As Chynna sat down to write her 500 word essay given by her art teacher, which, to be very honest, was very ironic considering that the subject was Art, not English. Her teacher had instructed her to write it and draw pictures to accompany it, and the theme she drew out of the plastic baggie of white slips of paper was rainbows.
Sullenly, she stared at the paper, not knowing what to write at all. Silently wishing that it’d be written in Chinese instead, since she just moved from China few months ago, learning English there, she thought about her past memories about it.
That’s it! Memories! she thought mentally, and a look of inspiration lit up across her face. She dipped a brush into a cup of water, and dabbed it onto some red paint, and drew some cherry blossoms, and used a dark brown for the branches.
Her mind raced back to the time when she was just two years old, and her mother had brought her to a garden full of the blossom filled trees, and she had stared up in wonder, mesmerized at the beauty of a single flower on those branches. She remembered that when her brother, Haru, only a year older, had accidentally bumped into the base of the tree while spinning around and around, gazing upwards. The force of the slight push knocked off a single, lovely red blossom, and her mother had pinned it to her hair for fun.
Continued on the next page!
Painting some orange and yellow lanterns she saw in the Spring Festival in Shanghai, she recalled the Lion Dances and the delicious food she had eaten. Licking lips at that thought, off-handedly she started to yearn for some.
With quick strokes of her brush, she recollected the memory of the bright, green leaves of of her bamboo stalk in her old home, and how she used to water it every other day, while her father would always joke about how her plant would die because of so much water, but it never happened. Sadly, she recollected the fact that she wasn’t able to take it with her, and had to give it away to a friend.
Finally, she was reminded of the clear, blue, starry skies in the nighttime when she looked outside her window, trying to count all of them to sleep. Painting a few streaks of light blue, then overlapping it with darker colors like navy, she finally added one finally stroke of indigo-ish purple.
So as she washed her brushes, now damp and inked with color, she thought of the waterfalls she saw. When she cleaned her workspace until it shone, it reminded her of the sun that used to shine on her when she walked to school on the other side of the Earth. Every single little thing made a tiny connection to her old life she realized.
So now, when she handed her essay in, she knew that it was more than a page of drawings and words, it was full of memories as well; her memories of her past life back home in China.