Dinner with M2

On Tuesday I had dinner with my sister. She is my second older sister--in Chinese, Er Jie--, I will call her M2. It does not sound like such a remarkable event, but upon reflection I realized that she and I have not had an extensive one-on-one interaction in years, maybe as much as a decade? We have lived in different places, and led busy lives. When we have seen each other it's mostly been at big family get-togethers where there are always many distractions...

I have vivid memories of M2 from when I was a child. She is nine years older than me, actually my half sister. When my age was still in the single digits, she was the coolest person ever born (as far as I was concerned). Everything that belonged to her was the coolest thing in the world. Everything she was interested in, I was interested in too. I try to imagine how annoying I must have been! But I didn't see it that way at the time of course. Later I developed a feeling of diffidence toward her, though I couldn't say exactly why.

Anyway, a conference brought M2 to Chicago this week and she called me up out of blue. I went and met her near where she was staying and we had dinner. I still felt some of that former mystique, a sense of great privilege to be in the exclusive presence of my childhood idol. At the same time, I am an adult now; well, we both are. The childhood strangeness that I think formerly interfered with our ability to develop a real sisterly relationship has been to some extent overcome, perhaps?

We had a really pleasant conversation, at least I thought so. We had more in common than I would have expected, personality-wise. We do such different work, and I have always imagined that we would have formed our respective identities around very different sorts of things. And yet there is something quite similar about our personality styles, our experiences of certain things.

In any case, I was really glad we did it. It was a good start. It is strange to talk of "starting" a sibling relationship in one's 30s, but there you have it. That's still how it feels.