Sisters

Anna Oakes

            I’ve always wanted to have a sister. Although growing up with two younger brothers has its benefits, I often felt a little separated from them, especially as I grew older and began to sit out on their wrestling and toy-soldier sessions. And though I’m used to being an older sister, until recently I had rarely seen myself as much of a role-model for my brothers; I don’t think they really expected it of me. They seemed perfectly satisfied throwing home-made weapons at each other and ignoring my feeble and completely unsuccessful attempts at stopping them.  That’s not to say that I don’t love my brothers—in fact, although I may complain about them, I don’t think that I’d be able to handle any other sibling configuration for longer than a year.

            In Vietnam, however, I am lucky enough to experience what it’s like to have two younger sisters—their names are Ôc and Chíp, and they’re three and nine years old. Not surprisingly, it’s very different from what I’m used to at home. Although my nine-year-old sister, the older of the two, is younger than my youngest brother, we seem to engage with each other more. We spend about an hour after school every day playing dozens of games of tic-tac-toe, looking at photos on my computer, and drawing pictures. I practice my Vietnamese homework with her, and she goes over her English lessons with me.  The three of us have also had several nail-polish sessions, where Ôc’s still-wet bright pink toenails seem to be inexplicably attracted to my bed-sheets. (Luckily I brought nail-polish remover.)

            Ôc is adorable, even if she doesn’t quite understand the games I try to teach her; hand games are too difficult to remember, and whenever we play hot hands she gets a little over-excited and just hits my hands as often and as hard as she can. She does enjoy, however, being swung around in a circle by her arms, and dancing with me. (The latter can be a little awkward, especially since I’m almost three times as tall as she is.) The constant fiddling with my hair is also quite nice, and she loves when I give her ponytails and bizarre hair-dos.

            However to be honest, it can get a little tiring to be constantly smiling and taking pictures and playing through page after page of tic-tac-toe and making dozens of paper airplanes and explaining every single app on my iPod and looking at every single photo on my computer and singing songs and learning songs and trying to communicate and looking at pictures of Barbies and “oohing” and “aahing” at every single one for what seems like hours and hours and hours. Privacy really doesn’t seem to be a concept that they value, though it may just be my Western way of thinking that causes me to be a little exasperated when Ôc comes into my room for the fourth time in half an hour to demand a spot on my lap so she can “help me with work.” (Very cute but, I assure you, also rather annoying.)

            This being said, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, or as if I don’t thoroughly enjoy my sisters—to the contrary, in fact. I already don’t see them in the context of a “host” family anymore; instead—and I know this is a cliché—they, and my host parents, have become my family away from home. Besides, Ôc and Chíp come in handy whenever I see another alarmingly large ant population in my room; they come running whenever they hear my shriek, and we spend the next several minutes jumping and stomping around my room, causing, I’m sure, great damage to the local ant community.