angel.

As it became clear in the rational part of my brain that her issues were very singularly focused at me, I decided to be a rather vindictive little brat and I casually took my top off. I then took my Brazilian Angel’s moisturizer that she’s always offering me and I’m always turning down and I proceeded to moisturize the pair of breasts that are literally sending women around me to the plastic surgeon’s office.

This clearly pissed her off further but my Brazilian Angel, furious on my behalf, collected the rest of her things, I put my top back on and we left.

And, just as I was trying to convince myself that going back into the locker room and beating the twat burger’s head in with my aluminum water bottle was not a good plan I saw my favorite trainer. He smiled at me, gave me the thumbs up and just like that I was pacified.

Thank god for men.