Portrait of my sisters

Seated first from right is my dajie, eldest sister born in 1935, 16 years older than me. Dajie is tall. She is about 165 cm, a height that made her outstanding among our neighbours. After all, there were rarely girls found over 155 cm due to poor nutrition in her days. Although she is tall, she runs rather slowly. Once our father recounted his own witness of dajie’s slowness in race competition in a sport event, “I went to see her in the race competition thinking she would win at least for the top three places because she had legs far longer than other contestants. But I surprised to see that she was the slowest runner.”

Dajie has a good temperament. Whenever she argued with her siblings or friends, she argued with a smiling face. This is an obvious difference from every one of her siblings because we are generally short tempered.

Eventually the fact that dajie was adopted from a neighbour revealed. She was the second last daughter of that neighbour who had too many children and found hard to raise up them all. My mother then just lost a son from an acute infection and was in deep sorrow. My grandmum suggested that she should adopt dajie to ease the sadness. That was how dajie was adopted.

Dajie died at the age of 58 from gall-bladder tumour. She married to Yan family and bore 3 children, two sons and one daughter.

First from right is erjie, the second elder sister, 13 years older than me. Erjie married to a school teacher who later promoted to be in charge of the teachers team. To our family, she married to a decent social status.

It is said that erjie was very beautiful when she was young. That was how she attracted Lee family’s attention and soon the match-maker came on behalf of Lee family to offer their proposal. Admiring the bridegroom’s occupation, my parents nodded their heads.

Erjie also went through a period of hardship as many other housewives of her day after marriage. She bore Lee family 4 children, 3 sons and 1 daughter.

Erjie is quite generous. Each time when mum or dad visited her, she always bought them good food and inserted some tea money into their pockets prior to parting. Mum likes to tease dad’s frequent visit to erjie because of erjie’s generosity. Dad always argues that it is from his love.

Standing at the centre is my sanjie, the third elder sister, 9 years older than me. She learned to become a seamstress from a cousin when she was at her late 10s and early 20s.

Sanjie has a good virtue of perseverance. She helps educating us this value by telling stories or giving lengthy lectures on this virtue. She helps tutoring on our school homework. She is very strict that she doesn’t worry tearing off the part of our poorly done work and asks to do it over again. For many times, she did this to sijie, my 4th elder sister, and that made her cry madly.

She married to Liao family and bore them two sons and two daughters of twin. Because of her always emphasising good value to her children, all of them are quite successful in their careers especially the 2nd son being a vet and the 3rd daughter possessing a master degree in the horticultural art.

With her seamstress skill and her strong belief of perseverance, she had successfully overcome the hardest period of life when all the 4 children were in various stages of schooling.


Standing at the centre is sijie, the 4th elder sister, 6 years older than me. Sijie is the most sociable child among us. I remembered she always had someone to talk to wherever she went when we were small. And pretty often, she brought her classmate home, even stayed overnight at our place.

Sijie was very attractive. When she was dating with her husband before their marriage, the young man was in mad love with her that he not only often treated sijie the Taipei delicacy food, Yaroubian (鴨肉扁), a kind of roasted and smoked duck, but also bribed the family members by giving a big pack of Yaroubian. Though as a matter of fact, he was still struggling with his knitting garment business when he was dating with sijie.

After they married, sijie helped his business booming by working as his accountant, quality controller, cooker for the team of workers and etc. that was indeed a tremendous load to her.

She bore 3 children for the Lin family, two sons and one daughter. They made quite a fortune yet lead a no-frill life style. In 1989, they immigrated to Australia. Now sijie is living with her 3rd son, a baker, in Sydney with the eldest son and daughter working in Taiwan.

Sijie is a devoted Buddhist. Her husband died in 1999 from liver cancer. With the supportive fellow Buddhists’ chanting and counselling, her husband passed away peacefully.

This is xiaomei, younger sister, 2 years younger than me. Like me, xiaomei is rather shy and introvert. Perhaps our age is close that we find we have similar way of thinking about life.

Xiaomei married to Ye family at 30 years of age, quite late comparing to all her friends. This must be something to do with her commitment to looking after our parents. In our tradition, looking after parents is the responsibility of the son. I am the only son of the family so I am supposed to pick up this duty. But before I stabilized after my 2 year military service and 3 year period of career exploring, xiaomei shared the duty without complaint at all. To her willingness in looking after my aging parents while I was away in other towns, I am so grateful to her.

Like sanjie, xiaomei also possesses the perseverance virtue. She bore two children for the Ye family, one boy and one girl. And she educated them to become decent people in the society. In order to reduce the financial load of parents, both children do part time job during holidays while most of the university students are enjoying their fun activities.

Xiaomei is also a devoted Buddhist. When our father died, she was the one able to cite a praying mantra everyday for father for the 7 periods of 7, ie 49 days hoping to help father’s spirit to return to Amitabha’s pure land. She is indeed a filial daughter to my parent and a respectful sister to me.

Amitofo!