pre-ramble
I took a brief hiatus from all writing to focus on tutoring in October. Predictably, I started to get that awful itchy feeling in one’s soul where you feel like you’re being a total fake loser who is wasting her life not creating any art.
So….!
One thing I find that helps whenever I am in an inspiration slump is to revisit works I’ve written in the past (in this case, way back in November 2013 — boy was I angsty back in the day) and try to refine and keep the story going.1
A few nights ago I watched Spree, a 2020 film directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko which really captures the frenetic, paradoxical and morally bankrupt “attention economy” brought on by essentially a convergence of two of the most persistent and inevitable forces in human history: greed and technology.2
All visuals for this series are screenshots from Polish-Ukrainian filmmaker and animator Yelyzaveta Pysmak’s My Fat Arse and I,3 which was actually what inspired me to dust this story off among the graveyard of dead story attempts in my Google Drive. 🪦
So yeah, without further ado, I guess, I present to you Part One of….
Fat Ugly-Weird, 15
Korean/한국어: 뚱못이상, 열다섯-1
My name is Fat Ugly-Weird Girl. My first name is Fat, and my middle name is Ugly-Weird. My last name is Girl. I’m fifteen years old.
My mother’s name is also Fat, so I guess you could say that I’m Fat the Second.
One day I’m sitting out by the swings just minding my own business, uploading a photo of my new vintage Oxfords on Instagram when Ben Kim comes by and throws a handful of sand at my face.
Hey Fatty, why’re you so weird and ugly? His face is all screwed up like a dirty piece of crumpled up paper. I shrug. I spit grains of sand out of my mouth and shake them out of my hair.
To be honest, I don’t hate Ben. He was born super small and filled with rage. I remember looking up “fetal alcohol syndrome” once in my mom’s nursing textbook one day after school after I saw Ben’s mom is a drunk whore scribbled on his locker. He’s the shortest guy in the entire school— even shorter than Jimmy Chiu— and he’s one of the Thin Ugly Weird kids.
Maybe I should explain the classification system in our habitat, known as Douglas High: sometime in freshman year a small group of my classmates seemed to have convened a secret meeting in which they decided which among us would be grouped into various word-clusters: Fat, Thin, Ugly, Beautiful, Weird, Smart, Cool. Of course you could be in multiple clusters. It just so happened that my name and my cluster were an exact match.
My best friend in this jungle is June Kim (no relation to Ben). She’s not Fat or Ugly but she’s definitely Weird. She wears really thick eyeliner and always wears the same oversized black leather jacket, black jeans, black sweater, and black combat boots. You’d think she’d be a goth based on her clothes alone, but I happen to know for a fact that she has the biggest crush ever on Seb Pattalli, who won the annual celebrity doppelganger contest for his resemblance to that skinny curly haired guy (Finn something?) on Stranger Things last year. It wasn’t really an official contest since the yearbook kids just arbitrarily picked who looked most like a certain celebrity and held an informal voting booth outside the library on someone’s laptop. I mean, this is exactly the kind of shit that makes people shake their heads and go, “Yep, democracy’s had a good go of it up to now.”
June and I are sitting at our usual spot in the English classroom at lunch. June wrinkles her nose at what her mom packed her: kimchi fried rice with kimchi on the side and a fistful-sized portion of marinated beef.
“Wanna trade?” she says, looking lustfully at my roast beef sandwich.
“Sure,” I say, and we hand each other our respective Ziploc containers.
Another thing June and I have in common is that we’re both Asian but we don’t hang out with the other Asian kids of our kind. We go to school where the majority of us are Asians— Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern. There are white kids too of course, clumped here and there like pale pieces of cholesterol on vast yellow plasma membranes.
I’m the weird one out because I’m half-Korean, half-Iranian. You’d think that I’d look like a slightly more oriental version of Gigi Hadid, but life is a cruel lottery in a lot of ways. My older sister is the oriental Gigi Hadid— I turned out more like the coloured housekeeper from some no-name country where Western beauty standards never quite infiltrated the genetic or cultural mainstream.
Anyway, a couple of days ago I was bored and surfing around on YouTube when I came across this random-ass video of a black American writer in Paris ranting about how sorry he feels for white people in America.
It was weird, but I felt uncomfortable. Not because he was black and angry, but because I felt like he was peering straight into me and saying something that I knew was true but was too scared to say out loud.
He’s dead now— he died in 1987, which is when my dad was born. My mom was born in 1988. My dad is the Iranian one, by the way. He took off as soon as he lost his job and my mom’s voice got louder and louder, and her eyes glowed with that terrifying euphoria of drug addicts who have gleefully surrendered to the darkness.
My dad on the other hand was just a quiet guy. Once I learned the word ‘diffident‘ and thought that his photo should be there as a human example. He never really bothered to keep in touch.
The last I heard from him, I was still in elementary school. It was when I was in fifth grade. I remember this because my homeroom teacher was Mr. Green, a jovial white man who looked like he could be any one of the following: public elementary school homeroom teacher, tire specialist at Home Depot, regional manager at a medium-sized business or any number of mid-level managers across this great Multicultural Nation that both my parents had fled to from their respective (but not so respectable, I guess) home countries.
Mr. Green told me that I was really ‘conscientious’ for someone my age. That word became engraved into my soul, and became my identity. I didn’t know at the time, of course, how long it would take for me to let this die.
I held on to that word because it was the only affirmation I had received from a male authority figure up to that point. Mom, on the other hand, got increasingly more unstable. She began dating a new guy sometime last year— older, late 60s, Croatian. Bo? Joe? I forget. It’s her fourth or fifth.
I think this is why I could never quite get the whole ‘K-‘ thing.
After dad left, mom started taking out all of her anger on us. My sister dealt with it by becoming Perfect. In fact, that’s her name. She broke the curse of being Korean because she was lucky to be born with a slightly different chromosomal makeup from me— one where she got the best of both worlds. She got dad’s rocket-fast metabolism, mom’s alabaster white skin—a trait mom remains steadfastly, pathetically vain about— and most striking of all, she got dad’s truly beautiful emerald green eyes.
I could never forget the first day at our new middle school in Coquitlam, when I found my sister surrounded by a small group of decidedly mean-looking girls with matching Lululemon fannypacks who had convened their designated hazing ritual for new girls.
postscript 1
To be continued, I think? LIKE COMMENT AND OR SUBSCRIBE if you’d like to read more. 😿
postscript 2
postscript 3
I watched this in November 2025 and really matches the tone that I was going for in this piece. I’d only recommend watching this for those who can handle extremely uncomfortable truths about what’s happened to Millennials and Gen Z thanks to the wholesale commodification and gamification of all conceivable forms of late modern capitalist life.
postscript 4
This was among the many films I watched during my frenzied binge-watching sprees on Mubi (a platform I no longer support upon learning about its ties to Sequoia Capital) earlier this year. It made me realize that art is a calling that transcends flimsy human-made categories designed to keep us all in our place. Time’s up, pigs.