Author and violinist Ling Ling Huang joins us to discuss her new novel, Natural Beauty, and the fraught nature of that term; how working in the clean-beauty and wellness space affected her eating-disorder recovery and her mental health; why she invested so much in wellness culture at a time in her life when she could barely afford food; the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures in wellness; and lots more.
Ling Ling Huang is a writer and violinist. She plays with several ensembles including the Music Kitchen, Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra, Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, Shattered Glass, and Experiential Orchestra, with whom she won a Grammy award in 2021. Natural Beauty is her first novel. Learn more about her work at linglinghuang.com.
Resources and References
Ling Ling’s novel, Natural Beauty
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Fen, Bog, and Swamp by Annie Proulx
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being. I’m your host Christy Harrison and I’m a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25 and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there! Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and my guest today is author and violinist Ling Ling Huang. We talk about her incredible novel, Natural Beauty, and the fraught nature of that term; how working in the clean-beauty and wellness space affected her eating-disorder recovery and her mental health; why she invested so much in wellness culture at a time in her life when she could barely afford food; the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures in wellness; and lots more. I loved this conversation, and I can’t wait to share it with you shortly. Before I do, a few quick announcements.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at Substack. Not only do paid subscriptions help support the show and keep me able to make the best free content I possibly can, but they also get you great perks like early access to every episode, bonus episodes (including one I did with this week’s guest), biweekly bonus Q&As, subscriber-only comment threads where you can connect with other listeners, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up.
This episode is also brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! The book explores the connections between diet culture and wellness culture; how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories; why many popular alternative-medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful—and what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true well-being. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. Or just pop into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there. Now, without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Ling Ling Huang.
So Ling Ling, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be talking with you about your story and your book Natural Beauty, which I think listeners of this podcast will really resonate with. It's so and haunting and I just can't stop thinking about it, so I'm really excited for people to explore it and experience it for themselves. And I'd love to start off first by having you tell us about your history with wellness culture and sort of how you came to write this book.
Ling Ling Huang: Sure. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I am such a big fan of yours, so this is really wonderful. I was thinking about where my interest in wellness started, and it wasn't until I was reading The Wellness Trap that I really remembered. I had a friend who had, both of her parents had different kinds of cancers and I was 12 at the time when they were undergoing treatment, and of course now I know that they were going through chemotherapy and doing all the things that are suggested for cancer, but what they really glommed onto as having saved them both was this really intense restrictive diet. It changed their lifestyles and whenever I visited I would see all of these alternative medicines and things that they were trying that really stuck with me even though I didn't really start on my own wellness journey for many years.
That really affected me and I got really interested in clean beauty. I would say maybe eight to 10 years ago. It was a new field back then it felt like, and when I had the opportunity to work at a clean beauty and wellness store, it was kind of this, all of my interests aligned and I really was excited. I drank the Kool-Aid hard when I worked there for the first few months and slowly over time I started to just have too many questions to continue in that space and I feel like I'm still on a journey of unlearning a lot of the things that I learned there, and actually there was still so much Disinformation about the wellness culture in general that I felt like finally with The Wellness Trap, I kind of was able to see more clearly. So thank you for writing that. So that's kind of been my journey and it's a journey that continues trying to find wellbeing as you put it, and it's really fun and Intuitive now, which feels great.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's huge. I'm so glad The Wellness Trap was helpful to you. That's really awesome to hear. And yeah, I think it's like the Disinformation is so deeply embedded in wellness culture and when you've spent so much time in those spaces too, it can just be, there's just so many layers to unpick, I guess. And you've written too that you had your own history of an eating disorder and that working in the clean beauty and wellness space kind of tested your recovery, so I'm curious about how it affected your recovery and your mental health more generally.
Ling Ling Huang: So I had an eating disorder really badly when I was, I would say from 11 to maybe 15 or 16, and then I started recovering, but I felt like I still had it. A lot of the wellness industry really reminds me of the time when I was really religious, which I'm not religious anymore, but there is a focus on perfection that I feel like ends up bleeding into every level of your life. And so when I was religious, I felt like I was recovered. I'm supposed to be loved for who I am, but I was severely diluted. I had disordered eating and it was all part of becoming this perfect person who is religious, and I felt like that was coming back with the wellness industry stuff and especially at the store where I worked, a common entire meal would be bone broth and people weren't eating solid foods necessarily.
It was such a restricted diet. It's hard to talk about without triggers and hopefully I'm not saying anything that's triggering, but it just found it. Yeah, it really tested my recovery and I knew that I was going to have to be really on guard, and I feel like that actually helped me because I was drinking the Kool-Aid in other ways, putting things in my body on my skin that were not only completely unnecessary, but were probably harmful. I showed up once and some company was there giving shots in the butt, so I hadn't done any of my own research and I think of myself as someone who thinks critically, but I realized especially from books like The Wellness Trap, that there's so good at packaging everything so that you think that you're doing your own research, but actually it's really harmful. So I didn't even do that. I just showed up. I was like, yeah, we're getting shots in the butt. Of course this is a wellness company, this is clean beauty. I'm not going to question it. All of my peers are doing it. It seems really fun, let's do it. So things like that I look back on now and it's very interesting. I try not to have any judgment for myself, but yeah, it's fun to look back.
Christy Harrison: And it's so easy to get sucked into those things too. I think in that kind of peer pressure environment where everybody's doing it, it seems like it's sanctioned by the company, it's like, sure, this is going to be great. And I'm curious if you remember what those shots were supposed to do and if there was anything there that was really compelling to you.
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah, I think at the hope of every single product and procedure, however natural, there was the desire to be a certain weight, I feel like that was really what attracted me. But I think the one that I ended up getting was supposed to be helpful for joints. I'd been in a car accident a few years before that, and so I wasn’t on health insurance, so I was like, oh, maybe this random butt shot will be just the thing that my knees need. I mean, there's just no shortage of things to try where we were constantly buying new products to sell and a lot of these would be homemade in someone's basement, but just packaged so beautifully that even though it's completely unregulated, people are going to buy it, you're going to use it and sell it as someone who works there. So it was a really eye-opening time.
Christy Harrison: That is so fascinating and that unregulated nature of all of it is just really scary to me too. I wrote in The Wellness Trap about the supplement industry and how unregulated largely unregulated that industry is, and I really think supplements have a lot more in common with drugs than they do with food, even though they're regulated as food where they're not tested for safety and efficacy before they go to market, and sometimes they actually do have drugs in them, like pharmaceutical drugs or even illegal drugs in them, undisclosed. And so that feels so terrifying now, but yet earlier in my life I also really bought into supplements and took a lot of things seemingly for, I have multiple chronic health issues, so it's always popping something for immunity or fatigue or joint pain or whatever it might be. And yeah, it's so seductive and especially like you mentioned without health insurance, I think there's that added layer of it where it's like there's sort of this economic incentive to do those things that might be cheaper and more accessible than actually going to the doctor or taking pharmaceuticals.
Ling Ling Huang: For sure. I think a lot of my interest in the things that I tried at the store had to do with the fact that I didn't have healthcare and it seems like a way to cheat the system in some ways and it's purported to be so much better. All of the natural stuff and the supplements part of The Wellness Trap was really horrifying, and I remembered a lot of the things that I had tried that are supplements especially, I had such terrible reactions to a lot of the mushrooms stuff that we were selling, but I would just write it off because I mean, it's the queen mushroom, the nicknames, you come up with things for marketing, it's the queen of the mushroom. Of course, it's probably really good for me that I feel dizzy and can't get up without falling. So that reminded me of with skin stuff too, when it gets so much worse. There's a part in The Wellness Trap where if your symptoms get worse with chronic illnesses and stuff, they'll be like, oh, it's natural to have worse pain at first. And for us, the skin, we would have a huge reaction and people would be like, that's how it's working. You're purging. It just reminded me of that and I mean, I must've been purging the entire time I worked there.
Christy Harrison: You had a lot of toxins in your body. You were just releasing through your skin supposedly. Oh my God,
Ling Ling Huang: Supposedly.
Christy Harrison: And that rhetoric, that framing just helps hide any sort of accountability for the products or someone being able to say, oh, I started using this product and I broke out or have these horrible rashes. It must not be for me. It's like a clever way I think, of getting people to continue using something that actually isn't agreeing with their skin or with their body or whatever it might be by saying, oh, that's a sign that it's working. Yeah, the term purging for skin just makes my skin crawl because…
Ling Ling Huang: It's so damaging, because it really, I mean, I felt like I was just beginning to have a relationship with my body again, and when you hear things like that, I don't know, it just teaches you not to trust your body and not to trust what your body's telling you. And it's such damaging language actually.
Christy Harrison: It really is. Yeah, it keeps you from making the choices you need to make and doing the things you need to do. What kept you going through all that? Was it just this sense of it's working, this is good, even though the sort of purported benefits of beauty and whatever else or whatever it might be, probably weren't physically evident at the time if you were having reactions?
Ling Ling Huang: When I stopped trusting my body, and I feel like I've always had this skepticism toward my body because it's been made to be this thing that's imperfect, that needs to be improved in our society, and so I've constantly privileged the voices of other people, and so in that particular space, my coworkers were obviously correct even though they might've only worked there a little longer than I had or who knows what their credentials were, but I just trusted them implicitly in a way that I was taught not to trust myself. It was such a beautiful, luxurious space that it really gave it some legitimacy in a weird way for it to just be so beautiful. And now I question that kind of implicit trust in beauty, and a lot of my book is about questioning what beauty is and what beauty ideals do, how damaging they can be, but it's like the American dream.
I am a violinist by trade as well, so it's like if you practice enough, if you use the right products, you can be the best violinist, even though our industry really doesn't support that when you talk about just all of the things that we have going on, I'm never going to be not Asian American, and I feel like a lot of what I was searching for in the beauty industry was a way to belong, and you're never going to find the product that makes you not who you are. But yeah, it's the idea of adhering to conventional beauty standards and natural beauty is a lot about how damaging it would be if all of those right choices actually led us to be conventionally beautiful.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I was so struck in the book and hopefully this is not too much of a spoiler because people won't know what this is referring to if they haven't started reading it yet, but just the way that everybody starts to to look the same is really interesting to me. It's such a powerful fantasy version of what I think a lot of people are seeking when they start using wellness and beauty products.
Ling Ling Huang: We want to look like that influencer that we follow, and it would just mean actually a total overhaul of everything, and we try to change ourselves on a cellular level, which that can't be good.
Christy Harrison: No. I want to talk more about the book and this term natural beauty I think is so fascinating and the book explores it in so many different ways. That's the title of the book, but that phrase itself is just so fraught and you wrote in The Cut, “the phrase natural beauty acknowledges that those at the top will always be those who are born there, people for whom everything comes naturally. It also catalyzes the desire and subsequent consumption of products for those of us who want to appear more fortunate.” Can you talk a little bit more about that tension and why the term natural beauty was so fascinating to you as you explored this book?
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah. I first of all really liked it for the title just because growing up, I would never have looked at someone who looked like me and thought they're a natural beauty. It was a lack of seeing my culture represented, and so I loved the kind of subversiveness of that. I want little Asian American girls in Texas to see an Asian name next to natural beauty and to know that it's possible in a way.
It's kind of bizarre, this obsession we've had in recent years, and it keeps morphing what we call it, the no-makeup makeup, all of these things. It was just like, why are we trying so hard to look like we aren't trying? And yeah, it feels really misogynist.
I think one of the most damaging things about my time working in clean beauty and wellness was that it for some reason ended up being my entire personality, and only when I left did I remember this isn't my only interest. But the more you kind of accrue labels—like, “I'm a clean-beauty advocate”—for some reason it begins to bleed into and I'm clean eating, I am doing these kinds of things again, trying not to trigger, but it ends up being almost a full-time job to constantly optimize yourself.
And that's so unnatural and the thing that I really love now, I love hiking. I love spending time in nature, and that to me is teaching me what natural beauty is, trusting my body, which is natural in itself without me having to do anything and my skin, all of these things like the skin barrier, it kind of reminded me of adrenal fatigue when you were writing in The Wellness Trap, I feel like in the last, especially a couple of years, there's been this obsession with supporting your skin barrier or rebuilding your lipid barrier, things like that, the language that's used, and it's like your adrenals are doing the work except in some very specific rare cases. And I would say the same thing goes for the skin barrier. And so it's interesting to see a lot of this language being reused and recycled for different wellness and clean beauty things. So it's a powerful call hopefully to know that you are a natural beauty no matter what your name is, what your culture is, that is what makes you naturally beautiful, your body trusting it, and it would be impossible not to be a natural beauty. And only when you buy into the claims of the industry of natural beauty are you really, you're doing really wild stuff to your body that it doesn't need and that it can be really harmful.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it is so interesting to me too, the way that the discourse of natural shows up in wellness culture and is used to label all these things and to designate them as good, that natural is seen as always better. I talked about that with Alan Ovitz, who is a past guest on the podcast and wrote a book called Natural and the idea of faith and nature's Goodness and how it's used to sell all kinds of things, but that label so obscures so much of the beauty and wellness industry that is really unnatural in a lot of ways, taking us away from our relationship with our bodies, our relationship with nature was thinking about when you were describing hiking and being outside in nature and how if I'm going to go out on a hike, might just put on some sunscreen, I'm not going to put on a full face of makeup or whatever, and I'm probably going to be really sweaty and dirty by the end of the day of hiking.
That's natural beauty. That's what, irrespective of what I actually look like, just sort of the being out in nature and partaking of that, experiencing that it doesn't really matter what you look like. It's about getting to experience being in nature, and yet the beauty industry really sells us this lie that we have to look a certain way to be able to claim natural beauty and the no makeup makeup or clean girl aesthetic or whatever that is. All of that just still is a very specific aesthetic that people are going to have to spend time and money trying to achieve, not actually just rolling out of bed and looking like you look.
Ling Ling Huang: The benefit of nature is spending time in it and breathing the air. All of these things and so many beauty products that are natural, the way that they extract and harvest these natural resources, it's actually taking away from the benefit of it, which is that what happened in New York and in Canada right now, it's just completely at odds if you're just looking at the natural beauty industry and not thinking of it in the context of the claims of wellness and clean beauty is that it supports you holistically, but you're a person in this world. And so it's about supporting the world holistically as well. So it's drastically changed my choices to kind of broaden that perspective and to zoom out.
Christy Harrison: That's really powerful. And I really was struck by that in the book too, of how divorced from nature so many of these interventions were. And even the big reveal, which I won't give away, the sort of most horrifying aspect of the book is an affront to nature really, that's being sort of cloaked in this veil of being natural and organic and from a farm and all of this stuff, but that it's actually extremely technological and more in the realm of science fiction, almost some of these interventions that in your book, they're things that don't really exist but are very kind of sci-fi ish. But there's a lot of that stuff in the real world too, this technological way of viewing our bodies and the biohacking ethos I think has come into play and a lot of the wellness industry. So I think there's some real uncanny similarities between the books sort of horrific and fantasy portrayal of the unnatural interventions that go under the guise of natural and real wellness products and practices, or at least how they're marketed. So I'm wondering how much of that reflected the experience you had working in the Clean Beauty and Wellness store and sort of what you saw in terms of things that were being marketed as natural and how they actually were produced and created.
Ling Ling Huang: I've been joking a little bit that in five to 10 years, this book will be a nonfiction
Christy Harrison: Book. God, I know.
Ling Ling Huang: I don't even think that's too much of a joke because the rate at which we're coming up with new products and technologies, and I do think there's a really interesting connection between biohacking and natural and clean beauty and wellness. You cover it in The Wellness Trap, which is so cool because I feel like I haven't seen those connections made as often, but it's really something that I notice everything we're trying to do in wellness is in a sense, biohacking. It's just that we're not in Silicon Valley, all of us, so we don't think of it that way, and it's about these shortcuts and it's ruthless the way that we'll extract from any living thing in order to get the benefits. So in that way, that's how I came up with a lot of the procedures and products is like, oh, this jellyfish is purported. You can read anything on WIRED or something about some new great discovery of some animal.
And it's like, well, humans are going to want to extract what's great about them immediately to use for ourselves, which kind of a cynical way to look at the world. But I found that kind of true in my experience, the mycelium craze of just figuring out how amazing their networks are and stuff. And we immediately are ingesting seven different kinds of mushrooms daily in a tincture. So I would see all of these beautiful Scientific discoveries immediately, I feel like by the wellness industry because they're hungry for what's natural and what's of the moment. That was how I was inspired to come up with a lot of that stuff. And a lot of it is meant to be empowering. So I definitely flirted with ways that beauty empowers you at the same time that it chains you to its ideals. But I mean, I hope it's not eventually a nonfiction book, but I can see a lot of this stuff coming to pass.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think maybe, hopefully it's not going to be a nonfiction book too. I agree. But I think some of it is we're just one step away maybe from things getting to that point or whatever, and it's pretty terrifying. I'm curious how you researched that and came up with those interventions that do seem so out there and extreme and fantastical. You mentioned reading articles in WIRED. Was that part of your process or?
Ling Ling Huang: I generally like to keep up with science stuff. I tend to read a lot of nature books, so I'm reading Fen Bog and Swamp by and learning about the miraculous nature of bogs and swamps and how critical they are to our ecosystems. And I'm sure if I was writing Natural Beauty now, there would be some bog that's a spa that you immerse yourself in. So yeah, I love to keep up with what's happening in nature and science because I do think it's so miraculous and I'm always looking for ways to support the environment. And I think as a devil's advocate kind of way, thinking of ways to extract from the environment as well for satirical purposes is how I approached that. And I did read a lot of scholarly articles as well, I think particularly about sternal collagen. There were so many procedures and products that actually didn't make it into the book, but there was something to do with lobsters and fertility. It was too much. But the scholarly papers and what people are researching in terms of animal uses and beauty are really, I mean that's truly, to me, it was kind of horrific to read and stumble upon some of these articles.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's terrifying. It's interesting that there is so much of that already happening and makes sense. And I mean, I feel like I've heard about that for a while now with various products and stuff, but to actually look into that scholarly research must've been sort of intense. We were talking about extraction, and another theme of the book that was interesting to me and that I've also seen you write and speak about talking about the book is the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures, which is, and other non-Western cultures in general. It's really rampant in the wellness and beauty industries. And I'm curious sort of what it was like for you to see your culture treated this way in the space where you were working and to be seen as maybe a representative of your culture and what it was like to also be in the encountered with the clientele of the store who probably were not, I would imagine they were overwhelmingly white.
Ling Ling Huang: Yes, for sure. When I was first hired, I was really clear that I've been a violinist my whole life. I have no experience, but I was hired basically on the spot and I want to think that I am a good retail person and all of these things. But definitely for the first few weeks, a part of me was like, why am I here? Why was I hired? And I felt, and this is again pretty cynical, but I wondered if I was hired because it was a time when K Beauty was really popular or I gave some kind of legitimacy to the products that we were selling. I remember the time when, so we had our own beautifully packaged line of teas, including matcha. I remember once there was a weird batch or something, and I realized that it was just the same brand as the one that you could get at the local J Mart, like Sunrise Mart or maybe a fifth of the cost.
And I realized that we were selling the exact same product with just different labeling that we must have licensed or something. But that was kind of a shock to me in addition to another gorgeous product that we had. And someone just dropped it off and they were like, yeah, I just mixed this up in my basement, and it was such one of those guys who's really into biohacking. And I was like, wow, this is really not who I thought was making this thing. I've been eating every day, and certainly not in your basement, but I just felt kind of weird about a lot of the products that we sold and I don't know, you don't want to cause problems or make waves or I didn't at first. I remember some of the people who would come in that a lot of my colleagues kind of revered.
There was someone who really was working a lot with sweetgrass and the way they dressed, I think certainly in today's culture would raise a lot of questions, but at the time I was like, oh man, this oil smells amazing. And I was like, yeah, I mean, maybe they're just white passing probably. Who am I to say? So there was a lot of that going on. There was an acupuncturist, people who came in who worked with traditional Chinese medicine to work with us and to help sell them as practitioners, as well as products. And now I look back on that and I can feel that seed of doubt that I had, that I suppressed, which is so easy to do when you're taught not to trust your body. Same with any instincts you have. Of course, my employers know better about sourcing, and I can't assume that it's not being done respectfully. But yeah, I did feel fetishized in a way, and it's just a way to invisibilize, I think, because then you're kind of why my main character in the novel also doesn't have a name, because as soon as you fetishize someone, they become not their singular selves as a person, but they become part of a group that you already have ideas about and you just project all of that onto them. And I certainly felt like custom customers and even colleagues, I loved my colleagues, but there were projections immediately and reoccurring. I was struck
Christy Harrison: By the protagonist doesn't have a name except for the Anglicized name, that she is encouraged to take later on this idea that the customers aren't going to want to encounter her actual name, which maybe is ostensibly.
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah. And of course there would be customers where I worked who would definitely want to, it's a weird, there wasn't really an in-between. There are people who don't want to interact with your culture or people who really want to interact with your culture a little too much, and both are the same kind of invis. So it's bizarre. But of course, I did notice that traditional Chinese medicine kind of took a backseat in the pandemic, so that was interesting to see as well.
Christy Harrison: Were you working there in the beginning of the pandemic?
Ling Ling Huang: No, I wasn't, but I still keep an eye on, especially since I was writing Natural Beauty, I keep an eye on a lot of the companies that I interacted with and just a subtle messaging shift. And there was so much more of the fear mongering, scarcity way of marketing. But I mean, even a local Brooklyn place where you can get loosely teas and stuff was like elderberry is the answer. There was so many people were using that point in time. But I did notice that there was a surprising lack of traditional Chinese medicine where I think in another instance, or if the origin had been somewhere else, it would've been a huge rise in interest.
Christy Harrison: Right? Yeah, just the way that the pandemic cooled interest in anything related to China and Chinese culture was part of why it just downplayed traditional Chinese medicine. When in your experience of working at the store did you realize you wanted to write a book about it?
Ling Ling Huang: So this book kind of started as a journal of experiences there, and I had never thought of it as becoming a book until around the pandemic time when I realized that I had a narrative and then as a violinist, our industry, so many others shut down. So that's when I really sat down and fully put on the kind of critical eyeglasses and looked at my time there because there were a lot of positives about working there. That's something about any, you talk about how it can just be empathy that makes a difference in someone's life. And seeing an alternative medicine practitioner who gives you 45 minutes instead of five minutes of conventional doctor time. And I just moved to New York. I wasn't plugged into the music scene completely. I didn't have so much of a community. And so having coworkers and actually being valued for anything that wasn't just violin for basically the first time in my life meant a huge deal to me. And I think that community made me kind of stick with all of the wellness and clean beauty stuff more and caused me to turn a blind eye to some troubling things more readily. But yeah, I had nothing to lose eventually with the pandemic and decided to just go for it with writing.
Christy Harrison: Truth. Was there any question for you ever about fiction versus nonfiction or did you always feel drawn towards fiction?
Ling Ling Huang: I think I always felt drawn toward fiction just because it's mostly, I think what I read, science fiction and horror are really great genres to critique things that are going on. A trilogy that I love is the Three Body Problem, and a lot of people say that, I don't know if a lot of people say this, but there was a great article about how it's really about Chinese American relations and economics and all of this stuff, but because it's science fiction, you can read into that as much as you want, and it's really fascinating if you do, but it can also be fun. And I guess I didn't trust myself to write about this in a way that wasn't critiquing or shaming myself or other people. And so I felt like fiction was a good way for me to just raise a lot of questions that hopefully people would continue to ask themselves.
And I wanted to make it fun so that it was like a Trojan horse for deeper questions. It's the kind of book that I think as a younger person, maybe in my teens or something, I would've picked up, I would've been interested in the froth of it. And I got an email from someone who had read it whose parents are pressuring them to get eyelid surgery, and they said that reading it Spare in high school, and they said that reading, it was making them really reconsider and they were going to take more time to think about whether or not it was something they wanted to do. And that was so meaningful to me because I feel like this was the book that I wrote hoping this is what I would've wanted to read and it would've maybe helped me in similar ways if I had read it when I was younger.
Christy Harrison: That's a lot of why I write the books I do too, is trying to write for my younger self the book that I would've wanted to have at that point in my life that I hope would pull me out of it or just at least give me some other opportunity to think.
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah, I would've loved to read The Wellness Trap if I had been able to read that as a teenager. I think my life would be drastically different in really positive ways, but it's still really changing how I think it's changing how I interact with social media, that's for sure, which I'm thrilled about. But yeah, it's such a necessary book. We had our season closing concert last night for Oregon Symphony and backstage, some of us were talking about your work and your book. There's just a lot of Oregon musician love for you and you're fantastic. And yeah,
Christy Harrison: Thank you. That means so much to me. Oh my gosh, thank you. And also, I'm so glad that you wrote the book you did, and so I wish someone could have saved you from having to go through what you did and you've made something so beautiful out of it and rich and that's going to be so helpful to other people. So I'm grateful for your work too, and such a huge fan. And I'm so curious about the relationship between music and wellness. I was going to ask you something about that anyway, but then just thinking about the fact that you said other people in the symphony were also fans of my work. That's so interesting. And I've had some folks in the opera community who really resonated with my first book anti-diet, which is all about problems with the weight loss industry and all of that stuff. And I think there's so much pressure on singers, but people in classical music in general, I think there's so much body pressure. I heard you say in an interview that there was so much emphasis on how you dressed and your appearance in whether or not you won contests and stuff, and that it really came down to that versus how you played. So I'm just really curious about that link, what you've seen and sort of the classical music community and the relationship with wellness culture and diet-culture there
Ling Ling Huang: Of that instance that you just mentioned. I was so sad because I played so well in this competition and I didn't win, and the only feedback that I got was that I didn't dress well enough. And I think something kind of broke in me in that moment because kind of like the beauty industry, if you just use the right products, it'll be good if you just eat the right things. And so for this, if you just practice eight to 10 hours a day, I started when I was four. I had my first concert when I was four. I've worked hard my whole life to sound good. And then for that to be just in a moment, it was like, it's not about sound at all. It's about looks. And of course it's about wealth because the dresses that the other people were wearing who won, I can't afford that. But then the next year I bought one, I returned it the next day after I won.
But it took the fun out of it for me because then it felt like, oh, I didn't earn it. I bought it. That was a sad moment for me, but it's something I feel a lot now. I really perform femininity as a classical violinist, and I know that part of why I'm on stage is that I perform it well, and we have a lot of donor functions and things like that, and they really expect you to be their version of what a classical violinist is like. And I fit a lot of those assumptions except that a lot of people will assume that I don't speak English immediately and they'll be like, where are you from? And I'm like, I'm from Texas. But it's really similar. I would say the parallels between the music and the beauty and wellness industry, especially the beauty industry. There's this beautiful veneer.
We have gorgeous concert halls and we dress beautifully. We have gowns and fancy black clothing and stuff like that, but underneath it's a pretty unsustainable lifestyle. I was pretty successful in New York as a freelancer. I was on the Tonight Show. I did cool things. I played in Carnegie Hall all the time, but I was making 10 to $15,000 a year, which is really unsustainable for that city. It might not be elsewhere, but for that city, it's unsustainable, didn't have healthcare. It's the same as any other gig economy situation except that a lot of people assume that you're wealthy by you're participating in it. And I felt like that was the case in the beauty industry. I was working there at the same time, and I think a lot of customers would assume certain things about my life, and it was like, well, actually, I have to go home to a little hovel and it takes me two to three hours to get there. And this wellness, when you see me in this space, what you're getting is totally a fiction.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I saw you write that you had windowless illegal apartments that you were going home to and no health insurance and that you sprained your ankle and you were hobbling around on it without healthcare, and yet spending all your money that you could spend on the wellness products and services at the store because that was sold to you as the ticket to being well and maybe getting the kind of life you really wanted.
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah, I really loved that about The Wellness Trap as well, that it's such a trap of individuals. You are responsible for your care and the wellness stuff. So many people get into it because there's just a lack of community and systemic care. And I felt like it was one of the only places where I read about that and didn't feel judged. I felt really seen, and I'm luckier than most having parents who could have helped me if I really needed it. But yeah, it's just really nice to see that it writing and to know that there is a reason. It's a huge industry. It's because we're all, there's this gigantic void of care and we're made to feel responsible, and that's why I get shots in the butt for knee pain and why I tried salt water from a special part in the sea,
Christy Harrison: Right? It's not because gullible, I'm so glad that felt good and resonant to read that, and I really labored over the tone of the book, I feel like I have these sort of two magnetic poles that are pulling in opposite directions of wanting to call out all the bullshit and be like, look at how terrible this is. And then wanting to be like, but I was in it too. I was caught up in it. I bought it. I drank the Kool-Aid. And we're not uneducated people or gullible people. There's a lot of people who are really skeptical, I think, and critical thinkers and science-minded in so many ways that fall for this. And so wanting to walk that line of showing the industry for what it is and all its harms, but also keeping that compassion and empathy and understanding for why people get caught up in it front and center.
I feel like when I've encountered skepticism and debunking of wellness trends at various points in my life when I was more bought in or when I was struggling more and didn't have the answers in the conventional healthcare system or access, and so I was looking to those wellness or alternative spaces for healing and help, I think that the skeptical point of view was so off-putting. To me at that time, I was just like, what do you know? And I couldn't even fully articulate it at the time, but I think looking back now, I'm like, yeah, it just felt so privileged or something for the people who were debunking and dismantling to be calling it out from their position of not having to go through it and not maybe having better access to care or not having chronic illnesses or things that they're struggling with or not being a woman or being marginalized in some way and having to dawn the cloak of, or the armor really in some ways of beauty and wellness culture. So I was hoping to try to give voice to that side of things too. But there's definitely a big part of me, and especially as time goes on and I'm more removed from it myself or I'm just like, yeah, this is bogus. I want to tear it all down. So I think fiction, it's interesting what you said about writing fiction as a way to temper some of that critical tone, and that's an interesting approach that I might explore at some point too. I've been thinking lately that I'd like to write more fiction.
Ling Ling Huang: Yeah, I love that. I can't wait. Thank you. I mean, I really think tone is so empathic and compassionate. It's really amazing while at the same time not shying away from calling out all of the industry and systemic failures that together weave this terrible web. So it's really admirable. Oh
Christy Harrison: My gosh, thank you. Amazing. Maybe I should get a blurb from you. I love that
Ling Ling Huang: Anytime. Not that you would need it, but yeah, I mean, I'm really going to be getting this book for so many of my friends and really great for discussions, book clubs especially. Yeah, I am excited to see how, especially my female friendships can deepen from reading this book together and talking about it.
Christy Harrison: Oh my God, that means so much to me. Thank you. I'm so excited to hear that and to hear about it and stay in touch down the line and see how it goes.
Ling Ling Huang: So backstage last night we're about to play Mahler five, which to bring it back to the music stuff, violin is not a very ergonomic instrument. And we are taught, we are standing, we're practicing for a brutal amount of hours. A lot of us have so much pain, and it's another instance in which we have to divorce our bodies from our minds. So it's painful, but keep practicing. A lot of people do search out alternative therapies and things like that for pain that we have as musicians, but it's not a very natural profession. And so we had a really interesting conversation last night in regards to your book, just backstage before we're about to go on, about body trust and disordered eating and how being a musician at a really high level teaches you a lot of the things that can be a seed for disordered eating and not trusting your body or not listening to your body being in pain and things like that. And so it was already such a great discussion to have just in 10 minutes before. And so I'm excited in particular to talk to musicians about it. I don't think we talk about body stuff enough.
Christy Harrison: That's so interesting in that there's sort of professional incentives to disconnect from your body, which I can see would make it such a fertile ground for disordered eating to develop disconnecting from your hunger cues and feeling like you're sort of disembodied and you don't need to care for your body. And restriction can come from that. And then of course, the appearance focus too, really can incentivize restriction. And that's interesting too about the alternative treatments, people being drawn to that for the pain that's sort of natural, going back to that word again, like a natural response for anyone to have for that kind of grueling physical work and to sort of be looking to wellness spaces instead of to the structure of the systemic issues with the industry where it's like what if you had a less demanding schedule or if it was conceived of in a different way or structured in a different way to give more rest and to give more sort of awareness of how bodies need to function and need to be cared for.
Ling Ling Huang: Absolutely. It's a punishing schedule orchestra, and I feel that with every year that I'm older on top of the individual practice that you need to do. But the best thing for it would be to have more time to rest between services or things like that. But that's not feasibly possible because you're not in charge of your schedule at all. So instead it starts with reiki and then roll thing, and then essential oils. There's so much, or a lot of us do meditation. I mean, it's nerve wracking to get out in front of audiences all the time. Yeah. So it's really rife for alternative medicines and therapies, and I hadn't really thought of that before the discussion last night.
Christy Harrison: That's fascinating. I'm really, I could talk to you about this for all of this for so much longer, and I want to do more on the bonus episode. So can you stick around for a few minutes and we'll jump over to the bonus? Yes. One last question I want to ask for the main podcast actually is because starting to ask this to guests is that this podcast is called Rethinking Wellness, and I'm just curious what that means to you. How have you rethought or are you in process of rethinking wellness for yourself and what are you feeling like true wellbeing looks like outside of the pitfalls of wellness culture.
Ling Ling Huang: I am rethinking wellness for myself, and I feel like it'll be a journey I'm on for a long time, really thinking about the word natural. Aging is natural, and aging is great as it means you're living, you're alive. Remembering that wellness was not my identity or main interest was really powerful. Thinking about the community around me instead of just myself as an individual, which wellness and algorithms really can push on you, has made me so much happier. And remembering that I'm not just a consumer, but a creator in whether or not it's for other people, whether it's writing for myself or for people to read. It's just remembering that I have agency in how I spend my time. And yeah, I think honestly, a big part of rethinking Wellness for me has been changing my relationship with social media, which it's been a little more difficult with book publicity in the last couple months. I've felt like I've needed to be a little bit more on social media on my phone. That's given me some anxiety, but it generally is so bad for my anxiety to be on and just to be that connected to what other people and most of them like strangers are doing or looking like or eating. And so rethinking wellness, it's always going to be changing for me, but mostly I'm trying to have a relationship with my body and to do what feels good, like walking in nature, walking with my dog and really not forcing anything.
Christy Harrison: That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for this lovely conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you and excited to continue it on the bonus episode in just a minute. But for folks who are listening to this main episode, can you tell us where people can find you online, where they can buy your book and learn more about you?
Ling Ling Huang: You can find me on my website, linglinghuang.com or on Instagram, which is my main social media at violin squared, the book you can buy on bookshop or anywhere. Books are sold hopefully. And it's been such a pleasure talking with you, and I'm excited that we will get to for a little bit longer on the bonus episode.
Christy Harrison: Me too. Thank you so much.
So that's our show! Thanks so much to our amazing guest, and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. You can also support the show by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month. With a paid subscription, you unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber-only Q&As, early access to regular episodes, and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
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This episode was brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book or just go into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
And if you’re looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. Learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. That's christyharrison.com/course.
Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer. Administrative support from Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team virtual. Album art by Tara Jacoby and theme song written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening! Take care.
Wellness Culture and the Myth of "Natural" Beauty with Ling Ling Huang