A Sister in Shanghai

My sister uprooted herself last year. She packed practically everything she owned into two large National Geographic suitcases and flew to Shanghai on a plane that carefully skirted Russian airspace. There, she met a boy whose name she couldn’t tell me – I wouldn’t be able to pronounce it – and didn’t call for the entire year.

A postcard arrived home a month or two after she’d left, addressed to the whole family, with a stack of photos neatly encased in a cream envelope. One photo showed a row of skyscrapers towering above a brightly lit canal; another captured her enjoying hotpot at a table littered with beer cans and cheap cigarettes. In the next photo, her new moped, plastered with stickers of foreign cartoon characters, gleamed brightly. Her new tattoo featured in a few photos, and at the bottom of the stack, there was one of her with friends outside the university where she was studying.

I stole that photo, put it into the pocket of my jumper and took it upstairs to my bedroom to study more closely. There were a few boys in the picture, but I was only interested in the one standing closest to her, his arm draped around her shoulder. I figured he must be the boy she’d mentioned in a brief text a few weeks ago. I wondered what the two of them had in common, despite a fractured understanding of each other’s languages. He couldn’t have the same sense of humour as her, and he definitely wasn’t able to make her laugh the way I sometimes could.

In the Spring, my mother decided it was time to visit my sister out in Shanghai. She packed the last remaining suitcase, roped my father into chauffeuring her to the airport, and promised to bring each of us a gift. She arrived at the gate six hours early, determined to get a taste of the sweet, sticky life my sister had created for herself out there. While she sat 35,000 feet in the air, I sat on the stairs at home, wondering why I was so linguistically incompetent.

My mother returned a week later with a new set of gel nails, a tattoo placed a little too far down her lower back, and an expensive gift from the boy in the picture. He’d given her a small ceramic bowl from Jingdezhen. My mother decided instantly that it was far too nice to display anywhere in the house, so she kept it in the box it came in – a small piece of my sister’s new life, locked away on a high shelf out of reach.

She described Shanghai, the itinerary my sister had meticulously planned, and my sister herself. I didn’t recognise the person my mother described. She told us my sister could speak fluently to anyone she encountered, that she never needed a map, even in unfamiliar neighbourhoods. She mentioned a dinner with my sister and the boy from the picture. His English was much better than my mother’s Mandarin (she didn’t speak any). He’d start sentences perfectly but sometimes struggled to finish them, so my sister would interject to help him out.

The stories made me want to fashion my own pair of metal wings and fly from the drab English town we lived in, to the fantastical place that Shanghai seemed to be. I wanted to drink sweet beer and bitter tea, get spontaneous tattoos, have a foreign fling turn into a long-term relationship, and skip nightclub queues because of my Western features. I decided that if I familiarised myself enough with the language, I could go out there and slot myself nicely into her life. Perhaps she could find time for me in between going to classes and the boy whose name I still didn’t know.

When my sister finally returned a year later, she said she’d never felt so at home in a place. I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t know all that much about Shanghai or China in general apart from what I’d learned in school about the terracotta warriors and my own research on Chairman Mao’s rule. I figured it had to do with the good weather and couldn’t be anything else. She struggled to adjust at home, blaming it partly on the jet lag but also on the sense that she didn’t belong here anymore.

She got a job over the summer at a pan-Asian restaurant to try and make back some of the money she’d spent out there. One evening, I decided to surprise her by showing up and taking a seat at the bar. She poured me a glass of lychee juice, placing a few actual lychees in it just to make me happy, and then told me to be quiet while she served customers. When she came back, she had a bowl of steamed dumplings in her hands. As we shared them, she told stories she’d forgotten, about her trips to Japan and South Korea. I tried to copy her chopstick- holding technique, then asked her if these dumplings tasted anything like the ones back in Shanghai. She shook her head. When we finished, she told me gently that after her final year of university here, she planned to move back to Shanghai.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s better out there.”

“In what way?”

“It’s better for me.”

“I’m not out there.”

“No, I guess you’re not.”

“So how can it be better? Besides, there are cameras everywhere – you’re being watched by the government.”

“So what? I’m not doing anything illegal; I’m just living.”

“I think you’d be happier here. There are plenty of jobs for Mandarin speakers.”

“I’m going there to study.”

“Aren’t you tired of studying?”

“Not if it means I can go back there.”

I realised then that I had lost her. Whether it was the seductiveness of Shanghai or the boy – whose name I now knew, as she’d given him an English one – I couldn’t say. But I’ve often heard that losing one thing leads to gaining another. Now, whenever my sister comes up in conversation, I get to talk about how she’s fluent in Mandarin, how she rides her moped everywhere, how she plans on moving back to Shanghai next summer. I tell people she’s met a boy who buys our mother expensive gifts and makes her laugh, and that one day, I plan to fly out and see her there for myself.

Words by Beatrice Aherne