Megan called out, “Mom, no meat for me, please!”
“But you love barbecued chicken breast. Take a little bit.”
“No way,” Megan persisted. “Do you know how many growth hormones there are in chicken nowadays? Tons. We learned about it in biology. All those chemicals can’t be good for us. And Amy says meat has cholesterol that makes you fat.”
“Yuck,” said Dong-mei. “I don’t want to eat chemicals!”
I shot Megan a look that she blissfully ignored. Kevin helped himself to a second piece. “Maybe Megan is right,” he suggested in his ironic tone. “She’s only seventeen and she’s almost full-grown. And as for Grace, in a couple of years she’ll be the tallest in the family.”
Megan had become almost obsessive about food lately, since she had become friends with Amy, a girl as thin as a stick who wanted to go into modelling. To Megan, growing seemed a sort of crime, and getting bigger was sinful. She had cut down on her meat intake, then asked me to do stir-fries with only bits of meat among the vegetables. I went along with her. I knew what she was afraid of. The hormone angle was just a ruse.
Kevin had put on some weight over the last few years. Nothing extravagant, but he had a bit of a belly now and a comfortable look about him that, frankly, I liked. But every time Megan passed him, it seemed, she’d pat him on the belly and offer some sarcastic remark. “When’s it due?” or “Better cut down on the brews, Dad.” Her snarky comments were a cover for her fear that she’d end up with a shape like her mother’s.
The girls kid me sometimes because I’m just over five feet tall, especially since both of them passed me a long time ago. I’m narrow at the shoulder and wide in the hips—or, as Dong-mei put it tactlessly one day, pear-shaped. I came to grips with my oh-so-un-chic body a long time ago, after more than enough anguish as a teenager, but in my eldest daughter’s eyes I see fear every time she looks at me.
“Well, relax, kids,” Kevin went on. “It’s your genes that will decide on your size, not what’s put into chicken feed.”
“What’s genes?” Dong-mei asked, already forgetting her new fear of chemicals and selecting the biggest chicken breast on the platter.
“We studied that in biology, too,” Megan said. “A gene is a unit of material inside our cells that’s inherited from our parents. It controls what we look like and how smart we are and … stuff.”
“Thanks,” Dong-mei said. “Now maybe Dad can translate.”
“Think of a gene as a little computer program that tells our bodies how to grow as we get older. We get the genes from our parents, as Megan said. The same number from each.”
“So we can’t choose them?”
“No, dumb-dumb, we’re born with them,” Megan answered.
“It’s not as if our whole lives are decided ahead of time,” I assured her. “Each of us was born an individual and we all have to work hard to be the person we want to be.”
But I had missed the call entirely. Dong-mei put down her fork as tears welled up in her eyes. Kevin stopped eating and looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“All Megan has to do is look at you to see how she’ll turn out,” Dong-mei said quietly. “I got my genes from two people I’ve never met.”
Kevin caught on right away. “Yes, dear, but—”
“I’m going to be ugly, then. Only ugly people would abandon their own baby.”