Sherman Woo was my ‘Goo’ for as long as I can remember. ‘Goo’ my toddler pronunciation for the Cantonese word for ‘brother.’

Before I went to school, we would send and receive messages in Morse code in the middle of the night between my bedroom and his and Dickson’s. We were among each other’s early confidants and when he decided to be a writer, he explained to me that this would require for him to commit to reading 3 books a week for the rest of the time he was in school as preparation; I think I was in the 5^th grade and he was in the 8^th. He was the only person in my whole world that could make that kind of commitment and hold to it.

As four-years-apart siblings and his only sister, we shared many projects and adventures. When I was in the 7^th grade, Goo and I traveled to LA on the greyhound bus to spend the summer to help and learn from our Uncle Allen, Auntie, and cousins. That was the summer we were forced to speak Chinese-only in the company of our uncle and his family or forfeit a dime for each English word spoken; consequently, we took many walks together relishing our opportunities to retreat to our cone of speaking-English-only. Our LA summer was also when Sherman had an opportunity to play tennis with Walt Disney, and we got to watch Sandy Koufax pitch from our cousin Richard’s box at Dodger stadium. It was also the time Sherman decided that our long bus trip should be filled with my reading and discussing Chekov, Turgenev and Thomas Mann. He was a child prodigy and I was his kid sister who was a quick study but would have preferred to read Beverly Cleary. Nevertheless, our own often crazy family life enjoyed a normalcy against the backdrop of the many Russian and German stories we began to read and discuss together.

We were close and when small together made up the workforce of our mother’s dim sum cottage industry. Between studies and other chores, together we made thousands of ‘tai dois’, fried ‘goks’ and curry turnovers under our mother’s supervision. Among our talents, we could boast crimping pastry faster and more artfully than most aunties, as well as identify deeply and tragically with other people forced into servitude and child labor.

1968 was a big year for us both. Sherman was drafted into the Army and I decided to leave college to be a community organizer fighting poverty. Because of my choice to leave college and volunteer with VISTA, my parents had threatened to disown me; their threat was meant as a way of seriously dissuading me from carrying through with my plans. Sherm was in the army and I wrote him about what was happening with me and the family, and as soon as he could, he placed a long distance person-to-person call to me to tell me to follow my mind and heart and that no matter what our parents decided, I would ALWAYS be his sister and always have a HOME with him.

Just before he was deployed to Vietnam, he traveled to Brooklyn to spend his last week stateside with me. We spent that week taking in NYC. That very memorable week included communicating with the ACLU seeking justice for a soldier who was Black and recently murdered in Georgia only several days before he was to complete his stint with the army; visiting bookstores; discussing how to engage adults in reading; his impressions of different members of my family of street gang-involved youth; eating at Peter Lugar’s; and talking about anything we wanted to say to each other just in case this would be our last visit together.

I count myself among the most fortunate. I had a rich and Kodak-chrome relationship with my Goo. No subject was taboo and it bothered neither of us that we could hold totally divergent points of view on most subjects. I think he often found my perspective ‘interesting’ and was usually ‘tickled’ by how different we were. In my early years, I found his thinking, coaching, and verbal sparring often intimidating. Later, I knew that the mental gymnasium Goo and our father had put me through served the development of my better thinking skills.

We enjoyed each other’s company. I looked forward to growing older together. We would end it the way we had begun: in the company of family and friends, in the delight of delicious hand home cooked meals that were deftly prepared because we were the benefactors of our mother’s chef palate, skills and legacy, over mah jong, scrabble, cross-word puzzles and other table games, in the light of the world of good books and literature, and in the security of our insatiable appetite for yet another good mystery.

Even though our fanaticized joint travels with Viviana to visit the burial and birth place of many British authors, the Cotswolds, Provence, a few of historic baseball fields, and Tuscany are parked now as “dreams deferred.” Goo and I had traversed together parts of a life globe in other ways. We knew and had shared trauma, drama, grief, love, loss, joy, fun, forgiveness, surprise, intrigue, complexity, friendship, opera, parents, family, work projects, irony, recovery and grace. I am privy to most of Sherman’s great loves – especially, Jules, Megan, Rosten, Ida, Unni, Krissy, and the rest of our family. Together, we go on and the stories we will tell and share about my Goo, their father, their Yeh-Yeh, their brother, husband, uncle, grand uncle, and friend, will be rich, varied, curious, engaging, comet-sized, and often very illuminating like the man himself.