“Why farang so fat?” Lil’ Noi the 16 year-old waitress from Chez Michel asked at the end of the night. “Kin mak.”
Lil’ Noi was right.
Farangs ate a lot, although not as much as a hungry Thai woman during the course of the day. Morning rice and chicken, mid-day sum tam with Chinese noodles, fruit, snacks, dinner of fried shrimp and maybe a little vegetables, then a big dinner of everything in the refrigerator followed by a bunch of satay from the evening food cart and end the evening with ice cream.
I can’t keep up with their pace and neither can Thai men, so I couldn’t tell Lil’ Noi that over-eating caused fat farangs.
“Kin mai mak. Kin mai di.” It’s not how much you eat, but what you eat.
I have studied the rock documentary GIMMIE SHELTER for any seminal signs of the epidemic obesity striking the West and edges of the developing world. The only fat people are two members of Canned Heat, a fat naked girl on LSD, and another fat black man who gets the snort beat out his by Hell’s Angels. Otherwise millions of young thin hippies.
Hippies were notoriously skinny, so I surveyed a stadium of beer-drinkers. at the 1986 WORLD SERIES GAME #6. A No really fat people in the Fenway Park stands. Bloated maybe, but not fat.
Obese Americans were a rarity, until something was added to the national diet and it wasn’t Mcdonald’s supersized meals. In the late-80s farmers from the fly-over were stuck with mountains of excess corn thanks to the federal subsidy programs. Midwestern silos were bursting with the unwanted crop until a FDA flunkie OK’ed the conversion of billions of kernels into HFCS or high fructose corn syrup as a cheap alternative to sugar.
If you couldn’t believe margarine wasn’t butter, then how smart could you be to accept high fructose corn syrup as sugar?
“Damn, it’s sweet.”
HFCS entered the food chain through soda, ketchup, jellies, yogurt, cereals, soy product additives, pastries, cakes, chips ad nauseum, except Americans didn’t get sick, unless more than 300 pounds is an illness.
I still couldn’t explain the impact of this sugar substitute to Lil’ Noi.
The 16 year-old hadn’t finished high school and worshipped 7/11, the temple to high fructose corn syrup, plus Lil Noi wasn’t fat. Only a little pleasingly plump to speed up the blood of older men to a dangerous pace.
“French man not same America. Why did they have big bellies?” French men made up the everyday clientele of the small restaurant on Soi Buffalo and frogs definitely eat better than Americans. There was only one answer.
“Farang penh uwan lahkor farang chob dim lao beer.” I blamed the Gallic waist on beer consumption.
“Thai man drink beer too. Not fat.”
“”Young not fat. Old fat.”
“So old man fat.” Lil Noi’s eyes went a funny with the realization that all men end up fat.
“Old man fat.”
“Like you.”
I weigh 90 kilos and am a six-footer. My BMI is a nudge over 25. ”I’m only a nidnoi fat.”
“Nidnoi uwan.” She laughed and rattled several Thai sentences off to the cook. They thought it was a good joke. “What part nid noi uwan?”
“Maybe my feet.” I refused to tell them that a man’s penis is the only part of his body that doesn’t gain weight, although I suspected this phenomena was common knowledge.
“Nid noi uwan.”
I gave up right there and went home to examine myself in the mirror.
Nothing nid noi about it.
At least someone thought it was funny and I might have even cried if I didn’t have a beer in my hand, for a bottle of beer will never say you’re fat.
Never.
ps Sixteen years later I haven’t been to Thailand since 2022. I was severely sick on the last trip in 2022 on which I died in a Bangkok four-star hotel and the Seoul airport. I self-reincarnated both times and lived long enough to wait for a liver transplant. Post op I weight 185, then droppped another forty-two pounds into the summer of 2022. I had tet to eeceive a liver. My life expectancy was in months, not years. Gaunt and mostly bones. My waist size was a 31.
On a road trip up to a family wedding in the Blue Hills south of Boston my friend and I stopped at a Connetuicut rest stop. Jack almost thirty drove. I was hallucinating ghosts out of the corner of my eyes. I bought a can of ginger ale. I hate plastic bottles. Jack and I were approached by a young man.
“Excuse me, sir. May I ask you a question?” he spoke with a low voice, as if his question was a secret.
“Sure.” Not knowing what to expect.
“My friend and I want to know if you with the Rolling Stones.”
“Rolling Stones?” I realized he thought I was either Keith Richards or Ronnie Woods. Jack laughed and I answered, “No, I am no one, but I am the most no one you will ever meet.”
“Sorry, to bother you, sir.”
“No both. Paint it black.”
Jack was young. Not that young, but as a cisgen they weren’t a Stones fan.
“You should have signed an autograph.”
I shook my head. I was is will be no one.
Today I weigh 189. I eat very little processed food and have foregone alcohol. I get Ozempic, but it makes me feel morose, so I don’t look like anyone in the RollingStones and that is a good thing