Audrey places a can of fat-free low-sodium tomato sauce in our shopping cart.

“Are you sure you want to do it? If you don’t eat enough you’ll be short for the rest of your life.” It’s too hard to tell her about the other reasons, the other consequences.

“I’m not gonna do anything crazy. Just eat better and run longer distances, that’s all.” She takes a jar of peanut butter from its shelf, then puts it back down. I think of the night before my fourteenth birthday: me and my dorm-mate in the common room swishing peanut butter in our mouths and spitting the brown globs into a plastic bag. We can’t tell anyone about this, I’d said. People are gonna think we’re pre-bulimic or some shit.

“Can you at least think about taking a different role instead?” I ask.

“I’ve already thought about it. I don’t want a minor part. I don’t want to be an extra.” She walks to the next aisle and I watch her sprinter’s legs flex in ways mine can’t. I imagine her leggings growing loose; I imagine her rifling through the sick clothes I should have donated; I imagine her trying on the jeans I wore when the infirmary nurses asked me why my heart rate was so low.

“Whatever then. If you’re so sure.”

I know that there is no way to stop this, that my mother would laugh if I told her my fears, laugh and do worse than laugh. No pain my sister and I have faced or will face could ever compare to hers. Losing twenty-five pounds to play a starving communist child is one thing; growing up a starving communist child is another.

—Staff writer Angela F. Hui's column, "My Sister Will Be Hungry," is a serialized work of fiction centered around a college student's relationships with her mother and sister. The story explores the effects of collective cultural trauma on the second generation of an American family.