Locker Room Trauma:
Nothing-and I mean nothing-compared to the trying times of high school. Those four years of deprecating self-image and esteem were traumatizing for a flat-chested Asian girl in a sea of big-breasted white girls. In my entire high school (located, by the way, right here in Vestal, New York-yep, I'm a "Townie.") there were maybe three black girls and this friend of mine who was Puerto Rican. They were all big-breasted too. Two other Asian girls went to school with me. Like me, I noticed, they had little to no bust.

Gym class was loads of fun back then as well. Not only did I completely suck at basketball, floor hockey, volleyball and soccer, I had to change in the girls' locker room…with the big-breasted girls. You see, going to class everyday was fine because every morning I would carefully fold up a few sheets of toilet paper and stuff them in my bra to give myself an extra half a centimeter. A sweater over that covered the evidence up perfectly. Almost natural-looking, I convinced myself. But gym class meant taking that sweater off and having to make sure the carefully folded toilet paper didn't slip out as I changed into my smelly, wrinkled gym clothes-which they often did since I really had positively no curvature with which to hold them securely in place.

One morning the key to my toilet paper blues dawned on me. Angel voices and trumpets sang in my head. No more toilet paper for me. Shoulder pads would be the better solution. Shoulder pads were marvelous because they fit snuggly between my boob and the bra. With shoulder pads, I could actually fill a B-cup and walk around the hallways relatively carefree of my booblessness.

But then, something awful happened in the locker rooms one day.

"Sunny…I think you dropped your…shoulder pad…It fell out of your…(giggle)…shirt."

She said the words "shoulder pad" slowly as if for added dramatic emphasis. I kept my back toward the voice, refusing to turn around, pretending to be busy buttoning up my shirt, mumbling a "Hmm?" as nonchalantly as I could, shutting my eyes and cursing the day I thought about shoulder pads and…

"Sunny…I have the same Gap shirt at home and…mine didn't come with shoulder pads."

I finished buttoning up my shirt and looked down. Oh no. My boobs were uneven! If I turned around and faced the girl, would she notice? Where's my sweater? Find my sweater. Dammit I didn't bring a sweater today.

"Um…what are you talking about? That's not my shoulder pad." Smooth, Sunny, real smooth. My back was still facing the girl. I turned my head slightly around so that I could at least make an effort to look at the girl while she talked.

"Well I saw it fall out of your…(giggle)…shirt." Her arms were folded across her almost-too-perfect-sized chest and her eyes were squinty. I wanted to punch that smile off her face.

"No, it's not mine. You must've been mistaken."

"It's not a big deal that you stuff your bra," the girl rolled her eyes, "if you do it, own up to it. God. What a dork." Then she stalks off. I think for a moment, Were her perfect-sized boobs real?

So anyway, it wasn't until sometime around age seventeen or eighteen (oh I don't remember exactly when the cataclysmic epiphany occurred) when I stopped stuffing my bra and finally said to myself, "Fuck it. Who cares if I have no boobs? It's a part of my Asian heritage and I'm damn proud of being Asian and flat!"