Image by Olivia Hu
The first lines on a fresh canvas are the most daunting.
On a pristine, white surface, an artist makes their first marks. It’s an act of courage, akin to defiance — they believe they can take this perfect surface and make it more beautiful. It’s presumption, or maybe hope.
So in fear, in faith, I lay my first strokes.
On the day your daughter is born, purity, truth, and beauty intersect.
She is wrinkly and red against white sheets, affronted by the harsh reality of the world. She is pure — and it is true, she is beautiful.
You will watch her skin grow pudgy and flush, you will cradle her head to protect her soft skull. You will tuck her curled toes into tiny little socks, you will hold the camera as she takes her first steps.
She laughs and sounds out garbled Mandarin, a constant source of curiosity to her older brother. Together, they color your home with bright peals of laughter. This simple life comes at a cost — the marital scuffles, the compromise of assimilation, the family and familiarity left behind, the daily grit, are no small burden. Yet, beneath the endless struggle you find a kind of threadbare joy. Your wife cooks dinner, and steam rises with smells from a home overseas. Your children are endlessly delighted, emboldened by their ignorance. Still unshaped in their youth, with infinite futures ahead, they are completely free.
I darken the lines, and forms begin to emerge. My teacher always reminded me to lay down decisive, clean strokes. Go slow—stop making those inefficient, sketching motions. You’ll only produce hairy lines and messy shapes. It just confuses your artwork; you need clear lines to see where you’re going.
But I don’t want to. I sketch fuzzy lines, I hesitate, I erase and try again. I can’t help my indecision. I can’t tell if a line is accurate, much less good or beautiful. The result is vague and noncommittal.
But canvas is forgiving, and erasure grants a clean slate. So I dutifully try again.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and dappled sunlight flickers across the dashboard. Your daughter is in the passenger seat, stifling tears. The air conditioner throbs with gusts of cold wind; the radio holds an aloof silence. You don’t know what to say.
You are driving back from the RMV; she just failed her driver’s license exam. She’s inconsolable, maybe more than is warranted, but as a father, your compassion isn’t bound by reason.
You know that, like a newborn bird, this attempt is but the first of many failures. Countless trials have yet to unveil themselves, and though she will struggle, she’ll come out stronger for it. She’ll take this challenge in stride, drive every road in town, practice hundreds of parallel parks. In a few months’ time, she’ll retake the exam and pass.
The whole time, you’ll watch from the passenger seat, never wavering. Even as she panics or oversteers or blames you for both blocking her view and not checking for cars, you won’t overstep, and you won’t grow impatient. Because for all her gripes, she still needs you, so you’ll stay right where she needs you to be.
All this you know, but the words will not come. So you do what you can, and you drive home in silence.
The first foray into color is yet another act of courage.
Once pigment is applied, there’s no going back. It was conceivable, with pencil and canvas, that enough erasing could return the canvas to its original, unblemished state. No mistake was irreversible.
But paint brings us into an entirely new realm. Once the canvas is stained, it’s impossible to revert. Even the thickest layer of Titanium White cannot fully conceal an errant mark. My teacher used to warn me: start lightly, dilute the acrylic paint and treat it like watercolor. Build shadow with layers, not concentrated colors, and hesitate until the last moment to add dark shades. And never, ever, use pure black.
It’s 7:02 am. There’s some time before the day will begin, but the morning is stacked with meetings, to-dos, and coworkers to manage. You heave a sigh.
_
Down the hall, your daughter is also awake. Her eyes blink open to see a black hole yawning overhead. Assignments, college apps, tournaments, recitals, mentees, leadership responsibilities, relationships. Failure, judgement, anxiety, self-esteem, helplessness, hopelessness, exhaustion. All swirling into the abyss, sucking all color from the room. She is late for school. She closes her eyes again.
You don’t know that her mind is teetering at the extremes, romanticizing oblivion, anything to escape the excruciating present. You don’t realize that, though you’re a mere twenty feet away, she feels utterly alone.
So I start with broad strokes of watery acrylic, blocking out where the colors will go. Greens and tans to set the scene, reds and blues for the focal subjects. The sketch acquires a kind of depth, as irrevocable strokes stain the canvas. The absence of pigment implies where light hits the scene, gently. But it is not enough. I want to see contrast, I want to see textures drawn out. I can’t help myself—
In I go with the darks, and a creature emerges.
The front door shudders closed, announcing her return. From your office, you hear terse fragments of conversation, then heavy steps up the stairs and another door decisively shut.
When did the years fly by? Your daughter grew up in an instant, and now carries a throbbing turmoil inside her. The curious chatter and playful glee are barely memories, replaced by a color wheel of anxious outbursts, aloof frowns, and biting words.
Tonight is the same. The dinner table is set, and she enters, her brows scrunched, then expressionless. You too, are brittle after a long day. You turn on the TV. Distraction, like a blanket, and apathy, like an ointment. The rest of the day is just a buffer before the next workday. Her frustration, you think, is a problem only solved by time. This moment is about surviving.
Mother and daughter look at each other, then at you, but your eyes are fixed on the screen. They quietly pray over the meal — the practice still new, almost self-conscious, amidst the usual dinner routine — then you begin to eat. The TV chatters on.
If only you knew: her time is crammed full with commitments and to-do’s and thought after restless thought. Time is no salve, but a constant enemy. Her efforts feel unseen, her self-hatred unexpressed, her endeavors insufficient and fruitless — every single one. She sees her mother, who is earnest but unable to understand, and her father, who plainly refuses to make eye contact. She bundles her feelings in two fists and looks down at her bowl, completely lost.
At this moment, the seal has been broken. The darks have been broached, and the figure is emerging: now it is time for detail work. I dip my brush into a rich Yellow Ochre, then pacify it with white. The first stroke of undiluted paint touches the canvas. Slowly, a small, orange maw takes shape. Cadmium Red for the edges and umber brown to deepen the gullet. The beak protrudes harshly from a vague and feathery background.
The ads break, and you look up to notice empty seats and half-eaten plates. Murmurs and halting tones are audible from upstairs. You can sense that something has come loose.
At her doorway, you find her mother hesitant, peering in. The hallway light casts over a form covered by quilts, but her face is still hidden in shadows. what’s wrong, her mother entreats, but there is only a quivering silence.
When she finally speaks, her voice is fragile and young.
Bitter, broken words flung out, seeking their target. You don’t understand — and how could you? A life free from food stamps and freezing nights, steeped in American comforts, where the biggest concerns are studies, friends, a failed license exam. These privileges that you sacrificed for, she swims in blindly because it is all she has ever known.
Still, you relent: we’re sorry.
You feel a tightness at the back of your throat. Your feet resist the urge to leave, quickly. we’re trying, and you can always talk to us.
it’s okay. She turns and burrows deeper. it’s too late, anyway.
There, a little bird.
I spend an afternoon toiling over the small head, moving colors back and forth, comparing again and again with my reference. The beak is the center, the focal point that draws the viewer’s eye, so it must be perfect. These few square inches hold the energy and movement that anchor the entire piece.
But as I daub and worry over the canvas, the colors become muddy and illegible. I check my reference again, and the image looks completely different. Where is the translucence, where is the depth? I seem to have lost the intuition that guided my first strokes.
For the first time, fear sets in. What if I’m unable to finish? What if I’ve ruined this large, 24” x 30” canvas — a gift from my art teacher — by painting a garish, orange triangle? The little, misshapen bird stares helplessly back at me.
I sigh. If you get stuck, it’s okay, my teacher would say. Rest your eyes for a bit, go outside and look at nature. Work on something else. And later, when you’re ready, you can come back to work on this one.
I am doubtful, but sure, I’ll work on something else. So I shift my attention to the foreground, and set to drawing out streaks that will become the bird’s nest.
Your daughter returns from her first semester of college exuberant. Her eyes are lucid and hopeful, her mouth is filled with stories, her body still charged with momentum. She rushes through the holidays and she flees back to campus, where the community she loves awaits her.
In May, she is home again, tanned by the Georgia sun. She carries the sweet aftertaste of goodbyes, and you can see that a part of her remains on that campus, where she is building a new home. In a matter of days she has left again, to France this time, each flight bringing her further away.
When she first got her acceptance to Georgia Tech, nothing changed. You’ll find out later — she opened it alone in her room, still blurry-eyed from the last rejection. She refused to open any letters with you, because the shame of failure was too great. Praises or consolations — nothing stuck. It wasn’t prestige she wanted, or even pity, but escape from her own disappointment. Was that Georgia? Who could say.
She’ll find out later that yes, it was. Not in Georgia per se, but in the faith she discovered there. She’ll learn that her value isn’t in her accolades or your approval or even her own self-regard, but in her faith, which is a relationship with a God of unconditional love.
She didn’t know that, though, when you said goodbye. Barely a freshman, she knew so little. All she saw was the distance between you, which niceties and gratitude could not mend. So she held fast to her bitterness and stayed stiff beneath your arms. You and her mother flew back to Boston. It was bittersweet, but you both felt it: you finally had room to breathe.
Gradually, I am making my way around the nest. It is a wreath of branches, arching across the canvas, unruly and meticulously detailed. Each strand is a braid of tan, then shadow, then highlight, repeated again and again until a texture distinguishes itself from the canvas. If I stop for a moment, I’ll lose my rhythm, or else lose my spot in my reference, so I keep painting, keep layering, until I’ve reached the end of the nest.
Sometimes, I’ll look back at the nest and am surprised by the level of detail and realism I achieved — it actually looks like a nest! And I think, “Really, I painted that?”
Now, I begin to study the eggs, their smooth untextured surface, and I feel an exhaustion setting in. I start at the shadow, Cerulean Blue with just a touch of black, and wait — the color is wrong. The blue is far too rich; it throws the entire composition off balance. I check the reference again and find that the egg’s seemingly blue surface is really a more muted, desaturated gray. Regret begins to bud at the back of my throat; I hastily apply a coat of white, but the color refuses to budge. My teacher’s words are like a hex in my mind — you went too far with the darks.
The days at home were quieter at first, then just quiet. You and her mother settled into familiar routines, in a house now twice as large. Evenings are a serene pool with the occasional ripple: a talk show murmuring in the background, the heater clanking on and then off again, slippered footsteps shuffling back and forth, as the night slowly dissolves into silence.
The routine only breaks with the weekly appointment, when you call, then call again, to catch a glimpse into your children’s busy lives. Your daughter is walking home, the brief space between meetings and more work, and your son is just in from dinner plans. Your lives continue along tangent lines, occasionally mingling but always tunneling forward.
Until one semester, she calls. That fragility is in her voice again. She is asking for help; you can’t see it, but on the other side of the phone, the abyss has reopened behind her. She has come to the end of herself.
whatever you need, you both reassure her. Because you have plenty, and lately have found no one to give it to.
This time, when your daughter returns home, her shoulders are stooped and cautious. Gone is the stiff pride and displays of independence. At home, she is nothing but your daughter.
In the evening, she helps set the table. The TV is turned off. She is quiet, and braids herself into the night’s ebb and flow. You’re not entirely sure what goes on in her head, but there’s a certain translucency now. The struggle and resentment have faded, and she no longer assumes you don’t understand.
Time and distance have softened the friction, but there is also something else. Yes, you’ll find out: a new hope tethers her, strings her along, and urges her to keep going. As the weeks pass, you slowly see the fight return to her eyes, and she begins to ready herself again. She knows that this is, and will always be, her home. But still, she ups and leaves again, because the world has come to need her.
I lean back. No, the dark mark is redeemable. I apply a coat of white, then another, this time denatured with tan. The blue splotch gradually morphs into a shadow, a natural pedestal to the egg’s robin blue. You need more contrast, my teacher once told me. It’s all gray and murky, and you’re hesitating. You need dark parts to make the light parts bright.
Of course, she was right — the shadow enriches the blue-gray of the egg and bodies out the spherical shape. If I focus on something else, then look back, the dark splotch is almost indistinguishable. Miraculously, it has been fixed.
When I return to my painting the next day, I find I’m able to focus on the birds again. The long detour to the nest, the eggs, and the foreground have reset my eyes. Behind the central bird, another small chick raises its head from the shadows.
The paints from previous days have developed a hard shell, so I squeeze fresh dollops of acrylic onto my palette. Yellow Ochre on the tip of my brush again, I begin to trace out a second beak.
Not long ago, your nephew had his first child, and you, by extension, became a grandfather. In your free time, you began to reorganize your photo archives, starting from the year your son was born. Between messages about logistics, dental insurance, and family updates, you shared your discoveries.
Something was thawing, and your daughter could see it. Between the rush of classes and obligations and endless debt to time, she noticed:
A fledgling interest in golf, a new waffle knit sweater. You began to plan trips, revisit old projects, and declutter the house. You let your mind venture freely, with renewed curiosity about the world. You and your wife went out for your wedding anniversary, something special, this time.
Your daughter saw this, how, like a paint-covered brush dipped in clean water, new colors blossomed in your life. Now, though your son and daughter have departed, the delight you once had is slowly returning. This is where your home is. And she knows — you will always be there.
dad,
I see it now. All my life I have struggled to grow up, perhaps not unlike these birds. All my life I struggled to be your daughter. I fled from the parts of me that looked like you, afraid of the hurt that might be perpetuated through me. So now, I am learning how to be a child.
I didn’t realize it at first, but writing this piece became an exercise in empathy as I sought to understand you better as a father. Maybe, as a byproduct of growing up, it was inevitable that I’d start to see things from your point of view. But I know my own stubbornness and the bitterness, hurt, and jaded misunderstanding that I harbored these past four years. I also know that these emotions only came to unravel because of my faith. And don’t worry, this isn’t an attempt to convert you to Christianity; because there has been distance between us, I wanted to share these reflections with you.
dad, it has been so piercing to realize the kind of father you have been to me. When I look a little beyond myself, I see that you have been incredibly good. Our relationship has not been perfect, but it has been good, and it was in my own blindness and pride that I failed to see that.
It has been similar in my Christian walk. There were things I had learned about the God of Christianity: he is merciful, faithful, steadfast, and loving. 1 But during the past few years, I’ve been coming to know this God, as a father, as a daughter. These truths became the substance of my relationship with him. He is my heavenly Father. His great and perfect love is offered to me; in fact, it has been pursuing me since my very birth. And, dad, this love is offered to you too.
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” 2
I don't think I ever explained this clearly, but this is what I mean: our heavenly Father made us to be his children, but in sin we rejected the relationship he offered. So often we fail to see this, because the world is shiny and tempting, and it bombards us with instant solutions so that we’ll never notice the God-shaped hole in our hearts. Instead we pursue our own desires, whatever we lay our eyes upon. It’s a historical truth and a contemporary one. Despite the heartache this causes, God refuses to give up on his creation. To reconcile us to him, he chose to give up his own son to demonstrate the depth of his love for us.3 God loved, and sought our adoption. God spoke, and called us his children. And so we are.
It took me so long to understand this. It took me so long to stop stiffening my shoulders and fleeing far away from home. I realize now that all this time, you have been letting me go. I won’t forget: you have been patient, and you have provided for me from the start. You may be more like Him than you realize; in thinking about my relationship with you, I am also learning about God’s fatherly patience.
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” 4
I know, because I am your daughter, that you have felt it too. The question — is this it? — or the semblance of peace — I’m secure now because of this — these are all symptoms of that God-shaped hole. Christianity, or faith, isn’t synonymous with organized religion or strict rules or cryptic texts about 2,000-year-old stories. It’s merely a door held open: to understanding, to purpose, and to a relationship with our Creator.
dad, the same God is waiting for you, to be His son and to find a true peace. He is waiting to show you this too: this is where your home is.
As you have been here for me, He will also be there for you.
all my love,
olivia
Three thousand miles west, your daughter will set down her suitcase in an empty apartment room. Seattle air will carry sunlight in through the window. White walls and unfurnished floors; there’ll be a barrenness — a freshness — that speaks of a new chapter.
This final flight will carry her further than ever before, not just in distance, but in the undetermined stretch of time before her next return. You won’t know what she is thinking as she discovers the colors that will define her new life. You won’t know that she is praying, often, for you.
But you will also be closer than you have ever been, because the words have been spoken aloud, and the distance, like a loosened knot, will finally be drawn closed.
