So in my hysteria over Baby Chen’s crisis of non-growth, I ran across this photo of Ang and his grandparents, on a Chinese beach 27 years ago:

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When I saw this picture of his grandfather, I jumped up and went to interrogate Ang.

Me: “HEY. HOW TALL WAS YOUR GRANDPA? HOW MUCH DID HE WEIGH? WAS HE CONSIDERED SMALL IN CHINA? WAS HE STARVING IN THIS PICTURE OR WAS HE AT FULL WEIGHT?”

Ang: “uh….. well, he was maybe 5′ 6″. I dunno. He was short. Probably 130 lbs. if I had to guess.”

Me: “WHY IS HE SO SMALL? DIDN’T HE EAT?”

Ang: “He wasn’t starving…they weren’t poor. He was never malnourished.”

Me: “WAS HE CONSIDERED FREAKISHLY SMALL OR WAS HE AVERAGE? WHAT WOULD YOU GUESS?”

(I think I may have looked a bit wild around the eyes, because Ang answered me pretty straight without much goofing around, which is unusual for him.)

Ang: “No – he wasn’t freaky small. He would be considered on the small side, but still average I’d say.”

Anyone who’s dealt with American pediatricians on this subject will tell you that the likely reason Ang’s family is small in stature is because they were malnourished as children. American medical wisdom says that if they’d been fed a “better” diet they would be larger.

I’m telling you: this is crap.

They were not malnourished. Ang’s father DID endure starvation during the 60’s, when that evil POS Chairman Mao took over the country. But he was in college at that point. All of China was not starving on a regular basis for the last 100 years.

What is more likely here is that Americans are just fat, and we think that fat = healthy, on a baby especially. I mean, I hate to reinforce a stereotype about Americans that I regularly get annoyed about (based on my in-laws thinking I feed my kids fast food all the time) – but in this case it’s valid.

Just because your baby isn’t a butterball, with rolls of fat falling over his diaper and 4 chins, doesn’t mean he’s sick.

I discovered (too late) that the nurse at my pediatrician’s office had measured my baby wrong, and he was in fact over an inch longer than she originally recorded. (an inch makes a big difference at this stage.) He’s still very small – but he’s not going to be a dwarf.

The moral of this story is that a baby can be normal, when compared to other children of his racial/ethnic group, and at the same time appear abnormal on the American growth charts. (Especially if they are breastfed. Formula feeding + early introduction of solids + larger race = huge baby.) In the case of biracial kids, this is especially important to remember.

When parents adopt children from other countries, their kids are measured on growth charts that apply to them. Interracial children can sometimes take after one side of the family much more than the other – and this should be in the back of your mind when you see your American pediatrician.

And check this out! Here’s a woman in Norway with a Chinese baby, who ran into this same situation. She’s listed the links to growth charts for Chinese babies. (I thought it was so funny that I’m Norwegian and having the same difficulty. Norwegians are a truly large ethnic group on average, especially compared to Asians.)