Just the Seven of Us Words by Jenny Thai Illustrations by Chelsea Wong
I have six sisters. Including me, that makes seven girls in one family. Whenever friends and acquaintances discover this fact about me, the ensuing conversation usually goes something like this:
“Wow, really?” “Yes, really.” “No brothers?” “Nope.” “Your poor dad! So… what was it like growing up?” I’ve been asked this question so many times by now that I usually give the same default response: “Awesome! It’s like having six best friends!” I will be the first to admit that this sounds downright cheesy, but the sentiment is true. To be totally honest though, I rely on this as my go-to answer because I don’t really know how to explain what it’s like to grow up with six sisters, least of all during a passing conversation. In fact, I think it’s nearly impossible to fully encapsulate the experience in just a few words or milestone events. Rather, it’s the sum of every mundane, fleeting moment that makes the experience of growing up with my sisters so unique and so special. Friends tell me they “get it” when they see all seven of us interacting with each other. We get loud. Loud enough to the point where people
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stop and stare at us when we’re together at a restaurant. We all talk excitedly over each other about anything and everything in our secret sister dialect of English-meets-Cantonese-meetsacronyms, punctuated by obscure inside joke references that nobody else understands, not even our parents. Seeing the seven of us hanging out, I imagine, is probably a lot like watching an episode of Arrested Development—but in real life and in real time. A few friends have compared it to a unicorn sighting. Of course all seven of us share the same genes, but we also shared just about everything else: clothes, makeup, books, music, friends, secrets, and of course, shoes. When we all lived under the same roof, we kept our shoes on rows and rows of shelves that lined an entire section of the wall in our parents’ garage. By the time my older sisters got jobs and started buying their own clothes, we probably had at least a hundred pairs of shoes, from fancy heels and sandals to Converse sneakers in multiple colors, all neatly lined up along the shoe wall. It was the ultimate shoe collection for any pre-teen girl to have access to, but the shoe wall was more than that, too. It reminds me of a time when all seven of us still lived together at home, before we started to move out one by one, each taking our respective shoes with us. Money was tight growing up so we never had a lot of toys or games at home, but my sisters and I somehow always managed to find ways to entertain ourselves and have fun. We made our own board games. We put on fashion shows and made dresses out of fabric scraps leftover from our mom’s sewing projects. We reenacted our favorite movies and television shows. We made dioramas out of shoe boxes. We played store, but