2024

A nervous new licensee, I managed to drive all the way from Sudbury to Boston, my dad in the passenger seat beside me. He was not a backseat driver, angrily critiquing the angles of my turns or the jerkiness of my stops, unlike my mom. He did not extrapolate my driving errors to an indictment of my character, unlike my mom: “You need to learn how to make decisions. This is why I’m better than you as a driver – and as a human being.” My dad only occasionally cussed out the drivers around us, and only occasionally reached over me to slap the belly of the steering wheel, unleashing a furious honk. So all things considered, he was exceedingly chill. 

We entered a tall brick building with sunken-in windows and a Chipotle on its ground floor. A sign announced the Third Annual Massachusetts Amazing Emerging Artists Recognitions Exhibition, a juried high school art show hosted by the Massachusetts Art Education Association. My piece Eclipse, an acrylic and gold leaf painting on a wood panel depicting my friend illuminated by light cast from a rectangular window, had been among one hundred forty-nine artworks selected for exhibition. 

I scanned the room and found my painting hanging on the back wall. A little label displayed my artist statement, formulated in pretentious art-speak: 

In this painting of my friend Maddie, I wanted to imbue the light source with a life of its own, dancing along the walls and leaving contours of shadow in its wake. To this end, I juxtaposed the rigid, geometrical lines of the gold leaf with more loose, organic brush strokes, and used color and texture to create an ambience of mystery and revelation. 

Next to the label, I spotted a small blue ribbon that read “Davis Publications Award.” Award? I didn’t even know this thing had awards. I thought getting accepted into the show was the award. My heart fluttered.

Half an hour later, the organizers corralled the attendees into a side room filled with chairs, arrayed before a lectern and projection screen. They showed some PowerPoint presentation that probably talked about the history of the organization or something.

Finally, they announced the awardees. Eight people won twenty-five dollars. Four people, fifty. Three won two-hundred fifty. And then: “Jackie Liu. Davis Publications Award. Five hundred dollars.” Five hundred dollars! I’m rich! I could buy like, thirty new tubes of Liquitex. 

Applause propelled me to the front of the room, where a lady with curly auburn hair and a paisley scarf tied around her neck placed an envelope in my hands, and a man wearing a loose gray suit jacket over a black T-shirt and black jeans handed me a rolled-up poster. They posed on either side of me as my dad snapped a photo with his Nikon camera. 

On the way home, a smile teased the corners of my lips as we sat unmoving in bumper-to-bumper Boston traffic. Five hundred dollars!

“Jackie, ah.”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Your eyeliner – it look weird,” he frowned. “It make your face look fat.”

“Oh.” Humiliation scorched my cheeks as I studied the license plate in front of me with desperate concentration. For months, I had been trapped in a particularly intense torrent of bingeing, and now my father could see its evidence written upon my body. 

“How much you weigh now?”

I told him.

“Gee, so heavy,” he said, head shaking. “Zhēn de tài pàng le. You should really lose some weight.” 

I got home and ate until I was numb.