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I spent most of my adolescence with a painful, permanent indentation in my belly, the result of squeezing into jeans that were too tight for me, the button pressing angrily into tender flesh. At 13 I was already wearing the largest size available in the teens section of most of the local stores in Malaysia. By 17 I was wearing the largest available size for adults. At school, in the standard blue pinafores all Malaysian public school girls wore, I felt suffocated; the waist was always too tight. Over the years I learned how to sew just so I could unstitch the pre-sewn clasp and move it to expand the waistband, but even then I would come home at the end of the school day with red welts on my skin from the pinafore digging into me. Outside school, at the mall, other girls wore crop tops to expose defined abs; my tops were cropped because they simply didn’t cover my stomach. As a fat young person, it was always implied that my sartorial options would be limited. It was decreed, by society and by every overbearing aunty in my life, that I would be limited to loose black T-shirts, baggy dark-colored bottoms, and tankini swimsuits—the kind with frilly skirts to hide the offense of having thighs.
In the 2010s, as a 20-something millennial exhausted by the tortures of low-rise jeans, I, like many big girls my age, embraced the body-positivity movement. We followed plus-size fashion bloggers, embraced our curves, urged retailers to begin stocking more plus-size fashion. These changes have continued to push the industry to evolve—in 2021 the women’s plus-size market accounted for almost one fifth of women’s apparel sales in the US. Women above a size 14 have gone on to become successful and visible, something inconceivable when I was growing up. Ashley Graham, a size 16 host and model, continues to walk on runways and has hosted major red carpets. Paloma Elsesser, an African American and Swiss Chilean plus-size model, has become the face of a revitalized and more inclusive Victoria’s Secret. Barbie Ferreira, who at 200-plus pounds would previously only be cast as a fat sidekick, has played the stylish Kat on the acclaimed television show Euphoria. Plus-size talents have finally started making their way into film and television without being the butt of the joke.
In the same years that these women were gaining visibility, I responded to an open casting call from fashion blogger Nicolette Mason, who was looking for a diverse group of plus-size women to model for a segment on national television about fall fashions for the plus-size woman. When the producer from NBC’s Today reached out to me, I leaped into action. I may have been a broke 20-something working as a low-level associate at a PR firm, but it felt like a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I flew across the country, at my own expense, from my then home in San Francisco to New York. I crashed on a friend’s couch. I tried not to think about how I would make the rent that month after incurring this additional expense. I was vibrating with excitement, but I kept it a secret from my coworkers, didn’t even take the day off, praying that no one would schedule any kind of emergency client call while I was getting ready. The NBC town car picked me up in pitch-black darkness for my early call time.
On the Today set, I was surprised at how small the platform was. I worried I would fall off. For a brief five-minute segment, I, alongside four other plus-size women, paraded out in front of host Savannah Guthrie as she and Mason discussed plus-size fashion for the fall live for millions of viewers. The result wasn’t ideal for my television debut: My makeup was terrible, my eyebrows were much too short, and clad in a pair of too-big heels and a leather dress inexplicably labeled “military trend,” my walk was uneven. Still, I was beside myself: I, a fat woman who had spent her life hiding within her clothes, was now getting to model aspirational clothing for all of America. For years afterward, I considered this one of the best moments in my life. But still I kept it a private triumph—I limited the audience on my Facebook post and never even saved the video clip, which has since disappeared on the internet. It all felt illicit, impermissible. Fashion was still not for big girls like me.
If I did not see a world in which fashion could fit me, I also could not perceive a world in which my written words were of any value. I’ve always written compulsively: in my adolescence, in a paper diary I named Ariel, and later on the Xanga page I updated surreptitiously. Early on I tried to write a novel, then abandoned it. Often I would stroll bookshelves, roaming the aisle with all works by authors with last names beginning with Ch and dreaming of my hypothetical book sitting alongside them. But as a Malaysian woman without access to the centers of the publishing industry, reading books written almost entirely by white men, I couldn’t envision a life for myself in literature. I never felt permitted to think of myself as a writer.
Instead, I build a career writing things for others—speeches, press messaging, op-eds, and statements for CEOs, politicians, and on-air talent. I had moved to the US on a work visa; the idea of a creative career—where financial stability is not the norm—seemed like too much of a risk. When I did make attempts at writing fiction, my characters weren’t fully fleshed out—literally, they had no skin color, race, ethnicity, or background—because I was unable to imagine characters that weren’t derivative of Western works. Writing was beyond the possible. Even daydreaming felt like setting myself up on a dangerous pedestal of disappointment.
It took years to learn that both my body and stories deserve to exist—the body regardless of its shape, the stories regardless of their origin.
These days I write fiction for a living. I spend my days creating fiction about people who look like me and come from the same sunny, stormy country. When I attend book-related events, I lean toward bright colors and body-skimming silhouettes. I accept the compliment when thin women ask me where I get my clothes. And when I appeared on Good Morning America earlier this year, once again on a nationally syndicated morning show with millions of viewers, it was to talk about the book I had written, in an outfit I chose that fit perfectly—my twin rebellions for the pen and the body converging. And this time, unlike the last, I took many photos and videos of the segment and shared them with all my friends and family. I commemorated the moment as a reminder that fat immigrant women too deserve a life filled with words and style—that my body and my voice are exactly where they need to be.
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