the SKINNY
on the Model-THIN life
Confessions of an Asian American Fitness Model
by Evelyn Liu

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was born & raised in the South — home of fried chicken, bar-b-que, funnel cakes and saltwater taffy. America’s diet fixation has its least impact below the Mason-Dixon line. Tennessee is about good ol’ Southern Hospitality which involves many Thanksgiving-level meals topped off by pecan pie and a shot or two of Jack Daniels.

My college trek to Los Angeles introduced a new way of looking at food: The Enemy. UCLA is situated next to the Bel Air West Gate, Beverly Hills and Westwood, making my alma mater a mecca for wealthy, beautiful, bikini-ready "it" girls.

My first glimpse into the secret world of dieting started in the dorm bathrooms, which seemed to hold a slight odor more oft then not. A stench? Not quite. More of a lingering waft. Near the end of my first term, I was sitting around with some girls on my floor, basically complaining about this and that… our resident advisor is nosy, the rooms are too small, you catch the drift.

I brought up the bathroom smell. "You guys ever notice the weird odor in the bathroom?" It was at that moment when a circle of attractive California beauties enlightened me on throwing up as a way of life.

This concept seemed like a brilliant solution. I chastised myself - why didn’t I ever think of that before?! Then someone started talking about this one girl Kelly who threw up so much her teeth were rotting. Well, that’s a bit out of control. I’ll just use it for getting rid of a late-night pizza or two.

Fortunately (unfortunately I thought at the time) I couldn’t quite do it. Jenny corrected me; I simply didn’t put my finger down my throat far enough. I followed her instruction but when the gag reflex, which was the goal, started up, I rejected rather than embracing it. I was an unsuccessful bulimic.

In the corner dorm room lived a shy girl named Sarah, clearly an anorexic. We marveled at her self-esteem. "I never see her in the cafeteria"; "I’ve only seen her eat yogurt"; "What do you think she weighs??"

The discipline to reject the primitive instinct of eating - one has to admire that. Since Sarah always appeared pre-occupied and depressed, no one ever approached her, even to compliment. We figured she had family problems or something since her lack of food intake was an obvious success. One day she never came back to school and no one ever knew what became of her.

After graduation, I worked as a network broadcast engineer. It was a job which was oblivious to your physical shape. It was a looks-free period of my life in which daily attire consisted of sloganed t-shirts, jeans and cargo-shorts - and without fail, a belt equipped with a Leatherman Wave and a Mag-Lite. Plus, not a whole lot of make-up.

After a few years tooling around as Ms. Engineer, I burned out on TV engineering, and on a larger scale, Los Angeles. I decided life in the Big Apple would be the next phase in my life. I moved and immediately learned an important lesson: it doesn’t matter what you know, it matters who you know. Although I could ably handle eight different engineering positions, I knew nobody and nobody knew me.

The ensuing financial plummet didn’t phase me as much as it should, because I had discovered a whole world of socializing beyond college bar-crawling: the New York City scene. Not to be confused with the LA scene where people sit around posing and scanning the room for celebrities, quasi-celebrities and pseudo-celebrities.

To my parents’ chagrin, the nightlife became an outlet for work. I began manning the sacred club doors (possessing The List of who gets in and who doesn’t) at model parties and special events. This evolved to the profitable world of bartending at one of Rande Gerber’s famed Whisky Bars. The phenomenal success of Gerber’s Whiskies is no accident. PAGE 2

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