[H] Brother’s Skirt - Chapter 1

The first memory of my life is of my brother’s nipples, those female body organs that secrete milky white breast milk during lactation. This memory sticks not because my brother had a penchant for nudity at three years old, but because no matter how hard I bit or sucked, I couldn’t draw any milk and just wailed from hunger. Then my brother, patting my tear-stained and snotty face, would softly hypnotize me: “Little bro isn’t hungry, little bro isn’t hungry.” Eventually, unable to produce milk to feed me, my brother cried along with me in loud sobs.

Back then, we were staying in an orphanage, having not eaten well for three days.

“Kid, here to pick up your brother again?”

The white-haired old man sitting at the entrance of the woodworking studio always asked me this. I never got tired of giving the same response because he put a lot of effort into teaching my brother the craft of woodworking. My brother’s crafts now sell for a good price thanks to him. I handed over a seedless watermelon I had just bought to the old man.

“Brother──!”

The caller wasn’t me; it was my brother. He hugged me tightly, and the lid of the cold drink I bought for him wasn’t sealed well, spilling sugary water all over my hand. He lifted my hand and licked off the drips, like an ant addicted to sugar.

Meanwhile, the old man, tapping the watermelon next to his ear, asked, “Which one of you is really the older brother?”

I pointed to my brother, who was born two minutes before me and first cradled by the doctor, a fact known by our parents, noted on our birth certificates, and recognized by the orphanage staff. Perhaps it’s common for those in this line of work to be overly compassionate, as they often pity us for our parents’ tragic death, which left us numb to our origins from a young age. The orphanage aunt often remarked on our looks, praising me as if I wasn’t my brother’s full sibling, and she even doubted it once. It was only later in school that I learned about fraternal twins from textbooks. The aunt hadn’t seen our parents, and I barely remembered what they looked like. Maybe one of us resembled our dad and the other our mom. Aside from her, many people said I was more handsome than my brother, but that’s because they hadn’t seen him cry.

“Brother, let’s go to the supermarket; we’re out of toilet paper, and—” my brother whispered two words into my ear, “also out.”

My brother has many quirks, one being he ignores the reality and calls me “Brother,” which often leads to confusion about who’s older, and it’s always a hassle to explain.

On our way to Walmart, passersby would glance at my brother, partly because he wore a simplified version of Hanfu, with a long robe and wide pants, tied with a belt at the waist. The robe often dragged on the ground, and if I wasn’t careful, it would get caught in the escalator, so I had to hold it up for him. The pants were so wide that at a glance, one might think they were a skirt. He liked wearing it in the summer—it covered his skin for sun protection and was breezy.

Another reason people liked to sneak peeks at my brother was that he liked to hold my wrist as we walked, fearing that I, a man in his twenties, might get lost. If the street was less crowded, he’d thread his fingers through mine, using the wide sleeves of his robe as cover.

Walmart had two floors: one for various types of food and the other for household goods. In the small area for clothes, my brother pulled me towards the children’s dresses. He picked up a sailor suit and said, “This looks like the one you wore when you were little.”

That was almost twenty years ago. I asked him, “You remember?”

“How could I not? That time scared me so badly, I even remember the Batman underpants you were wearing then.”

Speaking of which, I recalled the second memory of my life.

Ever since moving into the orphanage, I heard the caretakers whispering that it was rare for siblings to be adopted together. Hence, my brother would always hold my hand wherever we went. Even in bed, if I turned over and our hands separated, he’d wake up, crawl over me, find my hand, and fall back asleep.

Those people were right—when I was four, my brother was adopted first. His adoptive parents didn’t have much money; the adoption fee they paid to the orphanage was a stack of crumpled banknotes, which I saw as the director counted them, looking like unwashed, unironed shirts. For them to pull together another sum to adopt me as well might have required selling blood or a kidney. My brother threw a fit on the floor, tears streaming down his face, mouth wide open, inhaling who knows how much dust. I cried too, trying to pull him back, but an aunt held me back. I struggled and managed to kick her hard—yes, intentionally. She had stolen a bite of my brother’s food the day before, and I saw it. Because she ate that extra bite, she had more strength than me, and I couldn’t keep my brother.

At first, my brother visited me once a week. An older brother, whose sister had been adopted, told me that my brother would probably stop coming after a few more visits. I asked why, and he said, “He’s got a new family now, who cares about you?” I hated everyone in the orphanage, whether they were cleaners, caregivers, the director, or the other children left behind, because what they said was always right.

I remember all these things, but they belong to the optional archive of memories. The more vivid second memory occurred half a year after my brother was adopted, when I was adopted by a couple. I heard the orphanage staff discussing my adoptive parents’ clothing and the expensive car parked outside. They had their envy; I had my plans to find my brother. Holding my adoptive mother’s hand, I said I wanted to see my brother. After a long talk in the director’s office with my adoptive parents, we got the contact information for my brother’s adoptive family.

Before meeting my brother, I became my adoptive mother’s dress-up doll. She tried on outfit after outfit on me, eventually choosing a sailor suit with a pleated skirt, saying it would surprise my brother. The only choice I had was my underpants; I grabbed a pair with a Batman logo for her to put on me.

I was taken to a children’s park, where I saw my brother in the old clothes he’d been taken away in, which felt especially familiar. His reaction, however, was the opposite of mine. He saw me and burst into tears within seconds.

“Where’s my little brother? I want my brother, not a sister!”

His outcry stunned me—I hadn’t even called out “brother” when I joined him in crying, setting off a chain reaction among the nearby children, drawing a crowd of onlookers. To calm my brother, my adoptive father lifted my skirt and pulled down my Batman underpants, telling my brother, “Isn’t your brother right here?”

My brother stopped crying, but I couldn’t help but cry, exposed in front of everyone, even as my brother tried to console me. I heard my brother’s adoptive parents scolding mine, while most of the onlookers laughed. My brother, furious, stomped on everyone’s feet. A boy slightly older than him pushed him over, and I finally stopped crying to help him up.

Later, when we were in different classes at the same middle school, my brother, upset about a bad test score, talked about this incident. I borrowed a chorus uniform from a female classmate to cheer him up, also a pleated skirt. It was freezing, and I lifted my skirt on the back staircase to show him the Batman underpants, waiting for him to laugh, only to notice a bulge in his pants.