Childhood - sisters

As the firstborn among all her siblings and cousins in both my parents’ families, my sister got the most attention after her birth. With three young aunties aged 14, 18 and 21 from my mom’s family and a young teenage uncle and auntie from my dad’s family, she was a niece as well as a doll. I came fifteen months later, second in the roll, being malnourished like many people of about my age who were born during the period of so-called three-year-natural-disaster in mainland China. I joined her in Suzhou before she was, at three years old, eligible to be enrolled in a childcare facility in Beijing.

 

I was too little to remember anything of those years spent in Suzhou in our maternal grandma’s house. Therefore, the family members of my parents’ generation had, from time to time, fed the blank spot of my brain with the adorable image of my sister and the naughty one of little me, and they chattered in such an amusement that it seemed that anything about my cutesy sister had become very boring and the pain I had caused them had brought great joys in their lives, in spite of the fact that my sister was the only one having a godmother, not by religion but by relation, who was the goddaughter of my maternal grandma. She had much more childhood pictures than the combined number of those my brother and I both got.

 

We were the little girls of the same parents, with opposite characters. As I am about to lay out the facts, true or not, that my aunties have planted in my head, I could feel them breath down my neck right now, making sure I am not rewriting my family history.

 

My sister was quiet while I made a lot noises. She was a joy and I cried a lot. She was a good puppy while I was a little tomboy. She was a team player while I played with only my own toys. She was easy and I had to be held by a nanny hired only for holding me around the clock, otherwise my crying would tear my aunties’ ear off (I have done an intensive research and found out that malnourished babies could cry a lot for no reasons.) She ate all she was fed while I picked on most of the food. She was healthy but I was not strong enough to walk well due to lacking of adequate calcium in my tiny bones. She drank milk but I refused taking it (this must be true because I did not drink milk until after getting in America) and spit out fish oil gels, both of which were supposed to help healing the deficiency. The only merits I have heard so far about the little me was, told by my middle auntie, that I did have the moment to stay quiet and play by myself for hours as if I had been disappeared from the surface of the earth, if and only if I was in a playing mood.

 

I guess I, indeed, must have been a nuisance in all those years.