“In the span of a week, I’d gone from an only child to a woman within a jumble of sisterhood,” writes Thao Thai. “Can one be a sister if one never knew one’s siblings?”
Credit: Erika Venci/Mariner Books
From a young age, I began to have vivid interactions with an imaginary friend, as many kids do, although I clung to mine longer than most. I privately referred to her as my invisible sister. She was a presence that would perch on my bed and guard me as I slept. Wherever I walked, she was my shadow on the pavement, flitting away as I stooped to catch her.
This invisible sister became my confidant, my sounding board for the concerns I couldn’t share with anyone else. But she was also my guilty secret. I didn’t tell anyone about her, least of all my mother, who’d once said, with a catch in her voice, that she would never have another child. Somehow, even then, I knew there was something transgressive in my longing for a sister, a want so breathtaking and impossible that I often ached with it.
Even after the age of invisible companions passed, I found myself befriending women who were sisters. Through them, I was drawn into the nets of sisterhood, each distinct, driven by their own insular conflicts and systems of language. I felt as if I were listening at the door of a gathering I very much wanted to attend. My longing for sisterhood danced at the edge of my periphery for much of my life, palpable yet unnamable until one night in Vietnam.
I was 22 years old, standing at the close of a pilgrimage to reconnect with my father, who I hadn’t seen since I was a baby. That very day, I had discovered that he’d disappeared from my hometown without a trace, rendering my overseas mission both fruitless and foolish. I’d long felt as if I’d been tiptoeing around pieces of shattered glass without knowing how or when things broke.
Credit: Erika Venci
That night, my mother’s own beloved sister sensed my despair. She crawled under the mosquito netting that surrounded my makeshift bed on the floor and, among the tumult of cicadas and the Delta heat that wrapped us like a caul, she told me about parents’ first child, a daughter who died within hours of childbirth. Her name was Hương, a name that refers to the fragrance of flowers. My mother was deep in a medicated sleep when my sister passed; my father, inebriated and insensate.
It was my aunt who found her small body, which had lost its warmth, its life. That loss cleaved my parents, whose marriage already bore the seeds of contention, so that when I came along, I could not be enough to bind what had irrevocably torn. They divorced around my first birthday. Neither spoke of my sister until decades later.
During that same trip to Vietnam, I learned that my father had remarried after my mother and I immigrated to America. He and his second wife had daughters of their own, whose names and ages were lost to me. In the span of a week, I’d gone from an only child to a woman within a jumble of sisterhood. Can one be a sister if one never knew one’s siblings? I considered how the trajectory of my life had been shaped by those other daughters that my parents had loved. It was then that I began to understand more about what drove my father further into addiction and eventual abandonment, along with the enormous melancholies my mother nursed in secret. The phantom dearth I carried had rooted long before I existed. It was, in fact, built into my origin story.
As I unknowingly grew up in the shadow of my mother’s first child, I’d nursed a recognition that there were things we could not discuss in my family. Tragedies that remained remote to me, bizarre acts weighed down by forces I was never permitted to question. My mother and grandparents’ behavior, at turns intensely loving and at others fearful and avoidant, had dictated the way I learned to regard myself, as a furtive seeker of the truth, a traveler of the overgrown past.
As my aunt shared what she knew about my mother’s first child, she couldn’t stop the tears from raking down her ruddy face. It was the first time I’d seen her cry. I knew what she was feeling wasn’t just her own pain in losing a niece — the first baby of the family, a role I’d always thought was mine — but my mother’s pain, too. Because that is also sisterhood. Taking the other’s agonies as your own. Living with a piece of their heart lodged in yours.
Need your next page-turner? See which books our editors can’t put down with our People Who Read newsletter — plus get PEOPLE News.
In my debut novel, Banyan Moon, I named the character most similar to my mother Hương. When the name came to me, I cried. Out of sadness, but also out of hope and beauty and the belief that what was missing might eventually be found. Now my mother and I sometimes talk about Hương; never directly, but with a casualness that, too, seems like a gift. She says things like, “When I was pregnant with your sister…” and I ask questions like, “How long after my sister…” Hương has become a marker of time for us, her own precious being, but also a thread that connects our shared, riotous past.
Credit: Mariner Books
As a reader who grew up on Little Women, Sense and Sensibility, and Sweet Valley Twins, I always knew I had a sister story in me. It wasn’t until my aunt’s revelation that I began to see where this impulse came from. When I submitted drafts for my forthcoming novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, a whirlwind tale of two estranged sisters finding each other through art, my editors assumed I had a sister of my own. You write about sisterhood like you know it firsthand. I bit down the swell of emotion that rose in me. That was the most bittersweet compliment I could have received about this book.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop reflecting on sisterhood. What was; what could be. To write my novel, I spent years teasing apart the many what-ifs and shadow scenarios of two characters deeply wound in my imagination. These women taught me something about the fraught terrain of sororial intimacy, how it shifts, how it holds under unbearable weight. Now, I’m still circling the door of sisterhood. But this time, I’m certain it will one day crack open for me. After all this thinking and writing and remembering, I’ve arrived at one answer within my heap of questions. I am a sister, even if I never knew my sister. This knowledge is mine and it is hers, wherever she may be now.
The Seekers of Deer Creek comes out Aug. 4 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.
Read the full article here
