evelyn yeo

Since the moment I was born, I have always been on the smaller side. My dad liked to joke that after I was born, he would feed me so much milk that when I went back to the hospital for my first checkup, the doctor was shocked to see how much bigger I had gotten. As I continued to grow, however, my smaller stature started to become more and more prominent.

In elementary school, when my teachers would do activities such as plotting our shoe size on a dotplot or having us stand in descending height order, I was always found on one extreme side of the spectrum. And when my dad would come over for lunch, my teachers would be shocked by his height and tell me, “Wow, Evelyn, your dad is so tall!” (he’s 6’2).

In middle school, my sister—who’s 3 years younger than me—and I were mistaken as twins by one of my neighbors. This was when I started to hear phrases such as “you need to eat more” and “you need to sleep early” more often (I still hear the first one from my grandpa).

In high school, my sister had finally overtaken me in height, and instead of her receiving MY hand-me-downs, I began to receive hers. That’s when my mom began to force me to drink this nasty red ginseng drink in hopes that it would make me grow taller (it did not).

In 2023, when my family and I visited South Korea for the first time, we met some of our relatives; one of them mistook my sister as the firstborn and me as the second. While this did a little something to my ego, this is also when I discovered the origin of my shortness. Visiting South Korea, I was able to see one very common trait among my maternal relatives; they were all short. After realizing that my stature was something I could not change, and that my sister just got lucky with my dad’s genes, I really could not care about what others said about my height (not that I did before).

Now that I’m in college, I think everyone has finally come to terms with the fact that I will most likely be short for the rest of my life (except for my grandpa). As for me, I quite enjoy being short. If it weren’t for that, I would have never been able to fit into my move-in bag.