I will never forget the first moment I started to worry about my weight. I was nine years old and visiting my grandparents in Virginia Beach for the summer. While putting on my hand-me-down bathing suit in my grandmother’s bathroom, my aunt came in to collect me. She looked me up and down, slowly extended one long finger and prodded me in the ribs.
“Aiyah,” she said. “You are getting fat.”
I am Whasian: half-Chinese, half-Caucasian. My father, a (now retired) diplomat, met my mother in Hong Kong, and the two of …