TIGblogs - Malcolm Lawrence

My brother and I got matching tattoos when I was 30 and he was 18. It was a coming of age experience for us both–his first year in college and I had finally finished my PhD and gotten a tenure track position.

That year we were both living in the Bay Area–he had insisted on UC Berkeley so he could experience living in the SF Bay Area, which he’d heard about all his life from his older sister, but which he’d left when our parents moved to Washington State when he was 6 (the year I left for college in Connecticut). My brother was born in San Francisco but didn’t feel like a native because he’d spent his formative years in suburban Washington

Despite my mother’s anger at me as the eldest–leading her baby astray into tattooed thug-dom, the tattoos were actually–strangely–a mutual idea. My brother called and said, “Hey, do you want to get tattoos?” Just at the same time as I had been thinking about getting one myself.

Agreeing to do it was easy, deciding on a design was not. We easily ruled out the obvious (our Chinese family name) and the derivative (symbols or designs from other cultures, like the Polynesian and tribal designs that are so popular). We realized we’d have to design it ourselves, and that we wanted to be more or less matching.

The idea of matching was important because he and I don’t match up as brother and sister. It goes beyond him being tall and slender, and me being relatively shorter and definitely curvy. We have different fathers. I still remember the day when he was about 5 years old and he asked me who was the man who sometimes came to visit with me. “That’s my father,” I told him. My brother’s question caught me off guard–it had never occurred to me to tell him–my father wasn’t around much so it didn’t seem significant. My brother, at 5, was understandably confused. We had never used terms like “half-sister”–and his father, my step-father, always referred to me as his daughter.

Our physical difference goes beyond the shape of our bodies or faces–we look different “racially,” because my father is European American and his is Chinese American. This is the difference that makes it most difficult for people to see us as related. His friends are always confused when they first meet his sister, “Wei Ming.” Expecting a fully Chinese woman, they instead meet me. I look Latina to many eyes. I am, thus, literally his “half” sister.

When my brother was 18, during his first year of college, he spent at least one or two weekends each month with me in San Francisco. When he graduated he lived with me for 6 months. When he studied for the LSAT and later for the California Bar exam he lived with me. I, recently divorced, will be living with him for awhile until I find my feet again.

We branded ourselves with a visible sign of the connection we have deeply known between us. Maybe the sign is for others to see, but the experience itself–designing the tattoo, holding each other’s hands through the pain, showing it to other people to “prove” that we are related–this is apart of the evolving relationship that I–who had been the only child in my family on both sides in my entire generation until I was 10 years old–had never imagined I would have. My brother has always had me in his life, so perhaps he can’t imagine it, but I know what it was like to be alone in a profound way.

My gratitude for his presence in my life cannot be measured.