By Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Growing up, my older sister and I couldn’t have been more different. She was a typical eldest sibling, clinging tightly to rules and order; I was a chaotic middle-child stereotype, pushing the boundaries whenever I could. We were both closer to our youngest sister than we were to one another – through her, we got along, but when it was just the two of us, we were more like forced housemates than anything. As we got older, our worldviews proved very different, too, in ways that sometimes frustrated me. We didn’t understand each other at all.
But then we parted ways: I moved from Sydney to Melbourne when I was 23, and she moved to Vancouver a few years later. We didn’t talk much outside of family calls, but from afar, I saw her begin to change in ways that were at first small, and then suddenly huge. She became softer, somehow; her walls began to come down, and I finally saw who she really was for the first time after knowing her all my life.
When the world began to change in 2020, she sent me a message I’ll never forget. She said she realised how ignorant she used to be about political and social issues I cared about, and she apologised for her part in the tension that had divided us for so many years. I knew I hadn’t been perfect either, and she prompted me to reflect deeply on that, and learn how to be less stubborn and righteous going forward.
By far the
