I MET MY BROTHER FOR the first time in 1970, when he was forty-six and I a mere twenty-six, teaching English for some years at a nearby high school, to our father's dismay and disapproval. I never understood why he should be so antagonistic to my teaching, since he himself had been a teacher in China and my brother had also been a teacher before coming to Jamaica. He said it was like working for nothing: there was no money in it. Then again, maybe it wasn't the teaching so much as teaching ENGLISH. As he said again and again, he could understand why it was important to speak English, but did I have to make a profession of it, when there was Law and Engineering and, above all, Medicine? And every single relative or friend of the family I encountered would fall into an uncomfortable silence when they heard what I was doing, as if it was a dread disease not to be mentioned in polite company, and they would quickly change the topic and regret they had ever asked!So here was my forty-six-year-old brother, a man I had never seen but whom throughout my childhood I had heard mention of, because he was the first-born, left behind when my father migrated to Jamaica in 1930. He never even had a name I knew: he was simply the oldest brother, and therefore his honorific was AhGo, oldest brother, and I was instructed to call him that from the very beginning, just as I had to learn all the intricacies of the titles for my nearest relatives and to differentiate aunties and uncles on my mother's or father's side - because they had one title if they came from my father's side and another title if they came from my mother's side, and yet another title if they were older or younger than my parents - it was a nightmarish world for a child to negotiate.My mother had very little to say, and whenever she started a tentative question or comment, she was immediately overwhelmed by my father, but it was obvious that she was happy to have her first child once again with her, and she kept reaching over and touching his hand as if to reassure herself that he was actually here, after forty years of waiting. And every now and then, when she got the chance to be alone with him, I could hear her asking quiet questions about the people she had left behind and whom she had not been able to contact for years. And she went out of her way to cook what she thought might be his favourite food: chicken with Chinese black mushrooms, stuffed cerasee, minced pork in black bean sauce and braised bean curd in brown bean sauce, and tons of white rice, and sat beside him watching him eat every mouthful.That first night, I was prepared to accept that he was my brother, but to tell the truth, I couldn't see any resemblance to me at all and I simply took my father's word for it. But back in my own house, I thought to myself, how would they know? They hadn't seen him since he was six years old! Don't children change when they grow up, and was parental instinct good enough to go by? Besides, I knew that many Chinese had either sold or swopped entry papers in the past: could he be one of them? But all that was shunted aside in my mind because I was trying to figure out how I would tackle the task which my father had landed on me at dinner. He'd said somewhat ironically that now I could show how good I was, and teach my brother proper English.The next few months did not turn out to anyone's satisfaction. Before I could even begin to teach my brother English, I would have to re-learn what Chinese I had forgotten. From early childhood, I had been mimicked and mocked at school by the other children with their version of what the Chinese language sounded like. And so - like any child in that situation - I tried to distance myself from the mocking by not talking my parents' language at all, though at home my father still insisted that I speak Hakka, which was the dialect spoken by almost all of the Chinese who came to Jamaica. By my early teenage years, I was defiantly answering back in English, despite dire threats of being beaten by my father. …