Aqi

amy wang

Yesterday afternoon, when Aqi pulled into the middle school parking lot in her gray Honda Civic, I asked her to stop by the gas station before we went home so I could buy a Slurpee.

Slurpees are bad for your teeth, she told me, without looking away from the road. And mom didn’t leave any spare change for us in the cupholder. Plus it’s freezing. Why would you want to eat something cold when it’s so cold outside already?

But I want one, I told her, and so she gave me a mini packet of M&Ms from the glovebox instead, even though mom made sure to tell her they were only for emergency use.

Make sure you finish those before you go inside, Aqi said, her voice a pitch lower than the static hum of the radio. 

Okay, I told her, and we settled into silence again, the kind that was so wet and thin it dissipated against my palms.

Sucking on the M&Ms, I stared through the windshield at the gray light and how it shimmered against the rearview mirror, coating everything in a silver smudge. The dry murmur of the car heater felt like a liquid wave against the back of my mind, and it made me drowsy. 

Noticing this, Aqi smiled at me.

Go to sleep, she said. I’ll wake you up when we get home. 

Her hands were laced over the wheel, white and small and pear-boned, each fingernail smooth and filed to a neat curve. As my eyelids flickered shut, the sight of them sparked the memory of how last quarter in school, the teacher had given us a printout that involved identifying the different components of a person’s anatomy. 

In class, the assignment had made me think of the various parts of Aqi’s body, those that I had seen and forgotten, and those I had never seen but imagined in detail. A surprising number of limbs were the former. This is because once, Aqi had lain down on the floor in her pajama shorts and let me trace all her veins to their roots. I followed them all over her body like they were the paths of a highway, trying to see where they dipped below her sternum, and where they slipped back out again. Her veins were very thin, and they overlapped each other in certain places, marbled like porcelain and just as cold. As the teacher showed us the arteries and veins, I thought of how I had held my head against Aqi’s chest, how I had tried to see if I could counter the beat of her heart with my own. This was, of course, impossible, because I have no sense of rhythm, but in the classroom, and then again in the car, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way her shoulders drew themselves together, like a bow without an arrow, latched too tightly to shatter into two halves. 

And despite the parts of her body I was intimately acquainted with, as only a sister can be, the image my mind kept returning to was Aqi’s chest, and the jumpy beating inside it. Mainly, I was thinking about the fact that even as a fifteen-year-old, I’m a lot larger than her in that department, which is the only thing I have to be proud of whenever my parents compare our work ethics, though mama always tells me that I have to chalk this up to the fact that Aqi didn’t get proper nutrition back in Fuzhou.

Still, in the moment, I was less than concerned about our bra sizes. I was trying to imagine holding the four chambers of her heart in my hand, trying to see if I could envision its warmth in my palms. It’s a weird thing to have thought about, I know, but sleep does weird things to your brain. And I had never seen Aqi’s heart, but that day, I had imagined it as something akin to the interior of a church, an image that I turned over and over in my mind as the car wound its way home. 

Again, I thought to myself that Aqi had always felt sacred. Perhaps this sanctity was the source of all her un-Americanness, I mused, though most likely it was because Aqi herself was deeply un-American. She did not stand for the pledge of allegiance at school, something the principal had called mama for over and over again. She preferred to wear only the clothes that our aunts send us from overseas, and at night, she told me folktales that are impossible to find in any school library, as if trying to plant the seeds of herself in the sun-stricken soil of my head. 

Or maybe I was just not used to someone who is so full of light, who fishboned herself against me like I am something to bet hope for. As I thought this, my mouth puckered. The m&ms had long been finished, but their rusty sweetness lingered against the pike of my throat. Like uncertainty, or something more bitter.

***

While we’re on the subject of anatomy, there’s something I should say. Aqi looks different from me, so different that you would think that we came out of different mothers if not for our matching birthmarks halfway down the right side of our backs. This birthmark is the only resemblance we have to each other, which is something that annoys our mother but does not bother the two of us especially. 

When I was little, I used to think that it was because she was born in China, and I was born in America, that our bodies flowered so differently. Now that I’m older, conceptually, I know this is not true. It is not the soil of a country that determines the planes of a child’s face. Still, at times I wonder if maybe my childhood theory has merit. After all, Aqi’s face is milk-white compared to mine, and smaller too, like a thin-skinned fruit that would bleed water if you squeezed it. Her eyes are thinner, her veins closer to the surface of her skin, as if they were salted too late and never seeded properly.

It is not just in appearance that we are different. Aqi likes the heat, and I hate it. On hot days, I suck ice cubes in the air-conditioned living room, while she sits in the half-shadowed hiss of the garage, the air tight and hot and full around her, like a lover’s arms or a mother’s anger.

Aqi explains this particular difference between us with the timing of her birth month. According to her, waipo always said that because Aqi was born during the hottest month of the year, her body has always been at home in the heat. Aqi’s dark hair sucks up sunlight like a peach pit, each strand of it pulsing with warmth whenever she brushes it at night. 

There is also the matter of geography — according to Aqi, in Fuzhou, where she was born, drought lapped the sky of moisture until even the sunlight harshened into a blade. The day I left, the pilots had to pour water all over the wings of the plane in order to make sure we would make the air, she told me once. According to her, the heat was so rough it felt like sandpaper against the back of her lungs. Aqi tells me that it’s impossible to survive for more than twenty years under those conditions unless you are born there, your body birthed into a shell of heat. 

Aqi always has an explanation for everything. This is another difference between the two of us — she is logical, whereas I cannot make the head or tail end of anything except for the brightest quarters in our penny jar. When I have a homework problem I don’t understand, I always bring it to her first, instead of mama or baba. Aqi is patient when explaining math, in a way that mama and baba are unable to emulate, no matter how much cold water they drink beforehand.

This patience is something mama and baba always harp on. Why can’t you be more like da jiejie, they always ask me, and whenever this happens I roll my eyes and tuck my hands beneath my armpits in an approximation of my own inability to stay silent. I don’t want to be like Aqi, I always think, a traitorous thought that I really cannot help. I don’t want to be flat and sad and mama’s least favorite.

Still, in some ways, it always feels like I’m perpetually lagging behind. Even with this entire cup and a half of difference, the boys at school always seem to prefer her to me, which is understandable but also kind of galling. On the whole, however, I do not begrudge her many things, because mama and baba love me better, and in the end, we are evened out when it comes to the affections of other people. I told her this a few weeks ago and she laughed so hard she cried, her mouth making the shape of a swear word as she slumped over on the carpet. I didn’t know that Aqi swore, but I haven’t seen her say it since then, so I assume that she keeps bad words for special occasions, pulling them from the air to keep safe.

For the most part, I assume that she keeps a lot of things safe, like the coins that she picks up from the sidewalk, and spare shawls that she brought over from China, and the half-used pans of eyeshadow that she tries on when she thinks I’m not looking. I guess in this way, Aqi is like a repository of all the light that I can gather. In this way, I try to show her that I love her too. More than our parents do, and more than the boys at school. As if somehow, that will make up for all of the space between us. As if that can feed the symmetry of her spine, fattening it into something softer.

***

You shouldn’t tell anyone this, especially not mama, but part of me believes that the differences between us are because we were raised by different people, in different places. Before Aqi came to America, she stayed with waipo back in Fuzhou, in a small house that had no windows and only half of a door. She grew up in a town that guarded itself with the rolling green searchlight of farm fields, her body growing used to the wet paste of dirt, the earth-worn smell of tea leaves whenever she and waipo went to gather them. 

This is something my mother has always regretted. She often tells the two of us that this distance made Aqi different from the daughter she gave birth to. Whenever she says this, Aqi goes stiff and straight and silent.

For what it’s worth, Aqi has always been a little strange for as long as I can remember. I don’t believe that this is waipo’s fault, though if we must blame someone, I would rather that it is a woman whose voice is now one with the ocean current. Sometimes I catch Aqi looking over the horizon at something I cannot make out, her eyes blown so wide it looks like someone has spat into them. Mama says that she does this because living for so long with waipo made her uncanny. It’s all my mother’s fault, she says, whenever I ask about it. She’s the one who made a ghost of the living daughter I left. 

Personally, I cannot vouch for the truth of this statement, because I have never met my maternal grandmother except through photographs and an old, rice-wine urn that my uncles sent to us when she died. I will say that my mother is probably wrong about Aqi being a ghost. For a seventeen-year-old girl, Aqi is very solid, though not in the big-boned, American kind of way. Aqi is quite skinny. Her bones stick out of her elbow as if they are yelling for help. When she comes out of the shower, her hair sticks to the back of her neck and I can count all the divots of her spine, like an abacus of each day she spent away from us. When I was younger, I always asked Aqi to tell me stories about that time, about those days in the tea fields, where the water seeped all the way up to her knees. 

There’s nothing to tell, she always said. But sometimes, if I was especially dexterous, I could wheedle something out of her, a scrap of an image, small and white and fissured.

The sky was bluer back home than it is here, she always says. And the water was more salty. The well always tasted like the sun had just pissed into it. 

Do you like it better here? I always asked her. 

No, she would say. And then when she saw how disappointed I was at this, yes. I like it better here because you’re here.

Do you like me? I always asked her, giddy on the euphoria of the thought that it was I, I who made it bearable for Aqi to keep living here.

Of course I like you, she always said back, her lips quirking down. You’re my favorite little American.

As I got older, I came to realize that she said American with an unusual kind of vehemence, as if it was a line in the sand that she had drawn between herself and the rest of our family. I could not realize it then, but my body still sensed that something was amiss — it was in these moments when the two of us were sitting together on the bunk bed, her body stretched out next to mine, that I felt the gap between us the most. It yawned, dark and yowling, like the gullet of a cat that had not eaten enough dry food to sate its hunger. 

***

And the funny thing is, while Aqi is here with us now, she did not come here for job opportunities as mama and baba did. In fact, she did not actually want to come and join us in our second-story apartment in San Francisco. As Aqi tells it, she was happy in Fuzhou, where the heat was sticky with the starchiness of rice and the sky never veined itself in gray. She only got on the plane because our grandmother had told her that if she did, she would get to see mama, and at the time she had not seen mama for two entire years. She barely knew baba, who did not know her either. In the photos of her homecoming, she looks stiff and doll-like in her big red coat, which waipo had bundled her in, in anticipation of the airport being colder than she was used to. 

And it was us who tore her away from waipo, away from Fuzhou, and it’s wet heat. By rights, the gap between her and I should have been as deep and gullied as the back of a woman’s mouth. It should have taken all the chocolate my mother keeps in the car, and the new dresses baba buys for my recitals, and the copper-green tea set that we keep for the days on which the minister comes over for dinner. 

Instead, it is the kind of maw that does not open itself very often. I only know that it’s there because Aqi never calls me meimei, only sister, or Rongqian, or when she’s mad, Serena. I always just call her Aqi, a habit of mine that feels impossible to evict from my brain.

***

And here’s a secret. I wasn’t happy about Aqi coming to join us when I first heard about it. I thought having another child come to our house meant my place in my mother’s heart would get smaller, and more cramped. I thought my mother would open up the glove box and find that there was only enough candy for one child, and because Aqi was older, would only give it to her.

Over time I realized that this wasn’t true because I realized that my mother only ever called her Aqi, or da jiejie, instead of Qi’er. Aqi, she would say. Be a dear and help Rongqian tidy up her room. Or Aqi, help us finish making dinner. Or Aqi, walk your sister to her afterschool program. She leashed Aqi’s name like it was a collar around a dog’s neck, and it was then that I realized that I would never have to fight Aqi for a place in my mother’s heart.

In truth, mama’s love is as limited as I once imagined it was. It is only because she refuses to give Aqi as much of a portion as she deserves, that I have maintained my own portion of the property and let it come to flower.

***

Maybe as a sign of this selfishness, by the time we got home, I had forgotten my promise to her, and so when mom went out to get groceries she found the m&m wrapper, which I had shoved into the gap between the car seats. Later, she shook it in front of Aqi’s face, its crumpled brown sides fluttering like the sharpest kind of accusation.

What a bad big sister you are, she scolded, punctuating each syllable with a snap of her wrist. You should be watching out for meimei, not indulging her bad habits.

From the living room, I watched, waiting for her to finish. I could’ve jumped up and defended Aqi, but then again I had tried that before, and it had failed spectacularly, only driving mom into a white-eyed, furious kind of rage that was so tight-fisted that I thought she might snap and hit one or the both of us like she used to. She didn’t, because we’re both taller than her now, and probably stronger too. Mostly she screeched and threw things in our general directions until we cringed and flinched away. 

This time, the two of us sat in her murky, pulsating anger until our shadows were low and long against the cushions of the couch. When she went into the kitchen to start the oven for meatloaf, I took Aqi’s hand and pulled her up the stairs, our feet soundless against the floorboards.

I’m sorry, I told Aqi, once we were in our room. 

I could not look her in the eyes, which was just as well because if I had, I probably would’ve seen her trying not to cry, which in turn, would have made me want to cry too.

It’s okay, she said, but I didn’t believe her because her lips were quirked down in the way they always do whenever she is fighting the urge to cry.

I’m sorry, I said again. Our bedroom window was open, and the wind rushed through the mosquito screen as if it was trying to run through us. 

It’s okay, she said again, and this time I believed her because she was smiling, her eyes inscrutable in the fading dregs of the evening. Really, it’s okay.

And I believed her, because I knew that she believed me. Because she has always believed me, maybe even more than she believes in herself. And this might not mean much to you, because Aqi is my big sister, and this is a failing of all big sisters, but it means something to me, because our case is a little different from most. Comparatively, we have had less time to bridge the rushing valley between our mutual trusts. After all, she only took on the title of jiejie six years ago, which is nine years after I was born, a time span that has left a gap between the two of us, wide-ringed and tongueless, the kind that can eat anything you give it and still ask for more. And yet comparatively, we are still making the most of what we have, and isn’t that the most important thing, anyway? I will always know her body better than I know my own. Shouldn’t that count for something?

Ashley Wang lives in Lawrenceville, NJ. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Sine Theta Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, No Contact Mag, Polyphony Lit, Plum Recruit Mag, Freezeray Poetry, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. A 2022 YoungArts Winner and Best New Poets nominee, she edits for Polyphony Lit and reads for Palette Poetry.