today I want to talk to you about my
father I want to talk to you about my
father and my art and the way that
creating art helps me to cope with
losing my father so my first memory of
my father is of him carrying me around
at my first birthday party now there are
pictures and videos of that party and
the dress that I wore still hangs in my
closet so I can’t tell you if I truly
remember it or if all the photographs
and the recordings have left impressions
in my mind but what I can tell you is
that I remember distinctly what it’s
like to be held by him when I was in
first grade he started this game with me
as he drove me to school every day he
would list out the names of countries in
the car and I would have to respond with
the state capital are the capitals of
the countries and we did this for years
and years really until I started high
school and after a while it just became
reflexive like music the way that you
just know the next word in the song i
knew the capital of Indonesia Jakarta
Australia Canberra Pakistan Islamabad
and sometimes he was wrong too for the
longest time he told me that the capital
of New Zealand was Christchurch and even
now that I know that that’s wrong when
New Zealand comes up in casual
conversation my tongue wants to form the
word Christchurch on my lips and it’s
weird because he’s not with us anymore
but in that way in ways like that it
feels like he’s almost ingrained in me
but it took me a long time to be able to
say things like that it took me a long
time to be able to admit to myself that
I was a teenager with a fatally ill
father or that I was 17 and didn’t have
one at all when I was in third grade
dude have some medical complications my
father experienced heart failure and he
survived but after that he forever had a
weak heart and the entire experience for
me was like some kind of bad dream
though I had fallen into one of those
books that I like to pick up the library
every Sunday where someone’s parent has
died or something inordinately terrible
has happened just so that the author can
raise the stakes of the story but I
always thought that like Alice one day I
would tumble back out of the rabbit hole
and my life would go back to the way
that I thought it should look like which
is really more like some 1950s sitcom
where everyone’s smiling and no fight
lasts too long but of course that’s not
what happened with sickness often comes
depression and when a parent is
depressed it affects the entire family
my parents especially my mother tried
very hard to make sure that my brother
and I still lived a normal life but I
was a kind of child that like to press
my ears to close doors to try and catch
a glimpse of what the adults were say
and so I knew a lot more about the
situation that I should have and I would
go back to my third-grade classroom and
I would sit in that desk and I would
feel such an anger towards everyone else
in that classroom because I felt like I
had to face the real world and they
didn’t and that’s when I first started
writing seriously or as seriously as a
third grader can do anything anyway but
I realized that I could create worlds in
which bad things didn’t happen to little
girls who didn’t deserve then because I
had realized perhaps a little bit too
early that this world has no karmic
balance whatsoever and so I took refuge
in creating worlds that did give me that
and so I was writing for hours and hours
after school inking page over and page
of characters that I created with my own
mind and that was incredibly empowering
as well because as a third grader whose
life had spun out of control being able
to be the master of my own story on the
page was everything and as I grew as a
writer it became more about just
escapism there’s there’s something
beautiful about the written word because
it forces you to take what’s the jumble
of thoughts that are in your mind and
make sense of it on the page articulate
it too
fine it and after a while in the tunnels
of everything that was happening to me I
started writing to understand myself I
would write characters with similar
experiences as me and I would work out
my anxiety and my fears on the page and
it became so that I was writing versions
of myself in order to understand myself
and it was also around this time that I
started to paint seriously and it’s a
little bit harder to explain why
painting brought me so much solace in my
time of need but there’s something about
the familiarity of the oil paint the
smell of turpentine the beautiful way in
which the charcoal crumbles across the
page that really brought me comfort and
there’s a power in being able to slash
bright colors against white canvases and
there’s something incredibly cathartic
about being able to mix paints that can
somehow display your emotions the
elations of the yellow the the sadnesses
of the blues but that’s not a new
phenomenon because writers and artists
have been using their work to grapple
with tragedy for centuries from
Picasso’s blue period to go a series of
black paintings they’re all examples of
the way that ink with ink and oil paint
and turpentine people are able to
release their emotions onto the canvas
but in a world in which art is seen more
and more as a luxury rather than a
necessity and in a world in which we
pride ourselves in being silent and
strong and resilient in our pain we
often forget how easy it is and how
helpful it is for art to help us in our
time of need and that’s what happened to
me and what I also didn’t realize
through all of this was even as
audiences we turn to art in our time of
need from Picasso’s Guernica which was a
way of him to commiserate with the
bombing of a Spanish town to the litany
of post 9-11 art to the Paris peace
symbol that many of you probably shared
on social media in the wake of the
attack we as audiences have also leaned
on art for centuries to help us find
solace but at that point am I writing an
artistic career I didn’t understand that
and so I began to feel a tremendous
sense of guilt really because as I wrote
more and more to submit to competitions
and to get published and as I painted in
order to become exhibited I began to
feel like I might be profiting from my
father’s illness because so much of my
work was rooted in what was happening in
my family and it didn’t sit right with
me that every time I father ended up in
the hospital I was able to write a piece
of prose that I was incredibly proud of
and I was afraid that if I kept writing
about tragedy it was going to define me
and I didn’t want to be defined by
something that had happened to me when I
was 15 years old or 17 years old I was
afraid of being pigeon-holed as a sad
artist the same way that actors can be
romantic leads for their entire career
or the bad guys and I struggled with
that constantly and it got to the point
where I was forcing myself to write
about things that I really didn’t care
about and that lowered the stakes of the
story for me personally and you could
tell my writing simply wasn’t as good
and the same thing was happening with my
art instead of throwing colors on the
page and somehow creating a work that
displayed how I was feeling I started to
force myself to paint scenery and still
lives and there was no passion in that
work and you could tell that there
wasn’t I had stopped allowing myself to
feel and to breathe through the written
word and on a canvas and I was a satyr
person because of it it was all becoming
bottled up inside of me and my junior
year was incredibly hard because of it
and then my father had a stroke he had
been ill since I was in third grade but
somehow the tumult of his health had
evened out and we had all gotten used to
it but in the winter of 2014 everything
was up in the air again and this time I
was really old enough to understand I
was old enough to understand that he was
lucky to have survived I was old enough
to understand that they were putting him
on the heart-transplant list and I was
old enough to understand that the
medical bills that my mother had
accidentally left in the printer were
not going to be easy for us and when my
father came home
because a stroke often often messes with
your brain he was often a very different
person and so I felt like I was already
morning someone who was still stood in
front of me in flesh and blood and it
was at that point that I stopped writing
entirely and I stopped painting entirely
too because it almost felt like I didn’t
know how to it felt like if I put this
down on the page or down on the canvas
this was going to be my reality there
was no tumbling out of the rabbit hole
after that my life would no longer be
sitting in the back seat of a car and
trying to remember what the capital of
Jakarta was our capital of Indonesia was
this is what it would be and I wasn’t
ready to admit that yet and when I did
start writing and painting again it was
only because I needed to fill up a
resume for my college applications and
they were all fluff pieces I wasn’t
invested in them and I had stopped
myself really from feeling through my
words and my paintings but it became a
new reality for me I was used to myself
being like that being sad and not being
able to properly articulate myself but
to everyone around me I was an entirely
different person and then a little over
a month ago today my father passed away
he had been in India for five months I
hadn’t seen him and it was incredibly
sudden none of us had expected it and in
the week afterwards I avoided my
notebooks my pens my paint like some
kind of plague I was terrified to admit
that this is actually happened because
my 1950s sitcom dream I had finally
found out was never going to come true
and then one day I was sitting in a cafe
in Palo Alto and I realized that my
memories are so fragile they’re so
fragile that I can’t even remember if my
first memory is real or if it’s been
doctored by all the photographs and
videos that I’ve seen and I realized
that if I want to remember my father 20
years from now 40 years from now the
only thing that I can do is write it
down it was the only way I had to paint
it I had to write it in order to
remember it and so I did
I wrote down my first memory to my last
memory and everything in between and
then I was crying in a cafe in Palo Alto
but I almost didn’t care because it was
such a relief to finally be able to feel
it again because the only way that I
really know how to express myself and
how to breathe is to be able to write
and when I started painting again too
though it took longer I wasn’t painting
still lives anymore I was through trying
to make more non-objective work I would
throw colors onto the canvas and I would
let my emotions dictate what happened
and it changed me entirely it allowed me
to truly understand that admitting
reality is hard but the real pain is in
hiding what’s happening and as this
happened I remembered what one of my
mentors at a writing camp once told me
she said right into your obsessions
young writers are so terrified of only
writing about one thing and thus being
dictated as a immature writer and not
being able to make it as a writer but
you’re only writing about something so
much because it’s important to you and
when it stops being important to you
you’re going to stop writing about it
and that’s the key I think to living
with tragedy without being defined by
hit it’s finding a way to express
yourself in a way that’s not a
distraction but a catharsis and in my
fear of becoming some kind of cliche
writer and artist I had stopped myself
from creating art that was honest
because tragedy can come with guilt and
anger and sadness and they can all
threaten to take you over but i found a
revelation in art I found a revelation
in being able to express myself in ways
that allowed me to admit the tenor of my
sadness on the canvas and on the page
when I wasn’t even able to admit it in
my own head space because ultimately
I’ve grown up with tragedy I’ve waited
my entire life for the other shoe to
drop with my father’s health and that
can leave a pernicious shadow over you
it can threaten to take you over but i
think that our
is the way out and not everyone’s an
artist not everyone’s a writer or a
painter but scientific research coding
they’re all art in their own way it’s
it’s about finding a way to express
yourself it’s about finding your passion
your art and allowing it to help you climb out of tragedy thank you