The Lesson in "The Evolution of My Brother"

  For my blog post, I decided to reflect on one sentence in Jenny Zhang’s, The Evolution of My Brother that stood out to me. The sentence is at the top of page 166 and reads:

“From that point on, I would refer to him as “your uncle” and he would mostly refer to me as “your aunt” and it would take a long time for our children to even understand that we were siblings first, but more than that, our children, just as we hadn’t, would likely not think much about a time before they were born, a time when he was my brother and I was his sister, and together, we were our parents’ children.”

This sentence stood out to me because I think it conveys the main lesson of the entire story, that family dynamics are a cycle that repeats with every new generation. I think most people in childhood are very close with their family, and then there comes a time in their teenage/adult years where they want to be independent from their family. Then, once they actually do become independent, they want to go back to the simpler times when they were close with their family. The narrator definitely goes through this when she moves to California and realizes that she misses those times but can never go back.

Another thing that I think changes family dynamics over time is the new people added to a family. In the story, Jenny emphasizes how her family growing up was a tight unit that consisted of just the four of them, and within that unit was an even smaller unit consisting of just her and her brother. As time passes, the parents might stay a unit, but inevitably Jenny and her brother will separate and create their own units where they’re the parents instead of the children. Her brother is now defined within the context of her new family unit as “your uncle” instead of “my brother.”

All of these lessons are things that Jenny took time to learn, and her brother hasn’t learned yet. Family dynamics happen in a cycle because it’s impossible for you to learn these lessons without growing older and experiencing them first-hand. In the main sentence she says, “our children, just as we hadn’t, would likely not think much about a time before they were born.” This shows how the cycle repeats with Jenny and her brother’s children. Overall, I think this sentence shows a lot about the broader lesson that Jenny Zhang was telling in The Evolution of My Brother.