Heavy
Tight pants, belly marks, bouldering — Week Five in Amsterdam
A side wall of my middle school gymnasium was made for wall climbing.
For the Friday afternoons of an entire semester, my class of thirty kids would split into two lines and put on a harness one after another to climb. Two from the class would remain on the ground with a rope through both of their hands, keeping the climbers safe. One time, a classmate had his hand scorched while snapping back from no man’s land and only started tightening the rope when the climber was already mid-fall. The teacher fetched something from the office and applied it to his hands. I think it was honey.
With how closely parents in China can now watch their kids through technology, there would probably be no way for wall climbing to happen now at the same school. Certainly, the teacher would not have the same level of chillness when a student was hurt during the class.
At the very least, the PE teachers would be the ropers, closely watching our every move.
Halfway through the climbing wall, there was an angle change that required the climber to have a decent level of upper-arm strength, a bit of a leap of faith and a slight dynamic jump.
My body always felt extra heavy with the not so-helpful-gravity; my arms felt like noodles whenever I was about to make another attempt.
I never made it over.
Hundreds of students at my school would gather on the giant playground, later turned into multiple basketball fields, for the Monday morning gathering. The national anthem would play, we would sing it together and wait for a model student to give their speech under the raised red flag with yellow stars on it.
I remember a particular moment, maybe a week before I started my Grade One, when I was practicing the lyrics of the National Anthem inside the bathroom of my parents’ first apartment. After a shower, I stood on top of the white toilet. The lid didn’t even curve down because of how skinny and little I was. The mirror reflected the bones under my chest skin if I did a deep inhale; they were so visible. I sang loudly with the mist doing the auto-tune.
Then came the end of the summer holiday before Grade Five started. After I had unlimited access to Dove chocolates and fatty chicken soup at my grandparents’ old Shanghainese two-storey home for the entirety of July and August. My school uniform started to feel tight.
It was about the same time I started wearing a pair of glasses. Not entirely aware of the change in my body, I was looking forward to surprising the school with a whole new identity. Not having access to expensive shoes or the courage to defy my dad on my buzzcut, a pair of glasses felt like the long-awaited unlock to a new me, ready for the last year of primary school.
A favourite teacher of mine caught me in the hallway on the first day of school. She slipped out a surprised look and chuckled.
I was suddenly a fat kid. Not a cool one.
·
One of my mom’s friends gifted me my first leather belt before I departed for Brisbane.
At the Cantonese restaurant where I waited tables, the Hugo Boss belt was worn every single shift until it looked so beaten up and soaked with oil from the kitchen. It was extremely uncomfortable, but it felt like the only thing I could latch onto.
As a seventeen-year-old, I had no idea how to make myself presentable.
My dedicated working attire at the restaurant was made up of a never thoroughly cleaned and pressed white shirt, black pants steamed by unknown liquid let out from opening the dishwasher at the bar every night, and a pair of fake leather shoes. Once a colleague of mine, a slightly older girl from Northern China, offered to bleach my shirt at the end of a shift.
We were told the mom of the boss, the original owner who opened the restaurant, was set to visit the next day. She was infamous for being picky about everyone being tidy. I imagined her as the arch-villain of some Hong Kong movie.
The shirt, after bleaching, still had visible marks from me serving countless metal plates for Sizzling Mongolian Beef or Lamb, the equivalent of Honey Chicken for Mongolian friends.
I also had to explain to the girl that I was into boys after expressing my gratitude and realising perhaps she had an ulterior motive.
I hated the Hugo Boss belt and every pair of tight pants I grew up with. Whenever I sat down, I could feel the top of the belt carving into my belly. Every time I walked past a giant CK ad, I would feel jealous of the model’s slender waist and how, from whatever angle, there was never any mark.
I felt really good getting suddenly drowned by my own pants after losing some significant weight by counting calories last year. Ironically, I then suddenly found myself in need of a belt again, so my pants would stop slipping all the way down. The marks around my stomach remained.
It was either too tight, or too loose.
David handed me a new pair of baggy jeans one night two weeks ago. I had tried on one of his and we agreed that I needed a pair that was one size bigger and with a more typical blue-jeans colour.
It was a little bit odd to experience that, for the first time in my life, I had a pair of stylish pants which fit me perfectly. Unlike the loose exercising pants, this pair also genuinely complements my body shape, or at least makes my legs look a bit longer, proportionally speaking.
I linked it to another moment of realisation when staring at myself in the mirror.
One day when I was removing some notes from a piece of music sheet so that I could proceed without stretching my fingers to an impossible extent on the keyboard, I suddenly found myself pondering the size of a keyboard, or piano.
Somehow, the hand size and finger length of some white dudes determined the standard key sizes for a piano. As a consequence, I have felt bad about how small my hands were since I started learning the instrument.
It feels pretty fucked up, if I am being very honest.
Steven invited me to join their regular Wednesday bouldering sessions when I arrived in Amsterdam.
I quickly understood why bouldering had become a popular thing. It’s really good cardio and strength exercise in short bursts accompanied by a lot of time for socialising if you do it with a small group of friends together. I had since met three other new friends in Steven’s friend circle.
Being able to immediately tackle grade 3 and 4 tracks made me feel proud. I did spend the entire last year training myself to do pull-ups. I went from not being able to do any in January to seventeen in a row around Christmas time.
I found myself able to cling onto the gripping rocks while my legs both searched for their respective landing pads, almost abusing the strength I had gained from the upper-arm training.
·
I sent Steven a message on WhatsApp after getting home from last Wednesday’s session.
“Bouldering is healing my childhood trauma haha.”
“I had this particular climbing wall I could never conquer because I had no upper body strength when I was a kid.”
“Yay healing!” They replied.