The Tale of Candice
Candice Chia Lin
Born: 21 February 1977
Died: 17 January 2000
(It's been a long time coming, but I'm gonna finally try to share a little bit of my life with my
big sister, Candice. There's so much to say, so I apologize if things seem to come out randomly.
The truth of the matter is that they will be coming out randomly.)
The two dates I've written up there seem so cold and say almost nothing about my sister's life. I
have so many memories of what life was like with her that I know I can't say everything I want to
say in a reasonable amount of space. I don't even know how I would begin to explain things.
I guess I'll attempt some semblance of organization by beginning with a broad, big picture
type statement or two.
I've never known two siblings who did not ever fight. My sister and I were no exception. From my
point of view, though, we never really had any really big fights about anything major. For the
most part, we got along well with a good understanding of our roles in our family. She was my big
sister and consequently she had to take care of me in innumerable ways. Try as I might to not be
a bratty little brother, there are also innumerable times that I know I was a bratty little
brother. On that note, I must also add that there are lots of things we've been through that
I regret my actions about, but I've learned a lot from them now. I used to think that people
didn't need each other, so I did the standard moody teenager type thing and kinda withdrew
from my family cuz I felt like they didn't understand me. That sort of attitude continued
into college, but then of course that idea was shattered. I'll have much more to say about
this later on when I get to it.
As for the present issue at hand, I consider it a blessing that we were only 2.5 years apart in
terms of age. This turned out to be a fairly good cuz with that sort of age difference, our interests
weren't all that different (at
times) while we also weren't so close together that we conflicted about things. You'll see
what I mean as I explain further.
The Early Years
I suppose my earliest and clearest recollections of what we did together would be memories of
playing together. Even then, you could see the beginnings of our future personalities. For instance, when we would
play pretend type games, my sister would be the one who generally came up with ideas about what to
pretend. I think one of the funnier things we liked to do was to pretend we were mice. We would
run around and pretend we were being hunted by big, huge, mean cats. We built up little
fortifications in the yard by barricading off small areas with various random things (e.g.
benches, ivy, sticks) and using terrain features (e.g. trees, the gate leading to the backyard) to
build up little hideouts. I even recall barricading off the gate to our backyard while my dad was
doing yardwork once and him kinda getting a bit annoyed that we were in his way, but he's a fairly
tolerant guy, so he just went about his business and we refortified after letting him through.
heh.
I remember after my sister learned to rollerskate, she tried to teach me to skate too. She did a
pretty good job too. She skated around while I skated to try to keep up with her while pushing
this cart thing for balance. In typical big sibling fashion, one time she took the cart away from
me and told me to skate, but I was too chicken to do anything so I just stood there and cried I
think. In the end, though, I eventually did learn to skate, and we had years of fun skating
around our yard. Even in more recent years, my sister hit upon the idea of learning to
rollerblade once (once you've got the idea behind skating in general, it doesn't take nearly as
long to learn to ice skate or rollerblade), so after a while of besieging the parents for
permission, they bought each of us a pair of rollerblades (pretty decent ones too and for a good
price), and we had plenty of fun learning to rollerblade. We've rollerbladed on the beach many
times, and it's still one of my favorite things to do (even though I haven't done it recently).
As for more indoors types of things to do, we used to play pretend stuff with our stuffed animals all
the time. Gosh, when I stop to think about it, I think we had as many imaginary worlds as we did
stuffed animals, although there were certain stuffed animals that got along with each other better
than others. heh. It would be a futile task to try to explain our stuffed animals, so I won't
even try. One thing that I'm sure I'll regret admitting, but for some reason I feel like sharing
(no I'm not drunk or something) is that for some freaky reason, I played with barbie dolls with my
sister before. No, it wasn't even coerced in any way; I guess I was somewhat
detached from all the social pressures on me to not play with girly toys. My sister had a
whopping total of 2 barbie dolls (as in the legit kind), and one of them was really cool cuz it
had a button on the back that if you pushed, it would wink. Believe it or not, we had to take
turns playing with the high tech one that winked. heh. Yes, I realize by admitting this sort of
thing, I've probably ruined my future political career. Oh well.
We weren't (read: I wasn't) completely strange, though. My sister had a cabbage patch kid and
and an accompanying pony while they were fairly popular, and I didn't really like playing with
those, while my sister really liked playing with them. On the other hand, I really enjoyed
playing with legos (a positive sign of a future engineer), while my sister didn't enjoy it nearly
as much. Consequently, we didn't always play together and I would play with legos and construx
type toys while she would go off and play with something else (I guess I really don't know
what she was doing since she was elsewhere). And once we were in school, our interests seemed to
polarize a bit more in the culturally normal sense. I had some GI Joes and Voltron toys and
stuff, while my sister collected girly stuff. If you don't know what I mean by girly stuff, I
guess you're not familiar with the technical jargon of that age group. heh.
Along the way, there were random things that we were both interested in, like garbage pail kids.
In case you don't remember, those were a fad while we were in elementary school that were
collectible cards featuring sets of somewhat gross cartoons parodying the cabbage patch kids. My
sister and I both started collecting them, so my parents used them as rewards for us while the fad
lasted. Of course, after a while, we lost interest in them and I moved on to collecting baseball
cards while my sister wisely escaped the allure of collectible cards.
My gosh, I'm starting to realize how hard it is to try to sum up years and years of experiences,
seeing as how I've written this much and just barely scratched the surface.
[more to come soon]
Contact Info
I welcome rational debate and comments, so if something I've written has elicited a strong
response from you, I would love to hear what you think. Since there are way too many spambots
out there crawling around looking for e-mail addresses in order to sell them to spam advertisers,
I'll
write my e-mail address in human readable form: oom_cow at yahoo dot com.
This page was last modified on 27 August 2001.