CHAPTER 68

2025-07-19

When a person starts to pay attention to diet, his/her vitality is back on track.

The need to eat until the stomach is full is the instinct for survival. I have always wanted to eat since I was a child, and I like to eat very much. I turned the instinct into enjoyment and brought fun to life. I have had many ups and downs in my life, but it never affected my appetite until I became depressed.

There are eight people in my family, seven males and one lady. My parents raised six sons. The housework was heavy, which made it difficult for my mother. The amount and variety of food consumed for dinner alone could not be reduced.

My family has a bad eating habit. Our mouths are overfunctioning. While chewing, we talk about reasoning, argue good or bad, and judge right and wrong. The voices are heightened along with the non-stop quarrels. My mother is mostly a circumstantial witness. She didn't participate in the war because of the family teaching of my maternal grandfather who is a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, and also because my mother's Hong Kong-style Cantonese is not fluent and can't catch up with her sons.

There were four people who often quarreled. My father challenged the three unfilial sons, namely the eldest, the second and me, the third. The zodiac signs in sequence were dragon, monkey, chicken and pig. The other three brothers, rabbit, horse and rat, could only watch the fight because they were young. The two sides often fought until my mother got angry and stopped us in her dialect, Haimen Teochew, to stop the fight.

As the years went by, the three of us became more and more powerful and targeted my father. He was getting old and descended to being the underdog. More often he stopped fighting when he was at a loss for words. As for me, I developed the habit of arguing and fought till the end with reasons, which eventually became one of my character traits.

The foreseeable consequence was that the six unfilial sons never respected my father, but at the same time we never quarreled with my mother and did not even dare to talk back. Looking back, this was a serious imbalance, and there were "long tails" (bad consequences) in the future, but that is a story for later.

In this atmosphere, I inadvertently developed some habits, one of which is that no matter what happens and what the environment is, I must finish the meal after picking up my chopsticks, and no matter how fierce the argument is, it never affects my appetite. So I have never tried to leave the table halfway because of emotional fluctuations. I am not as stupid as the characters in TV dramas who say, "I don't want to eat anymore" and leave the table to waste food when they disagree.

I have said so much to explain that the only period in my life when I had no appetite and interest to eat was the first few days of entering the psychiatric ward from early March to June 2019. During this period, I lost 15 pounds, that is, one pound per week. Looking back now, when I began to feel that I was not eating enough in the hospital, my condition had begun to improve.