YOU KNOW THAT FEELING WHEN YOU’VE BEEN BURNED BY someone you love and you think you can only save yourself from the flames by walking away? When that someone is your family, there are, as I see it, three options: estrangement, obligation, or forgiveness and gratitude. There’s no right answer, and the path will always be complex.
When you join me in my story, please remind yourself that the lens of a child is not the one I look through now. As an adult I can see other points of view – right or wrong, good or bad – that weren’t available to me then. Delving into my past to bring fractures of time into focus has uncovered my story through a kaleidoscope of experiences. Here on these pages I seek to make the brushstrokes of my family portrait dance to life.
Today, I reach into my trove of painting implements and pass to my own child an heirloom, handed down for a thousand years. Accepting it tentatively, she examines its soft grey bristles – shaped like a turnip bulb into a point. She weighs and turns the decorated bamboo stem in her small hands. ‘You are holding an ancient Chinese calligraphy brush,’ I say. ‘Imagine how many artworks this brush has painted, how many stories it has told, how many hands have held it, and how much more it has to say.’ She hesitantly hovers the tip of the brush over a petite porcelain well. ‘Now, dip the brush into the ink, and daub it gently from point to base, pulling it downwards lightly before quickly lifting. There, you’ve made your first stroke.’
As she wields the brush, I see the hands of our ancestors gripping its shaft, wrestling with its handle to bring the most vivid images into view, the black pigment bleeding into flax paper to create shadows and shade. I speak to my child of a dragon and a tiger, and tilting my head towards her mark on the page, I watch her confidence grow as she makes another. ‘You see, my love, this is who you are. This brush will tell you a thousand tales, and in the end you will use it to paint your own. Because this is a story that began millennia ago and has no end. This, my darling, is the brush of Kwa.’