If I could only put one thing in my life’s first-aid-kit, I would shove my sister, Chiara in there.

She understands all of me because we both front-lined the others traumas.

Chiara and I have been moved from house to house, and country to country.

Our upbringing was a never-ending goose chase starting with the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

In February of 2009, towards the end of the recession nearly 300,000 workers were laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

My parents tried to hold on to their real estate jobs, but the ripple of the recession cost them their positions, and led them to bankruptcy. We lost our house in Santa Clarita and the two cars, depleted our savings and gave our dog Harvey away.

It was a stressful time for my parents.

In 2009, I was four, she was ten.

Chiara experienced my parents’ poor financial choices and losing her safety net more deeply than I experienced it. She developed an anxious personality from it, and the arguments my parents would get into she overheard.

My parents wanted to leave it all behind, so we left.

We’re on a flight to Spain.

Chiara and I didn’t have time to focus on our life altering event because we were living in luxury watching movies and sipping on unlimited ginger ale on the plane.

First stop

Our first stop was a small town in coastal Barcelona called Sitges, a city of 30,000 people.

Dad had Spanish nationality, so we acquired Spanish passports.

Dad speaks Spanish, mom does not.

Dad was the only bread-maker of the family . The only bread Mom was making was mushy Açorda stew, made up of old bread, our most expensive meal given the fact mom splurged on the shrimp.

The thought of plunging my spoon into a gooey bowl of wet bread gave Chiara and I chills.

Mom stayed at home for the most part doing the cleaning and cooking. She would step out for her yoga down the street early in the morning, or for groceries.

I viewed her as the Asian-American mom that she was, meaning: independent, nonchalant, and Westernized.

It was awkward seeing her fulfilling a domestic role.

Dad pushed mom into her domestic duties, perhaps the idea of the home he always wanted for himself as a child.

I waited to see how long mom could put up with that role.

It was a great little year in Spain for me. I didn’t see the rough bits where dad was falling short on rent.

Instead, I saw Chiara. She really stood up for me and took care of me while my parents kept busy.

She and I would walk to school together, help me shower and brush my teeth, she packed my lunches and helped me with homework.

I would join her for her occasional playdates, which I formally invited myself to.

And at night, we would rest our sleepy heads on our flimsy, spontaneously collapsing beds.

Dad said Barcelona was full of dishonest clients that didn’t compensate him and stole his web design work.

One year in Spain and we were leaving again.

Another Fresh Start

We took a flight to Portugal. Dad was born there and he speaks the language.

We left Spain and all the “problems” we had there, but our problems always followed us to the next place we’d end up.

My exhausted dad, the sole income for the family, started to hold his money close.

Supporting mom’s yoga classes no longer took the same precedence.

To mom it was her escape, but to dad it was hours of the day she was abandoning the family. He wondered why she felt that yoga and the community she formed needed to be prioritized over taking care of the family or over finding an additional source of income.

The one time I saw Mom buy something for herself on the short allowance dad allowed, it was a ring.

I remember she would pick me up from the train station and walk me home from school. We passed an artisan jewelry store. She asked me for two euros to cover the money she owed the shop owner.

My source of income at the time, being 10 years old, was the change I found in drawers.

My independent mother is dependent on dad? Dependent on me? This was confusing for me.

Chiara and I got enrolled into a Spanish Institute in Lisbon, Portugal that taught all grades.

My favorite part about school was sitting by the wire fence, like a patient dog, waiting for the familiar face of Chiara to appear and walk past with her friends.

“Chiara, Chiara,” I would yell through the fence excitedly.

Embarrassed, she barked at me to find my own friends, and to stop coming to the fence.

So, I stopped.

I solidified myself in various friend groups and made friends with some older kids who’d take the train to school with me. It was the push I needed in order to embrace the life and people I had in Portugal.

Chiara didn’t struggle finding her people, but she did struggle keeping up in class.

English is our first language. The other languages came easier to my flexible toddler brain, but Chiara was learning at the same level as fluent Spanish and Portuguese natives.

She was being taught Don Quixote, the Shakespeare of Spain, and learning the same level of math as the rest of the students.

“Everyone was 20 pages ahead of me,” she complained, “I feel dumb.”

The school made her retake her exams. Those were called “recuperation exams” and they were a student’s cone of shame.

Chiara never felt there was order in our family. So, she made up for it by striving for good grades. This is how she would help the family, she thought.

We hired useless tutors which only frustrated her more.

Chiara thrived in biology and English. We ran with that.

We put her in a private American Catholic school called Saint Anthony in Estoril, Portugal. She finished up her last year in private school, while I stayed in the Spanish school with my friends.

Dad was too busy for friends. He talked to his kids forgetting that we were 11 and 16.

Chiara absorbed a lot of the resentment dad had toward mom. She began speaking to my mother rudely, with more frequency.

Mom has been hiding money from the family, my dad discovers, in 2015. She was receiving money from her parents, and putting it into savings.

Dad lost trust in mom.

He saw it as making us struggle on purpose, as selfish, and he saw conversing with her mother as a conniving effort against him.

There was no more trust in their relationship, so the only thing that made sense was to end their marriage.

Chiara’s last semester was coming to an end.

My parents sat my sister and I down and they explained to me that we are moving back to California where Chaira will attend university and that they were separating.

I went along with it despite my silent objections.

Mom and I left first. We would be going to live with my grandmother in Granada Hills.

Chiara and my mother had a love-hate relationship, and there was no time to make amends because mom and I were leaving.

Dad and Chiara were staying in Portugal until they could afford to fly to the States.

”It hurt coming to the apartment [in Portugal] and no one was there,” Chiara told me, ”It hurt to know you were gone.”

Chiara and dad arrived at an empty apartment, looked at one another, and went to their separate rooms to cry.

Going to grandma’s house

Mom and I moved into her old room. I started going to mom’s former middle school George K. Porter on Kingsbury Street and started the semester late, receiving all my required vaccines on my first day of school.

Grandma’s house ran a tight ship.

Mom was used to it, but when Chiara eventually joined us at grandma’s house a few months after, both of us were confused why grandma was cold, opposite of how we imagined her those years we were away.

We tip-toed around the house out of fear. Usually when we made a “mistake” grandma did not waste any time posting a sign addressing it.

“Do NOT use the stove.” “Shut the patio door!”

“Shoes OFF!” “Clean your hair out of the drain after you shower!”

“Don’t LEAVE shoes in front of DOOR.” “Use your slippers!”

“Leave all doors OPEN after using the bathroom.”

I got used to the rules and the regimen, but Chiara came into a formed structure that she didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. She was a daddy’s girl just waiting for her dad to come rescue her.

Chiara snuck away into corners of the house and walked out to the alleyway and made calls overseas to our dad. Usually the conversation consisted of when are you coming, and how is Macey, our dog.

We didn’t speak to our grandparents about our lives because we didn’t get the impression they cared. My grandma would veer the conversation to why have you gained weight or what’s all the hair on your arms.

It was hard for me too, but I learned the path of least resistance would be less stressful for everyone.

He’d been in Portugal selling all our old things and getting the money to secure himself an apartment in the States.

With our limited space and privacy, Chiara has been plotting her escape from my grandma’s house.

Once dad came back to the States, Chiara left to go live with him.

I seldom saw Chiara after she moved in with dad. I saw my dad every other weekend, which meant I saw Chiara every other weekend in a little apartment in Venice Beach—also limited on space and privacy.

I was in high school while Chiara worked part-time jobs and attended classes at Santa Monica College.

We all started living independent lives from one another. The visits felt like a courtesy not a natural instinct. The reality is that the family was officially divided. There was no going back now.

I missed the family structure I used to have, and I missed the connection I used to share with my sister, but we shared jovial moments in small windows of time throughout my four years in high school.

Eventually, Chiara got into the University of California, Davis, in Northern California.

Somehow we talked more than ever after she moved 400 miles away.

She tells me about the smallest things in her day, to the major life choices she is unsure of.

She shows me batches of cookies that she burnt and I show her the set of bangs I just cut in the mirror.

We call, talk, discuss, and complain.

She was meeting new people, fresh perspectives, and became inspired by her classes.

Stepping away from the divided houses we lived in gave her perspective on our upbringing, and her relationship with my grandmother, mom and me grew deeper.

The distance reignited our childhood whimsy.

Editor’s Note:

– Spellings were corrected on Oct. 28