My Chinese Mestiza Manang Easther
A writer talks sweetly about her sister.
For miles around, I believed, there wasn’t a finer sister than my eldest sister, Manang Easther. She was made of a different stuff and was everything we three younger girls were not everything we ever wanted to be. I was proud of my Manang Easther, and my greatest frustration was that I could never be quite like her.
She was special in every way, but I thought the most special thing about her- the one thing that I secretly coveted most- was her creamy, almost flawless skin. The slightest insect bite had the most devastating effect on us younger girls. We were plagued with skin rashes and allergies which festered, leaving their ugly, telltale trademark stamped on our arms and legs. It was nothing unusual; really, every other kid we know suffered the same fate. But not Manang Easther. She always managed to escape unscathed from the hordes of fleas and mosquitoes that accompanied our childhood. Or, if she did get bitten, it didn’t show.
