One of the weirdest experiences of my life was when I was around 6 years old.
My family was complaining I was taking too long to finish my meals. I don't know how that was a problem and honestly still don’t. Aren’t most kids like this? I have seen other parents complain about something similar but that was normal. The difference was that I had never heard of a case like mine. Case being my family took me to see a doctor for this.
What prompted them to do this? What made them think this was serious enough to be a medical problem? Jury’s still out as to why but it was certainly weird. It felt stupid to go see a doctor just because I took a while to eat my food.
They didn’t think much of it at first. It started with the “you ain’t leaving till your plate is empty” talk. Usual. I was forced to sit by the table until I finished my food, and weirdly enough I always obeyed. I don’t know why. Things got boring so I started to find interesting things to look at. Sadly though, the only source of entertainment was the TV. In the end, I would often just abandon my meal, never finishing it. I never ate much.
Don’t get me wrong, I was hungry. But I didn’t feel like eating what was put on my plate. So what I did was preoccupied myself with TV shows to keep my mind off the hunger. Made it as if the reason I'm not eating was because of TV distractions.
My family noticed and tried to make sure I never had my meal near the TV. They blocked it off with a panel or faced me away from it. This helped a bit; I think. However, there was a glass cupboard reflecting it back to me, so all that effort was for nothing.
At one point, they were under the impression that I was wasting food deliberately. Every day I would barely eat, sitting there for hours, watching TV to pass the time and trying to shove something down since I’m hungry. Eventually they gave up and told me to leave so they could clean up. They must have had enough of this because next thing I know, they brought me to the doctor.
On the way there, I remember thinking... why a doctor? You already know what’s the problem. Fix that and I'll eat. The End. But you were just unable to accept the truth huh. You aren’t the problem, there’s just no way. So it had to be me. Because I’m a kid.
So there I was, sitting there, mom telling the doctor her kid’s taking too long to finish his meal. Even though I was only 5 or 6, it was weird seeing her describe this like it's a problem. Because up until then, I had only remembered going to the doctor when I was sick. Things that made you feel like you were dying. But this wasn't something like dying. It was just me eating slowly. It was just something I did. How bad can it be?
But nooooooooo, my mom talked about it like it was a huge problem. Like it was some sort of disease. It was as if there would be severe consequences if I didn't eat properly. "Properly” as in eating as fast as they do. Whatever that means.
I don't remember what the doctor said, what I do remember was the doctor gave me medication for this. I couldn’t believe it. The doctor actually gave me medicine for this. The doctor gave medication to a child just because they aren’t eating their food fast enough. Thinking back, it was wild they even had a prescription for this.
It was a few bottles of liquid I needed to drink after each meal. They were shaped like an eye drop bottle. This one though, you suck it, you suck it like you are sucking a baby bottle. It was weird.
Did it work tho? No, it didn’t. I still ate like I normally do. Which made me question what were in those bottles because it was useless as hell. This persisted for a while, and my mom took me back to the doctor several times. All with the same results. In all of those visits she said the same thing over and over again and the doctor would again give some medication. It wasn’t always the bottles of liquid, I remember some pills and tablets as well.
They never worked.
They really wanted it to work but it didn’t. The truth was I never had a problem finishing my meal. The problem lay elsewhere and they knew the true reason for my refusal to eat. They just weren’t willing to change for my sake.
The underlying problem was what they were feeding me. It might sound like I’m putting some unwarranted blame for this but I do feel like it has some cause to it.
For Chinese people, rice is a staple. We eat it every meal. The thing is, there are different types of rice. The most common and popular among them is white rice. The others being sticky rice, brown rice etc. We are only going to focus on white rice and brown rice. So what’s the difference?
Well “allegedly” it was said that brown rice is healthier than white rice. How much of that claim is backed by science is unknown. All I know was my family bought into it, and they bought into it hard. My grandmother is diabetic and white rice “allegedly” has a lot of sugar thus being unhealthy. So in an effort to curb down my grandmother’s diabetes, we switched from white rice to brown rice. They took it like a religion and shoved it down my throat. Literally.
Now that wouldn’t have been a problem if health was all you were going for but kids don’t understand nor care about health. Kids only care about how food tastes. To a kid like me, brown rice tasted like shit. It was like white rice but very shitty white rice. Like someone took white rice, coated it with mud, dried it then passed it off as “healthy” rice. That's how brown rice tasted like. A spoonful of it was enough to destroy my appetite. All my childhood, I was being forced to eat this abomination they call food. I’d rather not eat anything.
I’ve verbally told them many times so they knew. They knew brown rice was the reason I wasn’t eating but didn’t care. Their only concern was if brown rice is healthy, we’ll keep eating it. Nothing wrong if the kid eats it but if they don’t, we will force them until they are fine with it.
The only thing that happened next was them getting upset.
Wasting is never good and for brown rice it’s worse because of the price. Brown rice is more expensive than white rice. I know this because they just won’t shut up about it. They scolded me for it, telling me it’s bad to waste food then give me the usual talk of children starving in Africa. Classic ain’t it?
They never stopped and thought of whenever we ate outside, I would always gobble everything up like it's a feast. I ate like it's the first time I had seen so much food in my life. I finished everything, often asked for more.
Since I barely ate, I was very thin. People wouldn’t shut up about it. Relatives wouldn’t shut up about it. Even my own family wouldn’t shut up about it. They all said the same thing: “Aiyo why are you so thin? You need to eat more!” It’s understandable why everyone tells me that, but what was unforgivable was my own family saying this to me. Because it was all words and no action. They would continue to feed me the very same food knowing I won’t eat it, then rebuke me for being thin.
Somehow, they could not compromise by cooking some white rice alongside the brown rice. They eventually did, but it took them years of underfeeding me to finally realize they had to change.
I don't know where they get their sources from since it was pre-whatsapp university. The irony is, it was found out years later that brown rice is not healthier than white rice. They have different nutritional values, but brown rice is not necessarily healthy. With this revelation, they switched to white rice.
When I confronted them about this, my uncle had this to say: "Back then, the sentence was not complete”. Bull fucking shit. What does that even mean? You don't get to just enforce your ideals and by extension your practices on people just to dismiss the ideal later just because you feel like it. Then when called out, your excuse is “The sentence was not complete”.
Damn hypocrites.
At one point, they stopped worrying as much because that's when I started eating a bit more(growing up means bigger hunger too and you can’t fight that)and a bit faster. From then on their excuse was I’m just the type of kid that likes to take his time and enjoy.
Or they would label me as what they call “小吃多餐“. Meaning small eater, many meals.
These days, I eat a normal size meal with normal eating speed. Like everyone else.
This experience has taught me that some ideals are dangerous and harmful not just to yourself but also to others. Be very mindful of what you are taught and question them. Always. They might not be true or lack information. Don’t be so arrogant as to think that your beliefs are absolute, others must follow. In short, be curious, be humble.
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