By Elizabeth Hsu
Spring 2012 Kaplan Award Winner
She comes over to visit me in my apartment in Seattle, and she wants to go on a run.
“You? You want to go running? Like, do you even have running shoes? Since when did you run?”
True, she joined the cross country team in high school, but I always figured it was more for social reasons. At Mt.Spokane, you might as well kiss your potential on the popularity chain goodbye if you don’t do any sports.
Nevertheless, my sister was never particularly coordinated. I grimace to see her throw a ball “like a girl”, elbow and wrist awkwardly taut. Cross country seemed the best choice for her, if anything. Her strength lay in pure will and determination. As a teenager always two grades behind her, I gained at least the vague impression that she wasn’t terrible at the sport.
But. I was the athlete. I had the stockier build, she was a slender gazelle. Fragile, thin, and long, like a model. Her fingers were more suited for piano than my stubby, nail-bitten digits. Jealous, I made fun of her long “kangaroo feet”. She looked better in clothes and had a knack for fashion, leagues beyond my tomboy ponytails, baggy shorts and T-shirts. While I was out poking in the mud with my walking stick, I imagined her in front of the mirror, perfecting her straight, silky hair.
“Well, GasworksPark is a good 1.5 mile jog from here.”
Why would she want to go on a run? I was the athlete. I treasured the dust, the sharp grass, the salty taste of softball. She would never be seen in my cleats, heartily shouting out encouragement to teammates from first base, chewing on a leather mitt and sloshing down Gatorade. While I was sweating like Shaq at softball practice, volleyball practice, basketball, track, or just running around in the woods, she was…
We Weren’t “Close”
Gone. Once my sister hit 11, my parents decided that she had become A Teenager. She held everything in, wouldn’t open to anyone. Cold. Dad grounded her for coming home from high school with a disrespectful attitude and a deep tan, the former a sin to the Chinese tradition of strong respect for elders, the latter a heresy as the daughter of a dermatologist.
I hear the pain in Mom’s voice: “When your sister turned 11, she…changed.”
It might not have been anything specific, maybe a slow buildup of immense pressure from our parents. I remember sitting on the stairs in my pajamas hugging one of my stuffed animal dogs, peering down at the sharp light in the office, feeling the cut of Dad’s impatience as he bore fundamentals of algebra into my sister’s head. Used to tutoring graduate students during his undergrad years, he kept his voice under a shout, letting all the intensity of his frustration seethe through pure tone. “No,” he burned, “that’s not correct.” She was two years ahead of her classmates in math. I left, tear ducts tingling, when I could no longer bear the sound of her suppressed sobs.
I could never make eye contact when she cried.
My sister wants to go on a run. We’ve never run together in entirety of our twenty-something lives.
Books and Copycats
My sister could have dealt with parental pressure in a number of ways, all of which would have been inferior to the one she chose. She lost herself in books. When she finally got her own room, she would lock herself in and read. I knew little of what she read, though she did once recommend Mattimeo to me, initiating the Hsu children thirst for Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. Some years later, I recall sneaking The Kite Runner out of her closet and reading it when she wasn’t there.
My furtiveness was not unfounded: my sister absolutely hated copycats. She despised me for walking in the same direction, for ordering the same thing at a restaurant, for joining Tae Kwon Do even though it was her original idea. One day, she walked out of the room in a huff because I saw her eating ice cream and decided to get some for myself.
I even copied her hatred of copying, and behaved similarly towards our brothers. Her abhorrence of imitation had ingrained itself to the point that not copying her was my only relief in getting rejected from Stanford. She majored in history, I in English Literature at the University of Washington. She got yelled at for not being home by six o’clock sharp, for getting sunburned, for twisting the truth; I saw her cry, and balanced her behavior by being the “goody-good” sister.
The prospect of going on a run, side by side in the same direction with the same destination, just didn’t feel right.
Her Shadow
Silent, my sister and I stand in the dark outside the gymnasium. Light glows through the door and the buzz of the audience drifts to our ears. My hand finds hers and grips tight; this will be my first and last time on stage. At least my all-black costume makes me feel invisible.
It’s our cue. A line of kindergarten, first and second grade students shuffle into the light. The song begins, and the kids start stepping methodically around the stage with each beat. I stumble close behind my sister, hands on her shoulders, and join in with the chorus:
Me and my shadow
Strolling down the avenue
Oh, me and my shadow
Not a soul to tell our troubles to
And when it’s twelve o’clock, we climb the stairs
We never knock ’cause nobody’s there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue
I don’t remember rehearsing for the play, though it wouldn’t have been necessary. Following my sister was nothing but natural. I happily allowed her to drag me around, even out of sight from our mother, to her horror, at an open air shopping center in Stanford. “Come on, Wibby, come on,” my four-year-old sister said, unable to pronounce her “L’s”.
Mom says my sister treated me with utmost care, like a new baby doll (probably an inaccurate description; a doll wouldn’t bellow so loud that the neighbors would call the police). My sister’s soft, mild, falsetto whisper of a fairy voice matched her sweet temperament.
Before I could even form my first word (according to Mom, a low, spirited “COWWW!”), I would follow her around to the best of my ability. I was her shadow. My wardrobe mostly consisted of hand-me-downs for much of my life, and even as I write this, I’m wearing one of her skirts. Everything she did, wore, and said was automatically Cool.
Nevertheless, my sister’s cold demeanor and aloofness surfaced as she neared middle school. Even as a baby, she was much more reserved than her wide-eyed, physically affectionate little sister. I was the face-licking dog, she the standoffish cat.
Animals
We played epic games of Animals on our bedroom floor. My sister was in charge of the Tiger Family, a group of forty or so plastic figurines of tigers, lions, leopards, and cheetahs. I took the Dog Family, composed of wolves, coyotes, foxes, and numerous breeds of domesticated canines. The families had hunts and feasts and weddings and bedtimes, impossible love triangles and cruel, baby-snatching foes.
When she moved out of the room at 13, my sister wanted to stop playing Animals. After weeks of begging and bribes, I gave up. My memories of closeness with her stop. She avoids me for nearly a decade.
Distance
We had exchanged a few emails when I was lonely my freshman year in college. She opened up a little, tried to describe her past distance. “I think that I thought that…hanging out for too long with you would make me have to take a hard look at myself, which I had no desire to do,” she wrote, a junior at Stanford. “Trust me – I have more flaws than you can possibly imagine and plenty of insecurities – and if I ever get angry or bitter it’s because I succumb to them – like a defense mechanism. I’m working on it…”
My junior year at UW, I stand in the dark neighborhood alley, and we exchange our deepest secrets over the phone. Neither of us had known that the other would be able to commiserate over this thing that could never be revealed to our parents. That summer, we try to spend 12 days together traveling through Europe. We’re at each other’s throats by the time we reach Switzerland.
Running With My Sister
“Fine. But I’ll come with you, since you don’t want to carry your cell phone on you while you run, otherwise there’s no way I’ll know when you’re back to let you back in the building, and I can’t just let you stand out there, and you could get lost.” I yell at her for maintaining a three foot distance from my side, since she could block the path of bikers. She rolls her eyes. We sort of awkwardly stagger ourselves on the trail, one leads, then the other.
We don’t look at each other. She hates that I don’t trust her to find the park, or to find her way back. Our shadows don’t cross, but lengthen as we sprint up the hill.