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“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

My older sister and I are not related by blood. We didn’t even grow up together. But I call her “sister” all the same. Perhaps it’s a Thai thing: in Thailand we call those who are older than and close to us “big brother” or “big sister”. But despite our being “siblings” and having known each other since I was a teenager, I knew very little of her story. I knew that she was an orphan, born to a Thai woman and an American GI who had been posted in Udon Thani during the Vietnam War. I knew she looked different from most Thais, with her curly hair and dark skin that she inherited from her black father. I knew that she attended the Bloody May protests in Bangkok in 1992, only weeks after I was born. But that’s all I knew.

In Thailand we are surrounded by history. We just don’t talk about it.

For my sister, her Thailand has always been different from mine. Mixed-race children like her, who grew up never quite belonging anywhere or to anyone, have been given a name: Amerasians. Ever since she could remember, people would whisper behind her back or point at her. “Negro child,” they’d call her. She has no memories of her father, and when she was very little her mother left her with an “aunt” — a neighbour who gave children room and board in exchange for money from their parents — promising to return but never returning. My sister grew up washing, cleaning, cooking and babysitting for this “aunt”, a woman with a violent temper who told her repeatedly that my sister’s mother was a prostitute.

• Tags: Issue 16, Pim Wangtechawat, Thailand