The Cesspool of Weight Issues in Korea and Georgia
You know that rant I keep threatening to post about weight issues in third-world countries and how Western beauty/weight ideals are a threat? This is it, because I need to focus on facts instead of how depressed I am.
Background Note #1: I am a white, cis-female American who has been fat all her life. Sometimes "fat" means "a healthy size 18". Sometimes "fat" means "an unhealthy size 12". I have never had a diagnosed eating disorder, but like many women, I've been on the self-loathing, diet-hopping rollercoaster for years. I do not traditionally exercise - you will never see me on a treadmill at a gym - but I do try to walk, dance, and maintain a healthy, balanced diet.
Background Note #2: I'm an ESL teacher who has taught in Daegu, South Korea and Telavi, Georgia. I lived in Korea for a year and I've been in Georgia for two and a half very long months. While I lived in Korea, there were a number of cultural issues that sent my self-esteem into the toilet, which I will go into detail about later. I've recognized different issues here in Georgia. This post will delve heavily into my own interpretation of those two cultures. The conclusions I draw are my own and are not meant as a blanket statement on all Korea or all Georgia.
What occasionally scares the hell out of me as both a woman and a teacher is how pervasive Western beauty ideals are in the rest of the world. When I was in Korea, they had the "thin" part down, but what they wanted more than anything was pale skin and round eyes. I once had a kindergardener's mother tell me that her six-year-old was too fat and that she would never succeed in the world because of this. Never mind that the girl was whip-smart and funny and eager to learn not only English, but many other subjects. To her mother, she was never going to be "beautiful".
In Korea, when you're above a size six, you're an Other. Your skin color and ethnicity is almost irrelevant, because what really marks you as Not Korean is your weight. The Korean genes for low body weight and small statures are sometimes so pervasive that many women (not the men, they wouldn't be so presumptuous, it's very much a cultural thing) will come up to a heavier Western woman, or a tall Western woman and ask "why are you so fat/tall?". It's not meant to be rude - it's an honest question. This happened to me in Korea too many times to count, and the curiosity didn't stop there. I had strangers come up to me on the street, touch my stomach or arms, and ask "why so fat?". I had students poke me and giggle when I reacted, like they hadn't realized it was attached to me.
I mean, what do you say to that? It's hardly worth getting angry over - they honestly don't know and they're asking you for an answer. You can't say "genetics", they won't get that either. If you tell them they're being rude, the situation will get even more awkward because offending a guest is one of the worst things you can do in Korea. Eventually, I just learned to say "I don't know" and they would just smile and go away.
The worst possible thing to do, I learned, was ask them "why are you so thin?" because that opens up a whole boatload of Issues. Women under the age of fifty are expected to be thin - if you're not, you haven't tried hard enough. They will starve themselves, try crazy diets, drink sand in their protein shakes, spend hours at the gym, play fourteen extracurricular sports . . . anything to be more "beautiful". And they will lecture you, at length, on what you're doing "wrong" and how you, too, can be "beautiful".
I'd assumed that since I could technically pass for Georgian and weight is a less-sensitive issue over here, I wouldn't have nearly as many problems. Cue the "wah-wah" music. Unfortunately, South Korea is a first-world country. Technology abounds, very few go hungry, their economy is good, vast varieties of cuisine can be found very easily, and while they're very hospitable to guests and protective of you, you do have a lot of freedoms as a foreigner in their culture. Georgia is a world of difference.
In Georgia, first of all, the piling of food onto guests is a sacred duty. The giant dinner parties, called supras, run on this rule: if you are not eating and drinking, you are not having a good time. You will begin to hate the word "tchame" (eat), because everyone will be shoving food at you and chanting it constantly. Supra food is the best of the best - the most expensive things you can afford (roast chicken, khatchapuri aka cheeseybread, khinkali aka meat dumplings, fresh cucumber-and-tomato salad, fried potatoes, various veggie salads, fresh fruit, cake, wine, etc) and the best quality you can buy. But for the day to day food, especially if you're out in the villages, you eat what you have available/what you can afford.
I can't speak for others (even other TLG-ers), but I've had the worst time trying to adjust to Georgian food. I've been sick to my stomach nearly every time I've had to eat my host-mother's cooking, and I'm beginning to suspect it's a combination of two things. First, my host family is extremely poor and the quality of ingredients is very low. Secondly, they eat onions and nettle and cilantro in everything, and those are not things which my stomach can take in any combination. I've basically been doing the Georgian binge-and-purge - I binge on the rare Western food I can get and rare Georgian food I can eat, and the rest purges itself whether I want it to or not.
I feel absolutely terrible. My blood sugar is constantly in the toilet, I'm yelled at for drinking soda, my host mother cries because I can't eat her food, and I've been surviving on bread, eggs, jam, yogurt, and pizza and/or McDonald's on the weekends. This means I've lost about twenty pounds and dropped three sizes. Everyone is delighted to see I'm getting skinnier, and assumes that I must be dieting or have some special Western knowledge of how to lose weight. All it's doing is making me cry when I look in the mirror, because I might not have a giant stomach anymore, but I feel terrible and want a piece of my mother's lasagne (all forty thousand calories and saturated fat of it) more than I want to live.
Third world countries can't afford to live up to Western beauty ideals. A lot of Georgians may be thin, but I guarantee you, their blood pressure's through the roof and their hair's falling out from the lack of bathing (sometimes you just don't have running water, other times it's nowhere near hot) and eating properly. It's extremely hard to eat a balanced diet when you simply cannot acquire fresh fruits and vegetables. It's extremely hard to get a variety of food when you have to make do with what you have. You'll eat potatoes for three weeks straight because a kilo of them is 3 lari and a tiny box of pasta is 4 lari - you do the math on which can feed a family better.
I'm trying to keep my healthy, Western-idealized fat-accepting lifestyle, but it is very, very hard when I'm staring down the third bowl of onion-and-buckwheat soup this week and a culture that wants me to "tchame!" and yet keep on getting thin.
If you made it through all that, you're my hero. Now, off to eat a yogurt and try to calm my stomach down.
Background Note #1: I am a white, cis-female American who has been fat all her life. Sometimes "fat" means "a healthy size 18". Sometimes "fat" means "an unhealthy size 12". I have never had a diagnosed eating disorder, but like many women, I've been on the self-loathing, diet-hopping rollercoaster for years. I do not traditionally exercise - you will never see me on a treadmill at a gym - but I do try to walk, dance, and maintain a healthy, balanced diet.
Background Note #2: I'm an ESL teacher who has taught in Daegu, South Korea and Telavi, Georgia. I lived in Korea for a year and I've been in Georgia for two and a half very long months. While I lived in Korea, there were a number of cultural issues that sent my self-esteem into the toilet, which I will go into detail about later. I've recognized different issues here in Georgia. This post will delve heavily into my own interpretation of those two cultures. The conclusions I draw are my own and are not meant as a blanket statement on all Korea or all Georgia.
What occasionally scares the hell out of me as both a woman and a teacher is how pervasive Western beauty ideals are in the rest of the world. When I was in Korea, they had the "thin" part down, but what they wanted more than anything was pale skin and round eyes. I once had a kindergardener's mother tell me that her six-year-old was too fat and that she would never succeed in the world because of this. Never mind that the girl was whip-smart and funny and eager to learn not only English, but many other subjects. To her mother, she was never going to be "beautiful".
In Korea, when you're above a size six, you're an Other. Your skin color and ethnicity is almost irrelevant, because what really marks you as Not Korean is your weight. The Korean genes for low body weight and small statures are sometimes so pervasive that many women (not the men, they wouldn't be so presumptuous, it's very much a cultural thing) will come up to a heavier Western woman, or a tall Western woman and ask "why are you so fat/tall?". It's not meant to be rude - it's an honest question. This happened to me in Korea too many times to count, and the curiosity didn't stop there. I had strangers come up to me on the street, touch my stomach or arms, and ask "why so fat?". I had students poke me and giggle when I reacted, like they hadn't realized it was attached to me.
I mean, what do you say to that? It's hardly worth getting angry over - they honestly don't know and they're asking you for an answer. You can't say "genetics", they won't get that either. If you tell them they're being rude, the situation will get even more awkward because offending a guest is one of the worst things you can do in Korea. Eventually, I just learned to say "I don't know" and they would just smile and go away.
The worst possible thing to do, I learned, was ask them "why are you so thin?" because that opens up a whole boatload of Issues. Women under the age of fifty are expected to be thin - if you're not, you haven't tried hard enough. They will starve themselves, try crazy diets, drink sand in their protein shakes, spend hours at the gym, play fourteen extracurricular sports . . . anything to be more "beautiful". And they will lecture you, at length, on what you're doing "wrong" and how you, too, can be "beautiful".
I'd assumed that since I could technically pass for Georgian and weight is a less-sensitive issue over here, I wouldn't have nearly as many problems. Cue the "wah-wah" music. Unfortunately, South Korea is a first-world country. Technology abounds, very few go hungry, their economy is good, vast varieties of cuisine can be found very easily, and while they're very hospitable to guests and protective of you, you do have a lot of freedoms as a foreigner in their culture. Georgia is a world of difference.
In Georgia, first of all, the piling of food onto guests is a sacred duty. The giant dinner parties, called supras, run on this rule: if you are not eating and drinking, you are not having a good time. You will begin to hate the word "tchame" (eat), because everyone will be shoving food at you and chanting it constantly. Supra food is the best of the best - the most expensive things you can afford (roast chicken, khatchapuri aka cheeseybread, khinkali aka meat dumplings, fresh cucumber-and-tomato salad, fried potatoes, various veggie salads, fresh fruit, cake, wine, etc) and the best quality you can buy. But for the day to day food, especially if you're out in the villages, you eat what you have available/what you can afford.
I can't speak for others (even other TLG-ers), but I've had the worst time trying to adjust to Georgian food. I've been sick to my stomach nearly every time I've had to eat my host-mother's cooking, and I'm beginning to suspect it's a combination of two things. First, my host family is extremely poor and the quality of ingredients is very low. Secondly, they eat onions and nettle and cilantro in everything, and those are not things which my stomach can take in any combination. I've basically been doing the Georgian binge-and-purge - I binge on the rare Western food I can get and rare Georgian food I can eat, and the rest purges itself whether I want it to or not.
I feel absolutely terrible. My blood sugar is constantly in the toilet, I'm yelled at for drinking soda, my host mother cries because I can't eat her food, and I've been surviving on bread, eggs, jam, yogurt, and pizza and/or McDonald's on the weekends. This means I've lost about twenty pounds and dropped three sizes. Everyone is delighted to see I'm getting skinnier, and assumes that I must be dieting or have some special Western knowledge of how to lose weight. All it's doing is making me cry when I look in the mirror, because I might not have a giant stomach anymore, but I feel terrible and want a piece of my mother's lasagne (all forty thousand calories and saturated fat of it) more than I want to live.
Third world countries can't afford to live up to Western beauty ideals. A lot of Georgians may be thin, but I guarantee you, their blood pressure's through the roof and their hair's falling out from the lack of bathing (sometimes you just don't have running water, other times it's nowhere near hot) and eating properly. It's extremely hard to eat a balanced diet when you simply cannot acquire fresh fruits and vegetables. It's extremely hard to get a variety of food when you have to make do with what you have. You'll eat potatoes for three weeks straight because a kilo of them is 3 lari and a tiny box of pasta is 4 lari - you do the math on which can feed a family better.
I'm trying to keep my healthy, Western-idealized fat-accepting lifestyle, but it is very, very hard when I'm staring down the third bowl of onion-and-buckwheat soup this week and a culture that wants me to "tchame!" and yet keep on getting thin.
If you made it through all that, you're my hero. Now, off to eat a yogurt and try to calm my stomach down.