Age 16

By Rachel Kurtz

Rosena Fung’s YA graphic novel, Age 16, follows Roz’s struggle towards self-acceptance. The work portrays this journey not only as a personal experience with body image, but also in a wider cultural and familial context. Fung illustrates the impact of beliefs passed down the generations and especially through maternal relationships. The work shines a light on the influences of culture in Roz’s time growing up. Through contrasting color palettes, we are also transported into her mother’s (Lydia) and grandmother’s (Mei Laan) formative years. We see each girl at 16 years old experience desires for love and acceptance, and the emphasis on female attractiveness and thinness.

This fictional, semi-autobiographical graphic novel opens in Toronto, Canada in 2000 with prom looming on the horizon. Roz’s day begins with the scale calling to her and reproaching her for her weight. Roz conjures a thin version of herself in a prom dress, admired by all her peers. The dress’s ribbon is scored with marks reminiscent of measuring tape, an apt metaphor for the importance she and her mother place on body size, and how they both despair that she doesn’t measure up to their ideal of thinness. The number on her bathroom scale haunts her, and the unreachability of this svelte silhouette she aspires to causes her to skip lunch, though her stomach grumbles in protest.

Reading this graphic novel, girls today may be surprised to learn that before ubiquitous social media, the pressure to fit in, especially with body size, was already strong for girls who might identify today as “fat.” Peers and magazine depictions of thinness added to the burden, but it is clearly her mother’s words and actions, both about her mother’s own body and Roz’s, that mold Roz’s perception of herself. Scolding Roz about eating at night her mother says, “You inherited my slow metabolism and bad genes (p. 27).”

The reader comes to understand how Roz’s mother and grandmother internalized their own beliefs about beauty and body size. Roz’s grandmother, Mei Laan, grew up in Guangdong China and at age 16 was expected to be silent and to be attractive to find someone to marry. She learned she was valued for her beauty, which included being thin. During a tumultuous time in China, Mei Laan was sent to Hong Kong to be married to a man who already had a wife. Polygamous marriage was made illegal in Hong Kong in 1970, but in Mei Lana’s time, the 1950’s, polygamous marriage were allowed for Chinese immigrants (Scully-Hill, A. 2016). She managed to escape this marriage and raise her daughter Lydia on her own in Hong Kong. When Lydia reached 16 years, she did not fit the thin ideal of her family and society and endured fat phobia all around her, and especially from her own mother. Readers see the background that leads her to carry around a calorie counter as an adult, show displeasure for her own body size in front of her daughter, and criticize Roz.

This depiction of the influence of the mothers on their daughters’ body images and behaviors is backed by studies which have linked mothers’ “fat talk” to daughters’ negative body image and disordered eating behaviors. Fat talk is defined in these studies as disparaging comments about body image and weight and includes voicing worries about their own weight and strategies to control it. Fat talk by mothers is linked to eating disorders in their daughters. (See for example Jones & Young 2021).

It is important to note that the word “fat” is not used here as a negative term but rather as a neutral descriptor in the fat acceptance community. The fictional Roz grows up in a time before the rise of body positivity and fat acceptance, however, and when she uses the term in the novel, it is to disparage herself.

This work could appeal to adolescents who feel insecure about fitting in or measuring up, not just due to weight stigma, but any differences they feel separates them or makes them somehow not okay. Roz (and with her, the reader) is empowered by understanding where her mother and grandmother are coming from and by true acceptance from friends. By the end we see, too, that the love of her mother and even her difficult grandmother, however fraught, can buoy her. By ultimately rejecting the idea that the scale defines her worth, she begins to see the possibility that she already is “who [she is] supposed to be (p. 289).”

At the end of the work, the author provides resources, including works that deal with fat phobia/weight bias as well as information and help for eating disorders. In the work itself, Roz displays problematic behaviors around food and her body such as several attempts to starve herself thin; checking behavior by weighing herself and comparing her body unfavorably to others.  There is no mention of her being diagnosed with an eating disorder, but she clearly struggles with body image and negative body image is associated with disordered eating and eating disorders (for example Maclean & Paxton 2019).

References

Jones, C. C., & Young, S. L. (2021). The Mother-Daughter Body Image Connection: The Perceived Role of Mothers’ Thoughts, Words, and Actions. Journal of Family Communication, 21(2), 118–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2021.1908294

McLean, S. A., & Paxton, S. J. (2019). Body Image in the Context of Eating Disorders. The Psychiatric clinics of North America, 42(1), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2018.10.006

Scully-Hill, A. (2016). Competing Family Law Norms: Challenging Hong Kong Law’s Conceptualization of the Ideal Family. Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 11(2), 343–365. doi:10.1017/asjcl.2016.24; https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/asian-journal-of-comparative-law/article/competing-family-law-norms-challenging-hong-kong-laws-conceptualization-of-the-ideal-family/891F581AA94B246AE2D0EB4280FDA487

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Rachel Kurtz is an aspiring graphic memoirist and a former English teacher who also holds Master’s Degrees in Creative Writing and Clinical Nutrition. During her training and practice in nutrition, she specialized in eating disorders, body image, and disordered eating. She is passionate about conquering weight stigma and advocating body neutrality. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and greyhound. Occasionally she remembers to post her work to Instagram @rachelkurtz_graphic_lit