The bra
Posted on: 27/9/2021
I remember the first time I wore a bra. I arrived home from school in the fourth grade, and my mom silently handed me a white cloth to put on beneath my shirt. Right after the day I had bawled my eyes out to her, coming back from my daily 6pm cycling ride around the city, when a middle-aged motorcyclist had grabbed one of my two minimal, hand-sized hemisphere blocks of fatty tissues protruding above my rib cage, not forgetting to flash a sinister wink before speeding off.
The trail of motorcycle smoke blew into my face, blurred my entire world and flipped it upside down. My brain short-circuited trying to process what just happened, before the bitter taste of disgust flavoured my swallows of nothing. Shame was a delayed bomb exploded inside me; and it spread fast, barreling into every cell in every corner of my body. Self-consciousness pricked the reddened skin of my ears, cheeks and nape. I had to rebalance myself on the bike, so as to not fall off, so as to not let my already scrambled inner thoughts spiral and shatter on the ground. Maybe I should’ve let loose, broke an arm or two, so the physical pain would calm me down and wake me up from this petrifying fever dream. How I wished it was just another of my daydreams gone wrong.
I hold on to the bra mom gave me like dear life. My tender mind assigned it the same role a metal shield bore to an ancient soldier. It protected me from the gaze, the hands and the wink, from that incident. I felt less naked when I looked down at my white uniform shirt - one of thin material, a tinge transparent - and saw another white layer exposed beneath it. Sometimes, the penguin embroidery, one you would usually see on cheap, low-quality bras plaguing clothing stores in Vietnam, would look straight back when I stared at it in the mirror. I bet everybody at school could see the penguin too, that’s probably the reason why weird looks thrown at me across the hallway had spiked recently. From the single-digit-aged kids that had never in their life seen a bra. Or more precisely, another kid their age wearing one.
Yet I couldn’t seem to care. My bra was my guardian angel, and if I had to choose either to be looked at like an alien or to relive the incident every time my tiny breast was in sight, I would happily opt for the former. But having a cloth covering my chest wasn’t enough, I would slouch, wear huge clothes, too scared to admit the existence of the barely developed body part I then deemed offensive. The breast’s singularity managed to cause me incessant shame, guilt, anger that always resulted in me blaming it for the manics I have gone through.
I hated my breast just for existing, loathing the way it looked, the way it felt, the burden it imposed on my life. So I saw bras as its archnemesis, and how I loved the bra. I learnt from my mom’s silence, my friends’ ridicule that if I didn’t want something to be looked at, then cover it up. Look at it the way you want others to look at it. Let it carve an irreversible scar into your insecurities.
Until I learned that bras can never protect me. From the gazes, the winks, the catcall and the hands. Nothing can.
I wonder how many women have to learn the hard way how frail and feeble our cover up can be.
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