When my mother gave birth to my elder brother in the late stage, also the toughest stage of Resistance-Against-Jap War in Chongqing, she adopted my sister, who was just a ten-years-old country girl then.  In addition to her fondness for a daughter, my mother needed a helper to care about the newborn baby because of her unhealthy physical condition.  Apparently, in that time my sister must have come from an even poorer family which had to give her to other foster parents.  (So miserable then China was.)

My mother did treat my sister as her own daughter, taught her to read and write.  But I have to say that my sister must have sacrificed a lot of her childhood and adolescence to the family, especially when my younger brothers and I were born and later the family fleed from Shanghai to Hong Kong after 1949.  In the reduced circumstances, she took care of most "household" chores and tended to three naughty boys of us.  Before the family moved to Taiwan in 1953, in order to alleviate family suffering and burden she married to my brother-in-law at only 18 and so remained behind in HK ever since.

Later on when we grew up in Taiwan, particularly when my youngest brother found his first job in HK, my father and the rest of the brothers all came to visit her individually once for a while, but never done it jointly.  This time we took the advantage of participating the belated wedding reception of my nephew held in HK, four brothers of us paid her a visit together at her home in Kowloon.  Her husband passed away last year, so now she was alone at an apartment in a relatively well-designed community, with her sons and a daughter, as well as many grandchildren, living not far away from her.  I am happy to see her look pretty well, being a hale and hearty old lady at 84. 

Dear Sis, how I wish we could go back to the time we were used to be, though it was the one I could not bear to recall!