When I tell people my sister is 14 months older than me, some marvel at how close we must be. Others joke that my parents got busy fast. The joke is true, but my sister and I have never been close. We couldn’t be more different. I’m louder, taller and blunter. She’s quieter, shorter and sweeter. When we were young, I barreled through Michigan forests on my bike while she buried her head in Nancy Drew books. Because my sister was more obedient and a better student than I was, I perceived that she was the favored child.

While my sister and I have always gotten along, our relationship bears the tension of that childhood dynamic. For years we weren’t especially friendly and spoke only when necessary. Twelve years ago, our father had a stroke and suffered from aphasia. Around the same time, our mother found out she had pulmonary fibrosis. My relationship with my sister soon worsened. Because I lived closer to my parents, I managed all the day-to-day caretaking; from afar, my sister lobbed suggestions that felt like criticisms. After our mother died in 2015, it was hard to imagine that our relationship could ever improve.

When the pandemic descended, I turned to Chinese dramas to ease my anxiety. That felt natural: My mother also loved watching dramas. When I was young, she and her friends would share entire VHS tape sets of shows sent from Taiwan. Before my mother died, she was constantly hunched over her laptop, mesmerized by her favorite shows. Perhaps these dramas were a form of escape, her only connection to her childhood in China and Taiwan.

Without my realizing it, Chinese TV — which dates back to 1958 — had become an enormous export over the past decade. One research firm estimated in 2019 that over half the world’s new TV dramas were now coming from China. China is the second-largest market for TV programming after the U.S., and Netflix has been ramping up production of Asian dramas because of booming demand. Apps such as Rakuten Viki and iQiyi have been feeding this bottomless appetite, with the subscription base of Rakuten Viki growing by more than 80 percent since the pandemic began.

While Asians are often relegated to bit and stock roles in American television, these shows put Asians at the heart of the action.

I started with one of the most popular dramas. “The Story of Yanxi Palace” takes place during the 18th century in Beijing and tells the story of Wei Yingluo, a palace maid who enters the Forbidden City to investigate her older sister’s death. Along the way, she falls in love with Fuheng, a palace guard, becomes a concubine of the emperor and gets entangled in all the deceit and machinations of palace life. Within two weeks I watched 70 episodes.

Funny as it might seem, what moved me most was the simple fact of seeing an entire cast speaking Mandarin. I grew up in a mostly white town where survival meant assimilation. Whiteness came to organize my consciousness, as it has for large swaths of the world. After all, American culture and Hollywood have long been the lingua franca of global entertainment. I began to understand why Asian dramas are so popular: While Asians are often relegated to bit and stock roles in American television, these shows put Asians at the heart of the action, participating in the full spectrum of human drama.

All the while, as I watched “Yanxi Palace,” I found myself missing my mother more than ever. One day, I decided to text my sister what I might have normally told my mother — that she had to watch this show. At that point, my sister and I only texted once every few months, usually to discuss our father’s caretaking. Maybe she was feeling a sense of loss, too: Surprisingly, she began to watch along with me. Soon we were live-texting as we watched, and I marveled at the ornate costumes, detailed settings and nuanced performances that graced the show. Our appetite grew until we were consuming other dramas, like the hit “Go Ahead,” an exceedingly heartwarming story about three children from unstable households who come together and form a new kind of family. The more dramas we watched, the more involved our conversations became. We wondered what it would be like to grow up in China with Chinese people like us.

Over the past year, my sister and I have watched so many Chinese dramas together that I’ve lost count. At the end of a day spent teaching via Zoom, we’ll fire off texts to each other, trying to understand a bizarre plot point: Did that kiss really happen, or was it a dream? Or I might confess that one of my favorite actors is the 21-year-old heartthrob Song Weilong in “Go Ahead.” Recently, to my chagrin, we figured out that his parents are the same age as us. We laughed.

It has been a long year of repeated losses for us all, but amid these losses, I’ve gained a sister. I never could have imagined how my mother’s absence would lead me to yearn for my Chinese roots; how Chinese dramas could fill that void; or how dramas would help me build a new relationship with my sister — a chance to make up for lost time. As I search for something new to watch with my sister, it dawns on me: Our mom would have loved watching these shows with us too.

Victoria Chang is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her latest book of poems, “Obit” (Copper Canyon Press), was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry.