The last time Mei* called me Jie Jie* was when she was still struggling to form words. I held on to that memory like how a mother holds onto her baby's milk tooth. There she was, perched on the top of the staircase, trying not to be seen as she nursed our mother's cane mark on her chubby little leg. Her wide round eyes were full of tears. Soft whimpers emitted from her throat as her small body tried to grapple with the pain.

 

The front door slammed shut, leaving only the two of us in the house. I crawled up the stairs gingerly on my four limbs and sat a few steps below her, peering up at her with bated breath. She didn't look at me.

 

"Jie Jie, so pain... Mummy hit so pain―" her little voice bobbed up and down, mixed with her sobs.

 

"Let me see," I responded softly, breaching the space between us and carefully removing her hand from her wound.

 

Pink and red eddied out from the imprint of the cane, a thin streak that split her soft skin. I went to the bathroom to get a washcloth and soaked it with cold water. At eight, I was clueless about healing wounds, but as far as I had felt the pulsing pain of my sister's leg like it was my own, intuition told me that she needed something cool to take the pain away. When I gently pressed the dampened fibres of the cloth into her leg, she flinched and whined. She kindly returned the gesture; hot tear drops splattered onto my hands.

 

"Jie Jie will always protect you, okay?" I cooed, rubbing her head.

 

The in-between of our childhood since then was a blur. Time passed, we grew up, and relationships between people became more than just a matter of reliance. I found myself slipping from that pedestal Mei had placed me upon. Looking at it another way (a more idealistic way), I had deliberately dismounted from that lofty place on my own. A saviour complex, some might call it, led inevitably to my tragic downfall. Nothing mattered more to me than fulfilling the role of the big sister, and I sought desperately to be a role model for her amidst the confounding landscape of growing up.

 

It was a role that Mum had delegated to me. I recalled one of Mei's episodes. At thirteen, she had decided that she was big enough to storm out of the house after getting into a fight with Mum over some money mishandling. How a mismatch of cents and dollars bubbled into vitriolic words was beyond me. Mum grabbed my hands like her life depended on it.

 

"Jie, you need to teach her the right way! You must teach her!" I saw the desperation cloud my mother's eyes. It terrified me. An invisible baton had been passed. I was the older sister, the one who had to teach her. Mum didn't care that Mei barely spoke to her, much less looked her in the eyes.

 

"As her mother and sister, it is our job to teach her, no matter how much she resents us for it."

 

"Mum, you need to be gentle with her. She won't listen unless you calm down."

 

"No! We must teach her!"

 

The fulfilment of these duties required me to dissociate from the numerous shouting matches and sparring with nasty words that made my throat hoarse just from the utterance of their very meanings. I would never forget the way she looked at me. There was this one time─and I couldn't exactly remember what we were fighting over, much less if it really mattered─where we had gotten physical. It was like a movie tableau: white lotion splattered on the wall, Mei with her hands shielding herself, her frame drowned in my silhouette as the sun shone upon us from behind. To this day, I tried my hardest to recall what we had been arguing over. Because maybe then I could justify the gut-wrenching guilt I had felt from watching her tremble beneath me. I wondered if closure would come with the lesson to be gleaned from that portrait.

 

Sometimes I looked into the mirror and didn't recognise myself. Playing the mediator and the advocate in my family had distorted my sense of identity. One night, Mei started to complain about her group project in school and a bunch of mean kids who were ostracising her. As she relayed her story, I imagined how these kids must have perceived her: this sharp-tongued girl who saw the world as the problem, who spun praise into patronisation, who would fight back given any opportunity to do so. I imagined she treated them the way she treated me: defensive, impervious to feedback, and tactlessly honest.

 

"Mei, you need to try listening to them more. You can't always blame people for not agreeing with you—"

 

"Shut up, Jodie. You always think it's my fault. It's fucking annoying when you keep telling me ‘Oh, you're the problem, you're the problem.' I'm not!"

 

The dinner table fell silent. Our father, biological but whom rinsed himself of the duty to give moral instruction, spooned a piece of fish into Mei's bowl. Mum's body was rigid. And so I spoke, not because I wanted to, but because the alternative would have destroyed the four of us at that table.

 

"Mei, you shouldn't take your emotions out on people. Just take a deep breath and―"

 

Mei flung a piece of her chicken at me.

 

The thought that echoed through my brain seemed to come from generations of women before me: Where did I go wrong with her?

 

"Mei, Jie Jie will always be by your side." I reminded her of this often, just not in words. When she tried to steal money from me, I transferred her enough money to hang out with her friends. Sometimes I waited downstairs at the dining table until she returned home at 1 a.m., just to make sure she was safe. On some mornings, when she didn't bother to make breakfast, I sliced strawberries into little hearts, put them in a glass of milk, and served them with French toast. She never thanked me, but I didn't need gratitude. I also avoided conversation as much as possible because I believed she felt safer with me the less we talked. The wounds of my judgement ran deep. I knew this from how she minced her words and hesitated frequently when we discussed her personal life. And so I shut up and listened, biting the second tongue that my mother had sewn into my mouth, because I missed knowing her. 

 

Another day, Mum and Mei got into a fight. I sat between the two of them and repeated my usual mantras to calm them down, chewing up acrid words into softer euphemisms. I wasn't sure if it was the way she had said it, or maybe it was how she had said it. Mum stopped talking to Mei and decided to use me as a proxy.

 

"Tell her that she has no right to treat her parents like this! Tell that brat that she is not even worth loving!"

 

That night, I went to bed cradling a slapped cheek. My bedroom walls were paper-thin, so I swallowed down my sobs and became giddy from the pressure behind my eyes. It felt like Mum's hand was still there on my face, a tender reminder of the failure I was as both a sister and a daughter. I never expected a knock at my door, nor did I expect Mei to come in. The moon outside my window looked blue when she came in quietly and sat at the edge of my bed. I had never felt so small before her—curled in bed, bleary-eyed and wounded. I refused to look at her out of embarrassment. I had neither the dignity nor respect of an older sister.

 

"Jie, put this on your cheek."

 

A cold relief graced my cheek. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mei reach her arm over to press a damp cloth to my cheek.

 

"Thank you for standing up for me." 

 

I couldn't find the words, but the cries I had suppressed gargled up in my mouth and the tears scorched my eyes. In that moment, I was her Jie Jie again—powerless, weak, and defeated by the responsibilities placed upon her.

 

*Chinese