Chapter 23
My whole family was fat.
From my grandmother and grandfather, to my mom, dad, and even my older brother—everyone in my family loved to eat. In the evenings, sitting together and cooking delicious food was the most important part of our day.
My mom had big hands, so whenever she cooked, she made mountains of food and shared it with the neighbors. My dad was good at making snacks. My brother liked meat but didn’t care for sweets, so whenever Dad baked a cake or made milk pudding, Grandma and I ate almost all of it.
“Just eat well and stay healthy.”
That was my parents’ favorite saying. And in reality, everyone in our family was healthy.
Back then, I was the most popular kid in the village. I always smelled sweet, and I always carried snacks around with me.
I had been interested in theater since I was little, so whenever a traveling theater troupe came to town, I made sure to go see them. When the performances ended, I would wrap myself in old blankets lying around the house, pretending they were dresses, and I’d recite the lines.
Whenever I memorized and performed the lines perfectly, my family would clap and praise me.
My friends and neighbors said they liked watching my acting, so whenever there was a play for a festival, they always gave me a role.
Even I thought I had talent.
So at fourteen, I left the village alone and entered a theater school in the city.
And as soon as I got there, I realized I was different from the other kids.
On my very first day at school, the students who saw me suddenly went quiet.
They stared at me walking toward them, then started whispering among themselves and laughing.
No one spoke to me, and an empty circle formed around me.
Soon, someone said to me outright:
“You came here to act with a body like that?”
“Hey, you’d better be really, really good at acting.”
“Is your family rich? If you can’t even manage your basic figure, how do you expect to become an actor?”
“No professionalism.”
Those were the first judgments I heard from people who didn’t love me.
Throughout my time at that school, I was someone the others were allowed to look down on.
No matter what kind of acting I did in class, no matter what role I said I wanted to try, the students—and even the teachers—looked at me with that “You?” expression and subtly belittled me.
When I ate the snacks my mom and dad sent from home, people would say as they passed by:
“Can you even swallow bread right now? Must be nice to have such an easy life.”
“With a body like that, you’re still eating snacks? You really aren’t desperate enough.”
But even when I didn’t eat, the mockery didn’t stop.
I think people believe fat women don’t have sensitivity.
They think delicacy belongs only to thin women, and that if you’re fat, you must be dull. But the truth is, I had just as much sensitivity and delicacy as anyone else.
By that point, I started thinking that being fat was my fault, proof that I couldn’t manage myself.
I tried to lose weight, but it didn’t go well.
I would endure hunger until my vision turned yellow, then end up binge-eating again, over and over.
Through all of that, I kept hearing:
“Impressive. You’re still fat.”
On the day of my graduation performance, a lot of people came.
One by one, we went up on stage and performed what we had prepared.
It was something I had prepared for a whole year.
I memorized the lines perfectly, practiced blinking my eyes and bending my fingers at just the right angles so everything would look flawless.
I was really confident.
Even if I didn’t have the appearance people wanted, I believed that if they just watched my acting once, they would have no choice but to acknowledge me.
At last, it was my turn, and I stood in front of the audience.
But the hundreds of people seated before me were all showing me their side profiles.
They were all looking toward the entrance below the stage, where another student was waiting. The prettiest girl in our year.
The stage lights shone down on me, and I began my first line. I knelt on the stage, cried, and screamed—
But no one looked at me.
Not a single person, not even once, turned to face me.
I thought, “If they just see my acting once, it’ll be different.”
But I hadn’t even been given that chance.
I performed alone for fifteen minutes in front of people who all had their backs turned to me.
The theater was silent.
There was no laughter, no cheers, no applause. Because no one had watched my acting.
When I slipped once in the middle, no one reacted.
As I tried to catch my breath right before the final line, in the quiet auditorium, someone said:
“Is she still not done?”
People burst out laughing.
With my face burning red, I finished my lines as if nothing was wrong and went backstage.
The pretty girl everyone had been waiting for went up next.
The auditorium instantly filled with cheers and applause, as if nothing had happened at all.
And in the middle of that roaring applause—where even normal voices and screams were drowned out—four of my classmates dragged me to an empty lot behind the theater.
They said our school had become a joke because of me. If I loved food so much, they said, then I should eat my fill.
They laid out all the cakes that had been brought as gifts and told me to eat them all.
Without utensils, they made me eat with my hands until I threw up. Then they took pictures of me like that. One of them had a camera.
After the performance, my mom and dad came to pick me up.
I ran away home without even completing the final graduation procedures.
While I was resting in my hometown, I lost an incredible amount of weight.
I simply couldn’t put anything in my mouth.
A few years later, thinking I couldn’t live like this anymore, I looked into a mirror for the first time in a long while—and I had become a completely different person.
Right away, I went up to the capital, changed my name, and debuted.
I joined the first theater troupe that caught my eye and performed that same graduation piece I had memorized.
“Remarkable talent!”
That’s what everyone who saw my acting said.
It was the exact same acting as before.
No—if anything, it was worse.
Because I had taken years off, I stumbled over my lines several times and even forgot the final line altogether.
“After that, it became a story everyone knows. The rookie actress who appeared like a comet one day—Rosena.”
No one knew my past. There were only rumors that I was from abroad or things like that.
Reporter Skitter had followed me around since the moment I debuted, trying to dig up my past—trying to find any weakness, whether a romance or a secret patron.
“But those classmates tipped him off that I had gone to the same theater school as them.”
I heard they happily told him all the stories about how they bullied me.
How fat I had been back then. How ugly I looked running around the track every morning, sweating, trying to lose weight. How pig-like I looked, crying and shoving cake into my mouth.
“And on their way back after giving the tip, their carriage overturned, and they died. All of them. The ones who bullied me.”
Isn’t that funny?
“If they hadn’t come all that way just to hurt me one last time, they wouldn’t have died.”
“…But the film remained.”
“That’s right. The film remained. In the hands of the Imperial Daily reporter, Skitter.”
It’s all captured there.
The sight of the audience all turning away from me while I stood on stage.
Even the ugly scene of me eating cake with my bare hands.
They said I deceived the public. That I had been fat, yet pretended to be naturally beautiful. They called it fraud. But I never said anything like that. I just didn’t say that I had been bullied. Because it’s a memory I don’t even want to think about.
Do I have to tell people that?
Does everyone live their lives telling others everything? The bad memories from their school days? Is it deception if you don’t say it?
“Some people say that just by existing, I harm others. That my existence implants the idea into children and girls who dream of becoming actresses that they have to be pretty.”
“‘Since you’re a harmful existence and you pretended to be naturally gifted, it’s only right that the truth be revealed,’ was what the friend who handed over the film said.”
But is that really my fault?
When I was fat, no one looked at me.
Only after I lost weight did people finally look at me and discover my talent.
And you think I’d want to let go of that?
If it’s my fault for clawing desperately for attention, are the people who only give attention when someone is thin and pretty completely blameless?
“I’ve never bullied anyone in my life. I’ve never made anyone suffer. I was just… not pretty.”
Is that really such a big sin?
Is that what the public has a right to know?
The horrible memories I don’t want to dig up?
“I regret chasing my dream now.”
I should have lived quietly.
Done nothing. Not done what I wanted.
If I had lived the way people expected a fat girl to live—“not acting out of line”—then maybe my past, which I don’t even want to remember, wouldn’t have been revealed to everyone.
“Now that you’ve heard my whole story, you answer me.”
Am I really that bad?
