Currently, Kaylee

on filial piety, sisterhood, and grieving the relationship we thought we’d have.

the other night, i found myself at a halloween party having a conversation with someone i had only recently met.

we came from similar cultural backgrounds, so naturally, our conversation found its way to family. there’s something about meeting someone who grew up with the same unspoken expectations as you. you don’t have to spend twenty minutes explaining why your parents think the way they do, or why something as simple as disagreeing with them can turn into an argument about the disrespect towards their sacrifices.

there’s already an understanding there.

at some point, he asked for advice about his younger brother. without airing out anything, he wanted to know what he could do as his older brother to give him the love and support that his parents couldn’t give the two of them. i stood there and listened, offered advice in the best way that i could.

but the more that we spoke about it, the more there was this looming cloud of jealousy of his little brother.

i wasn’t jealous he was struggling, i was jealous that his brother loved him so much to ask these questions.

i remember thinking to myself, that must be really nice.

it must be so nice to be loved so openly that someone carries your struggles into rooms you aren’t even in.

it must be nice to have an older sibling who thinks about you when you’re not around, not because you’ve done something wrong, but because they’re worried about whether you’re okay.

to have someone who wants to understand you, even when they don’t know how.

it was such a simple conversation. one that he probably wouldn’t even remember having. but i haven’t stopped thinking about it.

because for a moment, i wasn’t thinking about his younger brother. i was thinking about what it might’ve felt like to be mine.

and then, inevitably, i thought about my sister.

when we were just sisters.

when i think about my sister and me as children, there’s one memory i always seem to return to.

sharks and minnows.

growing up, we didn’t have much in the way of toys or games, so a lot of our childhood entertainment came from whatever we could create ourselves.

sometimes, that meant turning our bedroom into a playground.

we’d play sharks and minnows, running around, laughing, and finding ways to entertain ourselves with nothing more than our imaginations.

there wasn’t anything particularly special about it. but maybe that’s why i remember it so fondly. we didn’t need much to enjoy being around each other.

she was my older sister, and i was her little sister. we were enough for each other.

i don’t remember worrying about disappointing her. i don’t remember feeling like i needed to explain myself or defend my decisions.

i just remember having fun. and growing up in a household with strict parents, those moments meant more than i understood at the time. because when your parents are the people you’re constantly afraid of disappointing, having an older sibling feels like having someone on your side.

someone who knows the rules because they’ve lived under them.

someone who understands the frustration without needing an explanation.

someone who can look at you when your parents are being unreasonable and silently communicate, i know.

who could possibly understand your childhood better than the person who lived through it beside you?

for a while, i think we had that.

and then, somewhere along the way, we didn’t.

you’re lucky you’re the younger sister.

i used to hear that all the time.

“you’re lucky you’re the younger sister.”

i’ve heard those words so many times that even now, as an adult, i can practically hear her saying them.

and for the longest time, i didn’t know how to respond. because how do you explain to someone that the life they insist you’re so lucky to have was a life you were contemplating throwing away at one point?

my sister grew up under circumstances i would never claim to fully understand.

there were parts of her childhood that forced her to grow up faster than she should have had to. she navigated expectations, judgment, and conflict within our family at an age when she should have been allowed to simply figure out who she was.

i know that hurt her. i know there were things she experienced that i didn’t. and i would never try to diminish those experiences by claiming that my childhood was somehow harder than hers.

but i wish she understood that being the youngest didn’t mean i was standing on the sidelines, watching everyone else struggle while i enjoyed some carefree childhood.

i was there too.

i was growing up in that house too.

and when she moved out, i was still stuck at home.

still living with the tension that had built up between our family members. still hearing conversations about decisions that weren’t mine to make. still finding myself caught in arguments that i never wanted to be apart of.

when she left for school, it was the first period of my life i remember being truly terrible.

i acted out. i experimented with drugs, with drinking, with anything i thought might silence the noise at home.

i spent my high school years defending her actions and choices because i know she wasn’t doing anything wrong by living her life the way she wanted.

i remember feeling like i was constantly defending someone who wasn’t even in the room. and the difficult part is that i never wanted her to be in that room.

i didn’t want her to come home and experience more judgment. i didn’t want her to endure conversations that would only hurt her further.

i wanted her to have the freedom to live her life.

but sometimes, i wonder whether she ever realized what it was like for the person who stayed behind. because while she was learning how to live outside of our parents’ expectations, i was learning how to survive within them.

and somehow, i felt like i spent more time fighting for her right to be herself than i ever spent fighting for my own.

maybe that’s where some of my resentment began.

not because she left. not because i felt she was free.

but because i wish she knew that while she was fighting her own battles, i was fighting for her too.

and all those times i was told how lucky i was to be the younger sister, i wanted to ask, lucky in what way?

because i didn’t feel particularly lucky.

i felt like i was growing up in the aftermath of decisions i never made, being reminded not to repeat mistakes that weren’t mine.

and sometimes, i felt like there was so much pressure to become the daughter my parents wanted that nobody stopped to ask who i actually wanted to be.

the debt of being someone’s child.

i don’t remember my parents ever explicitly teaching us about filial piety. that wasn’t a term i learned until i got into therapy.

there were no lessons about chữ hiếu, no lengthy explanations about what it meant to honor our parents or respect our elders.

it was drilled into our heads by maternal guilt. we were meant to understand it and to act on it always.

our parents had sacrificed so much for us. therefore, we owed them. we owed them our respect, our gratitude, our obedience. and in many ways, i understood why.

my parents worked hard. they made sacrifices to provide us with opportunities they didn’t necessarily have themselves. i know their lives weren’t easy, and i know raising children while navigating a completely different culture comes with challenges i may never fully understand.

but somewhere along the way, gratitude began to feel less like something freely given and more like a debt that could never be repaid.

every mistake felt like another reminder of everything they’d done for us.

every disagreement became something bigger than the disagreement itself.

if we talked back, we were disrespectful. if we questioned their decisions, we were ungrateful. if we wanted something different from the lives they imagined for us, we were rejecting their sacrifices altogether.

and i think that’s something i have struggled with my whole life.

because how do you tell your parents that you’re grateful for everything they’ve done while also explaining some of the things they’ve done to hurt you?

how do you explain that wanting independence doesn’t mean you don’t love them?

how do you become your own person when doing so feels like disappointing the people who gave you everything?

i think that’s the part of filial piety i’ve found hardest to reconcile. not the idea of respecting my parents, or acknowledging their sacrifices. but the expectation that love and gratitude should somehow mean never questioning the people who raised you.

and i wonder how much of that (mis)understanding of love was passed down to my sister.

because somewhere along the way, she stopped feeling like someone who understood what it was like to be my parents’ child.

she started feeling like another parent herself.

i needed a sister, not another mother.

i don’t think my parents ever explicitly told my sister she needed to raise me.

it happened in smaller ways. make sure your sister is okay. make sure she’s doing her homework. make sure she’s staying out of trouble.

because my parents didn’t have the same educational opportunities we did, they relied on my sister to help me with things they couldn’t always navigate themselves.

and i understand that.

i understand being told that being the oldest sometimes comes with responsibilities you never volunteered for.

but i think those responsibilities slowly changed the way we saw each other. she became someone who was supposed to keep me from making mistakes. and i became someone who felt like she was constantly waiting for me to make one.

there were still moments when we felt like sisters. moments when we could laugh together and forget about everything else.

but they became moments rather than the relationship itself.

the older i got, the harder it became to separate my sister from the authority she seemed to hold over me. and when i began navigating the messier parts of growing up, that distinction mattered more than ever.

there were times when i came to her with things that were deeply personal. things that took a tremendous amount of courage to say out loud. and instead of feeling understood, i walked away feeling questioned, doubted, and even more alone. i don’t think she fully understood how much those experiences changed the way i saw her.

because when you finally gather the courage to tell someone something painful, and the response leaves you wishing you’d never said anything at all, you start learning to keep things to yourself.

eventually i stopped feeling like i could go to her. not necessarily because i believed she didn’t love me, but because i didn’t trust that being vulnerable with her would leave me feeling safe. sometimes, telling her something felt no different from telling my mom. and if i was already afraid of how my mom would react, why would i willingly put myself in a position where i might have to experience that same reaction twice?

so i kept things to myself.

and maybe that’s the saddest part of it all.

i had an older sister.

i just didn’t feel like i had someone i could turn to.

maybe she was just trying to protect me in the only way she knew how. she knew what our parents were capable of when they were disappointed. she knew how painful it could be to fall short of their expectations. maybe she thought that if she could prevent me from making certain decisions, she could spare me from the consequences that she got.

and i can understand why she might have believed that.

but what i wish she understood was that i was never asking her to save me from growing up.

i was living life for the first time too.

i was going to make mistakes. i was going to disappoint people. i was going to make decisions she didn’t agree with. and sometimes, i didn’t need another person telling me what i should have done differently.

i needed someone to sit beside me and tell me that i’d be okay. i needed someone to understand that i was scared, confused, and trying to figure things out.

i needed my big sister.

the sister i wanted.

there’s a jealousy i’ve carried for years that i’ve never enjoyed admitting.

growing up, my sister’s girlfriend had a younger sister who was close to my age.

and sometimes, watching the relationship they had made me feel like my sister knew how to be an older sister to someone else in a way she didn’t seem to know how to be for me.

i saw a closeness that i craved. a relationship that seemed to exist without the weight of responsibility or authority.

and i was jealous.

not because i thought the other girl didn’t deserve that relationship.

but because i wondered why i didn’t deserve that.

i was her baby sister.

i was the one who grew up with her, who shared a childhood with her, who knew what our parents were like when nobody was around.

so why did i feel like i was standing on the outside of a relationship i thought was supposed to be ours?

i don’t know whether she ever noticed. i don’t know whether she ever understood how much i looked up to her, or how badly i wanted her to be someone i could depend on emotionally.

don’t get me wrong, i can look at my sister now and recognize that she was a child who was forced to grow up long before she should have had to. i can understand that she was navigating rejection, pressure, and responsibilities she never asked for.

i can feel compassion for that version of her.

but sometimes i wonder why extending that compassion toward her has always felt easier than receiving it myself.

why have i spent so much time trying to understand what she was going through, when i’ve spent so much of my life feeling like she never tried to understand me?

but i was a child too.

and i needed someone to remember that.

the distance between us.

i haven’t seen my sister in over four years.

writing that feels strange.

four years of birthdays, holidays, ordinary days, and entire seasons of our lives passing by without knowing what was happening in the other’s world.

we barely talk anymore. and when we do, it often feels like something we do because we’re supposed to.

a text out of obligation.

a response because we’re family. not because we just have something we want to tell each other.

and i think there’s something particularly sad about having a sibling who is still alive, still somewhere in the world living their life, and realizing that you no longer know how to be part of it.

i don’t know what my sister and i would talk about if we sat down together today.

i don’t think there would be anything to talk about.

i don’t think i’ve stopped loving my sister. but i’ve learned to love her from afar.

and maybe that’s something i’ve done with my family as a whole.

i’ve learned how to understand their experiences, to understand their sacrifices, and how to make peace with certain things without necessarily having conversations about them.

but making sense of something doesn’t always make it hurt less.

there are days when all i crave is the warm embrace of an older sister’s arms. there are days where i see how siblings behave with each other, and my heart sinks. i ache for a sibling bond that i can tell my friends about. i wish i could have a bad day and call her and speak with her about it. to get advice that an older sibling would give, not a parent would berate me with. and i think that’s what makes the distance so difficult to accept. i don’t necessarily want someone to fix everything for me.

sometimes, i just want to feel like somebody is on my side.

what i hope ends with me.

i don’t know if my sister and i will be close again. i’d like to think there’s a possibility, but i don’t know what that would look like, or how two people who have spent so much time apart begin finding their way back to each other.

and that’s okay to admit. i don’t need to know right now.

what i do know is that when i imagine having a family of my own someday, there are things i hope will be different.

if i have children, i want them to be able to be children. i don’t want the cycle to repeat itself. i don’t want them to grow up believing that familial love is conditional.

i want my kids to fight over stupid things. i want them to laugh until their stomachs hurt. i want them to make up ridiculous games when they’re bored.

and when life becomes difficult, i want them to know they have someone they can turn to without being afraid of what will happen after they speak.

i still believe in honoring my parents. i still believe there’s value in gratitude, respect, and recognizing the sacrifices that came before me.

but i don’t believe those values should require us to abandon ourselves. and i don’t think loving our families means we have to pretend that everything we inherited was good for us. sometimes, love means recognizing what we want to carry forward. and sometimes, it means having the courage to leave certain things behind.

i think about that older brother from the party.

about how he was losing it because his younger brother was struggling. about how badly he wanted to help him. about how he saw his brother as someone who deserved understanding, even when the world around him didn’t seem to know how to give it.

and i think about how something that might’ve been so ordinary to him could mean so much to me. because all i could think that night was, that must be really nice.

and maybe that’s what i’ve been trying to understand all along. not whether my family loved me. but why for so much of my life, i struggled to feel it in the ways i needed.

i don’t know if my sister and i will ever find our way back to each other. i don’t know if there will come a day when we can sit together and talk about everything that happened, or whether we’ll simply continue loving each other without seeing each other.

i don’t know if i’ll ever stop feeling some of the resentment i carry. and i don’t want to pretend that understanding why things happened has somehow made everything okay.

but i do know that i don’t want to spend the rest of my life believing that love has to feel like an obligation.

i want to believe that family can mean something gentler than that. that we can honor the people who came before us without repeating everything they taught us. that we can be grateful for the lives we were given while still wishing certain parts of them had been different. and that we can recognize the pain someone else experienced without pretending our own never existed.

i still think about the two little girls playing sharks and minnows in their bedroom.

before the expectations, before the distance, before either of us really understood what it meant to grow up.

sometimes, i wish we’d been allowed to stay sisters a little longer.