Traditionally, when the Chinese tell you you’ve put on weight, they mean it as a compliment, as can be seen from the way the observation is phrased: 发福 fā fú / “develop good-fortune”. The thinking behind it is: if you’re fat, you must have more than enough to eat; if you have more than enough to eat, you must be rich. Also, you don’t have to do heavy work, which would keep you thin. (The same with having fair skin: it must be because you don’t have to work outdoors, therefore you must at least be a white collar worker, if not outright rich without needing to work at all. Same thinking behind the Brits traditionally setting so much store by a tanned skin—you must be sufficiently rich to go far enough south to where the sun is.)
My mother retired at age 47 and, being very face-conscious, was concerned about her social standing image now that she no longer had to toil day and night as a midwife. Being of a naturally slim build, she decided to speed up the process of putting on weight by drinking milk, which she’d heard could make one fat.
Fresh milk was not easy to come by in those days in Singapore, if at all, so she went to a lot of trouble tracking down an Indian man not too far away from us who had a cow. An order was placed with him for a bottle to be delivered daily.
My mother would boil the milk, but some five minutes after drinking the stuff, she would go straight to the toilet. It is fairly common knowledge that the Chinese constitution is, as a general rule, unable to process dairy products since it is traditionally not a milk-drinking culture. (This might now have changed, as more Chinese are adopting Western habits.) So, what was meant to be an exercise in fattening up my mother ended up with her losing weight through the runs. The delivery was cancelled after a month.
(Singapore early 1970s)
interesting story.
ReplyDeleteI had heard that it is a compliment in China to point out how old one is. So now I see that telling somebody "You are so old and fat!" is the best way to flatter a Chinese!