Growing up, I had a big brother as well, one I called "Da Guh," which is the Mandarin equivalent. Our fraternal relationship was only in name, though. Peter was my cousin, a few years older, and I unquestionably idolized him. My earliest memory, one that has been retold by my parents and his to varying degrees of my humiliation, involved a four- or five-year-old me throwing tantrums on those Saturday nights when we would visit his family, refusing to leave their house until Peter and I could take a bath together. Absolutely do not analyze this any more than you already have; all I remember is thinking that it was a fun thing to do. I was five, at most. Again, do not.
Those Saturday nights were special for me. My parents and grandparents would often see Peter's family over the weekends, where hours of the evening would be spent playing round after round of mahjong on their dining table. Meanwhile, Peter would lead me from room to room, telling me about this and that, demonstrating video games on his computer and playing with toys. He had what essentially amounted to the entire cast of He-Man action figures, and while our parents were downstairs arranging and rearranging ivory tiles, we would be doing the same but with Duncan and BattleCat.
And no matter how late those mahjong games ran, how long my parents and I stayed, I would always cry and make a scene when we had to go home, saying that I haven't even had a chance to play yet, wanting just 5 more minutes. For nine years of my life, I was an only child, and Peter felt like the older brother I would never have. To me, he was beyond cool; everything he did was cool, better than anything I could do.
A few years later, after he outgrew them, he passed on those action figures to me, and though I played with them, staged the same scenes I remembered staging with him, it wasn't the same. I didn't want toys. I wanted a big brother, but by then, I had already become one to my sister. Thinking back, I wish I could have been the kind of "Da Guh" that Peter was for me, though I'm pretty sure I came up short.
When I got older, I stopped referring to Peter as Da Guh; both of us had long outgrown those childhood terms. Still, I didn't feel any different about him. Though we were always one phase of life away from each other (when I was in middle school, he, high school; when I was in high school, he had gone away to college) and we did not stay close, I still felt like he bridged the oceanic gap between childhood and not-childhood, adolescence and adulthood, to take me from who I was to who I wanted to become. I remember going with him to another cousin's graduation from high school, and he told me about his outreach efforts through his university where he would go to bars and talk about AIDS and HIV prevention. I remember going to see Untamed Heart with him and his girlfriend, not wanting to cry at the end but doing so anyway, and talking to the two of them later and hoping that I would one day know what it felt like to be the kind of adult he became.
I thought of him the other day because twice a week, Kevin and I work out together. I mostly just do what he does, though on a much lighter scale. I follow him from machine to machine, bench to bench, mirroring as much as possible his form and movements. He would dispense nutritional advice, weight-lifting advice, advice on life, I realized then, as I walked a couple of steps behind him on our way back to the weight room from the water fountain, that this is how I felt as a child, following my Da Guh around from one room to the next, believing that whatever he had to show me when we got there would change my life.
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