With His Absence, My Artist Father Taught Me the Art of Vanishing

Not long ago, my brother texted me a screenshot of notable new movie releases on iTunes. One of them was Barbarosa, a 1982 Western starring Willie Nelson and Gary Busey. It was once featured on an episode of “Siskel & Ebert” dedicated to uncovering worthy sleepers—“a tale of betrayal, vendetta, honor, and dignity.”

What was notable about the image, at least to Andy and me, was not the volume of Willie’s beard, nor the unruliness of his eyebrows. It was that the original artwork hung in the living room of our childhood home, because our father was the one who drew it.

My father is an artist. He won an Emmy for his work in 1977, the year I was born. My brother and I spent much of our formative years in his downstairs studio in our Long Island home. When my father made his regular train trips into Manhattan to see clients, I often went with him. We’d end up doodling together—in the company of French Realist painters like Bouguereau, or Bastien-Lapage—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I said I wanted to be a freelance artist just like him, he used to tell me I should be a plastic surgeon instead: “That way you can still play with people’s faces, but you’ll make a lot of money!”

For twenty years, he worked as a commercial artist, drawing and painting film posters, romance covers, illustrations of Tom Selleck as the original Magnum, P.I. for TV Guide, ice-skating advertisements for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, even covers of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

That peasant boy on his knee in supplication? That’s my brother. The warlord all armored up before him? That’s my dad.

My father is also a black belt in karate who once studied at the same Hong Kong martial-arts practice as Bruce Lee. Just as he trained us in the studio to draw and paint like him, he also trained us, in the garage, to punch and kick like him. Andy and I roundhouse-kicked until we were dizzy, and used each other as live heavy bags. We practiced with plastic nunchucks that looked like the real thing. My father, of course, used the real thing.

In the mid-nineties, my parents got divorced. My father moved back to Hong Kong, where he was born, and then to mainland China. He dreamed of a future in which he would no longer have to paint couples in amorous clinches for bodice-ripper romance novels. The models were always the same, outfitted in different costumes: pirate and wench, officer and nurse, cowboy and heiress. He wanted to leave that behind. He wanted to become a fine artist.

Over the last two decades, he has exhibited his work in New York, California, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Hong Kong. His work is collected by Chinese tycoons. One of his paintings now hangs in the permanent collection of Guanfu, the largest private art museum in China.

My brother and I didn’t see him often after he moved away. After my dad left, I stopped making art.

*

It has always been difficult to reconcile my father’s absence from my adult life with his constant presence in my childhood—he was always home, always there, ready to draw, to spar, to play. Once, when I was twelve—during a perfectly average afternoon spent hanging out together, in the middle of a lengthy, meandering conversation conducted from different corners of the living-room sectional—he turned to me and told me I was his best friend.

What is it like to have your best friend ripped out of the picture when you’re fourteen, fragile and just beginning to be confident in the world? I felt lost throughout much of high school. My mom, overwhelmed with a full-time job, solo parenting, and trying to keep her marriage together—at that point, my parents hadn’t yet officially divorced—didn’t have much emotional bandwidth for me.

For a time, I still made art, a profusion of it, building a portfolio that eventually helped get me into an Ivy League school. In the time between fourteen and twenty-one, my father and I saw each other twice a year at first, though our number of visits soon dwindled to zero. My father was missing. How could I put him back into the picture, somewhere adjacent to me?

During my junior year studying abroad in Sydney, I bought an international calling card and dialed his number in China. I told him I wanted to visit him on my way home. It’s not a good time, he said, his voice crackly, a little tinny over the oceanic divide. Maybe next year. I yelled and cried into the receiver. I told him that if he didn’t let me go see him right then, I would never agree to see him again. Who was this college kid, issuing ultimatums? I was constitutionally averse to conflict, always had been. But our estrangement made something bitter boil up inside me.

What is it like to have your best friend ripped out of the picture when you’re fourteen?

I went to Beijing because I wanted to begin a process of repair, though I didn’t know what that might look like. My dad took me to see the sights. We climbed the Great Wall, holding silly kung-fu poses that recalled the old Cantonese martial-arts movies we used to watch together. We walked through Tiananmen Square. I took photos of the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong, and of armed guards who yelled in Mandarin as I approached: Stop! Don’t come any closer!

In those pre-boom Beijing days, my father lived at the end of a dirt lane, across the street from a shantytown where a pair of sisters washed their hair with a bucket of water dumped from overhead while chickens ran free at their feet. I snapped photos of this visual smorgasbord, thirsty for these glimpses of the world my father occupied without me.

That week, he proffered a hesitant invitation to paint with him in his studio, just like old times. We sketched, mixed oil palettes, sprayed fixative, opened windows to flush out the fumes. We whiled away the hours, painting the same old man’s face.

Much later, he told me that my visit fell during a period in which he was struggling to make ends meet. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you to see me that way. This is what fathers want for their daughters.

As for me, I wish I could say that after that trip my father was back in my life, fully. Look at all the fun we had. It made us feel close again. This is what daughters want from their fathers.

*

You want him to miss you, to want to see you more. You want him to make more of an effort to meet you halfway. And you want your brother to talk to your father, too, so that you aren’t always doing all the work.

But it’s more like this: You go about living your life. Your father still doesn’t express much interest in seeing you more than once every couple of years. You get married. Everyone agrees that it’s probably better if he doesn’t come to the wedding. You make the trip to see him, this time with your husband. It’s a lovely visit, but it’s a major effort—in time, in money, in emotional labor.

Eventually, you have your own children to think about. You bring your infant son to Hong Kong to meet your dad, and have your trip cut short by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. When your second child arrives, you bring the both of them, traveling by yourself from a visit with other family in Japan, sweating through the diaper explosions and the interminable wailing, nearly missing your connecting flight, all because you want him to know them. On that arduous trip, as a new mother of two, you think that his interest seems to go little beyond aesthetics. He finds the boys beautiful, enjoys watching from a distance. But he doesn’t really engage with them.

When you return home, you give up—not all the way, not forever, but all the same it costs you something. The bitterness returns. Three years pass. But little things keep reminding you of him. Those Choose Your Own Adventure books your older son, now eight, is reading. Your father has only met him three times, the last time when the boy was five. That’s the age your younger son is now. No one judges you. But then comes a movie suggestion on iTunes—from a computer algorithm, of all things. Gently telling you what to notice about your own life, reminding you of your father and his work.

*

A little over a year ago, my brother and I went to visit our father—all three of us together in China, for the first time in nearly twenty years. Our dad lives in Guangzhou now, one of the most populous cities in China, right up there with Beijing and Shanghai in size and ambition. We boxed in his studio, did a little sketching, made plans for him to come visit us in California. Andy said it was the first time he felt that my father saw him as a real person, and not as the child he was when our father last lived with us. We were happy.

And then, on the night before we were to leave, we watched as our father nearly died on the floor in front of us.

The new exercise bar he’d been doing flips on had fallen off the wall. In the flurry to get the apartment ready for our visit, he hadn’t securely bracketed the bar. My brother and I rushed to his side as our stepmother frantically called for an ambulance. Our father’s eyes were open, but unseeing; his breath was irregular, gasping; there was blood on the floor. As Andy performed checks for consciousness, our eyes met over our father’s body.

Is this why we’re here? To be here when he dies?

No matter what happens, I want to see my father more often, on my terms.

When our father woke up, he didn’t know us. He spoke to us in different languages. When the ambulance arrived, I was forced to call upon my twenty-years-expired first-aid lifeguard training and do stabilization for head and neck injuries on my father; I screamed at the ambulance workers in Cantonese that we could not shove him into a wheelchair with the likelihood of skull fractures so great. I answered my father’s questions, repeated over and over again, on endless loop: What happened? Where? I did? At the horror-movie hospital, with its filthy, vomit-stained floors, flickering fluorescent bulbs, mildewed pillows, and people with head wounds walking around while flicking cigarette butts, I gave the young ER doctor a piece of my mind.

But my dad didn’t die. By the time my brother and I flew home, leaving him in the care of our stepmother, he knew us again. It wasn’t yet clear how far back he’d come from where he was.

As the months passed and we monitored his progress in the crisscross exchange of photos and messages across the Pacific, I knew he was going to be okay not when he started walking outside, not when he started doing his exercises, but when he started painting again.

*

I’ve been drawing again, too. Keeping a sketchbook. It has been my way of staying more acutely on nodding terms with him, with us, with the selves we used to be. With who we are now.

Most of the drawing I’ve done in recent years is as an on-demand sketch artist for my sons.

Animal menagerie. Ninjas. Superheroes. Draw it, Mama.

Several years ago, a group of designers developed “See Your Folks,” what might be best described as a global “family visit calculator.” You input a few facts into the calculator—how often you see your parents, how old they are, where they live—and it coughs up a number, based on World Health Organization life expectancy data. Once, when we hadn’t seen each other in a while, I told my dad simply that I wanted to see him more times before he died. It sounds a little macabre—but he laughed, because he understands that kind of bluntness.

A couple of months ago, I flew back to Guangzhou to see him again. We drew and painted together in the studio, took walks, had long talks on the couch. I only cried once, when we had that old familiar fight about him coming to see us in California.

The day before I left, he brought out some photographs he’d found. Us painting together, at thirty-nine and eight, and at fifty-two and twenty-one. I knew then, without him having to actually tell me, that he was saying he loved me, with all his heart, no matter how infrequently we saw one another in person.

I’m now older than he was in that first photograph. I made it a point to sketch him before I left, and to take another photo. No matter what happens, I want to see him more often, on my terms, than the family visit calculator predicted I would.

With any luck, my father will let me fly him to California this summer to be with us. We text each other almost every day, only now I’m sending images as well as words. The other day I texted him a photo of me drawing with my older son. It was taken from the point of view of me behind my page: my actual son blurry in the background, busy with his own sketchbook; the drawing of him sharp in the foreground, rendered in green ink.

Do you like my drawings? I asked.

A minute later, my father wrote back. Love your drawings.

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