Little Brother's many older brothers

My son DiDi or "Little Brother" with "Big Brothers" Kevin and Andy Hsiao

Contributor | Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

At 10:00 pm every Friday night, Mr. Pao, the Administrator of Students, rings the bell for everyone to go home, and…nobody moves. What kind of Chinese School is this that nobody is anxious to leave at 10:00 pm on a Friday night? Everyone, parents and teachers and students, are still talking and laughing, lingering a few more moments together, just one more person to catch. I slowly round up all my children from all their extracurricular classes—gu zheng, kung fu, yo-yo, art—find their coats, pick up their backpacks, and slowly make our way towards the front door.

But where is Little Brother?

I walk up and down all the hallways, ask the parents of all his little friends, check the upstairs and the gym and outside the back door. I finally find him in the multipurpose room, in the center of a big circle of teenagers, all twice his height (which is why I did not see him earlier), holding forth about his favorite Pokemon. Serious stuff.

Two of the teenagers, Brian and Stephanie, are fighting over him again, “Who do you like better? Me or her?”

Someone jokes that he is the high school class’ mascot. Everyone calls him Little Brother here. Stephanie asks her mother, “Does he even have a real name?”

When Little Brother was four, he was totally traumatized when he found out that one of his favorite big brothers had graduated. He came running up to me on the first day of Chinese School, eyes bulging, and said, “Mommy, something TERRIBLE has happened. Jeff GeGe went to COLLEGE!”

With three tough and strong (and mean) older sisters at home, Little Brother craves male connection and gravitates toward older boys and young men, all of whom he calls GeGe, or “Older Brother.” Luckily, all are indulging, passing down old clothes (Andy GeGe) and outgrown Transformer toys (Douglas GeGe), driving him around town (Kevin GeGe), and teaching him important life skills like Chinese YoYo ("Other Jeff" GeGe) and how to shoot paper baskets on an iPod Touch (Daniel GeGe). Charles GeGe is the only person to EVER successfully get Little Brother to eat a broccoli.

Last spring, Charles GeGe took Little Brother with him to the Huron Symphony Orchestra picnic at Gallup Park. Little Brother was so familiar and so at ease with all the high schoolers that the teachers assumed that he must be somebody’s little brother, which, in a way, he was.

It was not very long ago that I was the one chaperoning these kids around to different events, and now they are negotiating these themselves and taking care of me and Little Brother, too, showing us what lies just ahead. We went to a Chinese Yo Yo performance with a group of them last fall, and I was struck by how much they had matured in just one month of college.

So I am happy to play the doting auntie and help however I can. Last winter, we attended the HuaRen Chinese New Year’s Cultural Show at Mendelssohn Theater. Little Brother was Lion Dancing with his sisters, and the Older Brothers were performing Chinese Yo-Yo. Little Brother was dressed in his little red and black gold-trimmed Mandarin outfit, and the Chinese American sorority girls squealed every time they saw him, “Aaaahh! How Cuuuute!” Little Brother did not understand the fuss and, rolling his eyes, stayed close to the Older Brothers. I am not sure the Older Brothers, just freshmen then, completely understood, either. So I whispered to David, “Any time you want to borrow Little Brother to walk across campus and pick up girls, just let me know.”

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural contributor for AnnArbor.com, and a contributor for New America Media's Ethnoblog. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.