When I was in elementary school, my mother used to take me to art lessons on Saturday afternoons. I feared these long two hour painting sessions, not only because I was not innately talented, but also because I had felt I did not have a personal connection with the art form. Painting, drawing, pastel - these were all static activities that one relegated to oneself in a time of solid and introspection.
These were the thoughts that were going through my head when our group stepped into the classroom of the special needs school that we were partnering with. While making new friendships and bringing smiles to other peoples’ faces were things that I enjoyed tremendously, painting and drawing were not, and when I learned these activities were precisely what we would be doing with the children, I wasn’t too thrilled.
The student who I was working with was a young boy named “Tianbao” meaning sky treasure. Tianbao hadn’t told me this through conversation; rather, Tianbao had written his name on a piece of paper for me to read. For the first ten minutes of our time together, I had tried valiantly to communicate with Tianbao through spoken word. His non-responses to my queries left me perplexed as the minute I brought out Chinese dialogue, my students at No. 9 at other schools that we had worked at would response enthusiastically because of the shared culture. Tianbao was deaf. It was amidst the exaggerated gestures and the little notes that he wrote that I finally realized this.
Without the ability to communicate verbally, my interactions with Tianbao were superficially non-verbal. Here, my ability to read and write Chinese was particularly useful in fielding some of Tianbao’s questions regarding World War II, America, and his English name (I gave him Tim because it sounded a lot like Tianbao). What I didn’t expect, however, was that our mandatory drawing activity ultimately provided a means to communicate that was far more effective than the little notes that we exchanged between one another.
Tianbao and I first drew one of the faces of ancient Chinese on the paper that was given to us, and in the process of creating our masterpiece, we seemed to divvy up the features of the drawing telepathically between us. When I accidently gave the hair a shade darker than the drawing, Tianbao gave me a little glance that I knew instantly meant that I needed to lighten up the color. When Tianbao colored outside of the lines at one point, I raised my eyebrows slightly which prompted a small little laugh out of him. These little conversations would carry on throughout our hour of art together, that traversed drawings of WWII tanks, flags of Germany, mountains, and airplanes. At the end of our hour together, our drawing had looked like a mixture of my ideas and of Tianbao’s. There were clear areas in which both us of were able to express our own solitary ideas and other places where we negotiated, disputed, and found agreement.
In drawing up our masterwork together, I felt as if I had truly gotten to know the authentic Tianbao: the vibrant, constantly smiling student, the World War II aficionado, the Tianbao that loved action movies and the Japanese language. On this piece of artwork, I saw a little bit of Tianbao and myself as well, interacting dynamically across the canvass in discussion and deep thought. Maybe art really wasn’t a pursuit that was meant for the solitary individual. Maybe in my myopic scrutiny of the final product, I had forgotten about the peoples and thoughts that went into it.