Picture Us In The Light(14)
“People not taking me seriously because I’m still a kid, you mean?”
“You know the story.”
“Nah, I kind of have the opposite problem, honestly.”
“You got tiger parents? Is that what this is?”
It’s the reverse that’s true, really. When I was in first grade, the Cupertino Lions Club had a district-wide art contest for elementary school kids, and I won. The Cupertino Courier wrote up a little article about it with a photo of me holding my picture and my mom went up and down the street asking all the neighbors for their copies to give to her friends, and then they started researching lessons nearby, the best art programs I could go to after I graduated. On weekends we’d go to museums. My mom talked about how when she opened her hotel, she’d only have artwork in it by me.
Believe me, I don’t take it for granted that my parents have always supported my dreams. I know you don’t always get that lucky; I know they could’ve blotted out the fuzzy outlines of my art ambitions with the sharp clarity of medical school or law school or business school, things that required much less faith in me and that offered a more concrete kind of hope, the kinds of things my friends’ parents push them into. And I’m also lucky, I know that, that what they want from me is what I want from myself, too—I’m just worried my talent doesn’t run deep enough. And I can’t fathom facing the world the rest of my life if it doesn’t.
“No, they aren’t like that. It’s a big deal to them that I’m going next year,” I say. “It’s more—I’m worried I’m a fraud. Like maybe everyone thought I had all this promise but I’ll go through all four years of art school and bomb and my parents will be crushed.”
“Well, it’s not like you go through four years of school and you’re made. You can’t just learn your way into it.” She pauses. “And you can’t do it because of your family, either. You do it in spite of your family.”
“You think so? Do you wish you were doing something else?” How could you, though, when you stand in here and see what she made—how could you erase it from the world entirely, stick her behind some desk or podium somewhere instead?
“No,” she says. “It’s what I chose. But it takes more from you than what it gives back. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. Like, my family all lives in SoCal, and they aren’t a part of my daily life. I just don’t have that room. And I know I’ll never have kids. Probably never get married.” She tugs at her earlobe. “You’re going to have to choose, too. You have to look at the world like—you get one shot in it, and at the end you’re going to have to look back and see whether you said all you needed to say and gave it back to the world to hear, or if you just let that shrivel up inside you to die with you. All of us have to make that choice.”
We’re all exhausted by the time we get back to Cupertino. On the way back Regina’s mood seemed to deflate. I know she thinks Are you okay? is one of the most annoying things you can ask people, that it means you think they’re being sullen or overdramatic. So I don’t ask her. She seems subdued as she says goodbye.
The air in the car feels different with her gone, when it’s just me and Harry again. Sometimes I think your truest self is the one that emerges after the day’s been scrubbed off you, the way it feels now.
“You going to apply for that gallery thing?” Harry asks, easing around the turn onto my street. The seat belt catches against my shoulder as he taps the brakes. I will be eighty, I think, and still remember that particular sound the seat belt makes. “You should.”
“I doubt it.”
“How come?”
Someday, maybe, I won’t see other art and feel threatened by it; I’ll feel in communion with it, part of the same ecosystem. “Eh, I just doubt my odds are any good.”
He shrugs. He pulls into my driveway and turns off the engine. “That way it made you feel when you walked in—that really hit you, right? And you could give that to someone else.”
Something crackles on my skin like a fire. He felt me in that moment; he understood what it was to me. “Maybe. I probably couldn’t.”
“Well, not with that attitude.” He grins. It’s our inside joke—he’ll toss it out when Regina says something like You can’t put out a paper with four stories when everyone’s missed deadlines, when I say You can’t get to San Francisco in thirty minutes. I wonder who he feels the most himself around—if it’s times like this, or moments like earlier today with Regina when he has to make a case for who he is. Maybe that’s what they have together, that he finds himself more sharply defined around her. Is that what people really want, though?
We sit there a few moments. I’m reluctant to get out of the car, but I can’t think of an excuse to give for why. Finally he says, “All those things Vivian Ho was telling you—you think that’s true? That you have to choose that way?”
“I hope not.”
“You think so, though?”
There’s a kind of fear I associate with truth, and I felt it when she was talking. “Probably. She’d know, I guess. What would you do?”
“If I thought I had to choose between my family and what I wanted to do?”
“Yeah.”