What We Learned

I have no memory of my mother being pregnant.

This should be impossible. My sister is five years younger than me.

Not only do I lack that memory, I seem unable to perceive pregnancy at all. Even now, it can take me an uncomfortably long time to notice when someone is expecting, even after it has been pointed out to me. It is as if pregnancy exists just out of sight—something others can see clearly, but that remains blurred, or entirely absent, to me.

I have searched for the memory and found nothing. When I once asked my mother about it, she laughed.

“I was so pregnant,” she said. “But you never asked.”

What I do remember is this: one day, there was a baby.

She was in my grandmother’s arms, wrapped tightly, her face barely visible. People leaned toward me, smiling, expectant.

“Do you know who she is?”

I didn’t.

I remember the pause that followed, the way the adults exchanged glances, amused by something I could not understand. No one explained. My parents said nothing. The question hovered in the air as if it had already been answered.

Over time, the baby appeared more often. She stayed longer. Eventually, she came home with us. She moved with us to a new apartment, as if she had always been part of the arrangement.

“Am I having a sister?” I asked my mother once.

She smiled but did not answer.

The question remained hanging, like so many others.

Sometimes people teased me.

“Who do you think is your parents’ child—this baby or you?”

They laughed as they asked, as if the answer were obvious, as if the joke were harmless. I tried to answer but found I couldn’t. Was I really my parents’ child? I had no proof, only photographs of a baby in my mother’s arms, said to be me. The more they asked, the more my certainty unraveled. 

So whose baby was she?

Everyone seemed to know except me.

At school, no one talked about siblings. I didn’t either. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what to call her, or what she was to me. The words felt untouchable, as if they belonged to a language I had not been taught.

Looking back, those years feel like a silent black-and-white film. People speak, but no sound reaches me. Their mouths move faster and faster until I no longer keep up, and the words slip free from meaning. 

At some point, we moved far away from everyone we knew. My grandparents came with us. So did the baby.

By then, she became my sister—not through explanation but through time. No longer a baby, she moved, spoke, and asserted a will of her own. I had my room; she wanted one like mine. Whatever I wanted, she wanted as well. We shared the small, private rituals of daily life. At times, she was an annoying copycat, and I longed to be rid of her—yet there were moments when I was glad she was there. 

Even then, something remained unsettled, unnamed.

The doorbell became a kind of alarm.

Each time it rang, everything stopped. I would take my sister’s hand and lead her quickly to the bathroom inside my parents’ bedroom. We closed the door, turned off the light, and stayed completely still.

We were not supposed to make a sound.

At first, she followed me without question. Later, she began to resist.

“Why do we have to hide?” she asked.

She wanted to open the door, to see who had come, to be seen herself.

I covered her mouth before she could speak louder. I held her there, feeling her breath against my palm, her small body shifting with impatience.

I had heard my mother say it once, in a voice that was both casual and urgent: if my sister were discovered, she would be taken away.

Taken where, I didn’t know.

But I understood enough to be afraid.

In those moments, I listened to everything—the faint murmur of voices outside, the scrape of shoes, the pause before the door opened, the soft close that followed. My heart beat so loudly I was certain it could be heard through the walls.

We waited until the voices faded, until silence settled again over the apartment. Only then did we come out. 

This happened again and again, until it became ordinary.

Part of me wished she would be taken away.

The thought came quietly, without drama—like the familiar anger that she was a copycat, a nuisance I wished would disappear. If she were gone, we wouldn’t have to hide. The doorbell would be just a doorbell. We could open it. We could exist without the constant rehearsal of how to be, each time, in every possible scenario.

But when I looked at her, that thought faltered.

Where would she go?

The question unsettled me more than the fear itself.

As we grew older, the rules became more complex. Outside, we could not be seen together too often. If we were, I had to say she was my cousin. I learned to do this without hesitation, to answer quickly, convincingly, before more questions could follow.

I learned what not to say.

I learned to never mention her unless necessary. To leave her out of stories. To speak as if she were not there, even when she was.

Family outings became careful operations. We avoided crowded places, especially on holidays. Restaurants felt dangerous—too many people, too many chances of recognition. Once, we hid beneath a dining table, sheltered by the long fall of its tablecloth. Most of the time, we moved as strangers, pretending not to know each other at all. Only once we were safe could we be siblings again.

We became practiced at being visible and invisible at the same time.

Every moment carried a small, persistent fear: What if someone noticed? What if someone asked the wrong question? What if we were forced to answer?

What if we were separated?

It took me years to understand what had structured our lives so completely.

By then, I had also learned to read. The meaning appeared slowly, in fragments. Red banners hung across streets and buildings, their characters bold and unmistakable: Family Planning.

As a child, I had seen them everywhere without really seeing them.

They were presented as something positive, something orderly, something necessary. But beneath that language was a simple rule: one family, one child.

Anything beyond one was not permitted.

Anything beyond one had to be hidden.

What I had experienced as confusion was, in fact, a system. What had felt like silence was enforcement. What had gone unnamed in my family had already happened, clearly and repeatedly, in public space.

Only not in a way that allowed us to exist.

I carry those years in my body.

The instinct to scan a room. The awareness of who is watching. The hesitation before speaking about family, as if something might still be revealed by accident.

My sister and I still dream about disasters—dangerous situations in which we are separated, misplaced, unable to find each other again. In those dreams, the fear is immediate and familiar, as if it has never really left.

Yet we also remain bound by something just as persistent. We call each other. We check in. We hold on, in ways that feel both ordinary and necessary.

Now, the policy has changed. When I return to China, I see new red banners, printed in the same bold characters, stretched across the same streets.

They say: “Three children are welcomed.”

The color is the same. The certainty is the same. Only the permission has shifted.

But the fear does not dissolve with the policy.

It remains, quiet but intact, lodged somewhere beneath language. A memory not always visible but still shaping what I see—and what I fail to see.

Even now, when I look at a pregnant body, I sometimes do not recognize it.

As if, sometime early on, I learned that certain things  are not meant to be seen.