Scarlet | Teen Ink

Scarlet MAG

April 23, 2017
By gxqing BRONZE, Cupertino, California
gxqing BRONZE, Cupertino, California
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

He has not showered in two weeks, yet I climb the steps into the brick building that drips with the colors of the rainbow. My art teacher wears his heart on his denim sleeves. His denim is cuffed with the memories of the warm ruby, aquamarine blue, and vermilion of the sunset.

I met him when I was two feet shorter, dripping with the pretension of five-year-old amateur artists who just want to impress someone. He wore the same denim then – though in darker shades that were not so frayed with patches of the early morning and jaded scarlet. I had shown him my shadings, my golden cheeks purposely splattered with charcoal fingerprints to create the art my drawings could not. He had rumbled with laughter, coloring in the patches of misunderstanding and loneliness. I fell in love that day.

His knuckles have always been calloused with pain, camouflaged with azure and dark lavender that swing by the scuffs on his fabric when he speaks in harsh Vietnamese. I watched them lift the paintbrush when he first taught me how to color the sky, shadow my fingers as I failed to create a straight line, brush the horizon as he finessed the sculptural mold. In all these memories he is accompanied by his denim, a harrowing history that began before blue and yellow ever fell head over heels into red.

My art teacher lives in his studio of red brick ivy, a lost city that exists only through rickety stairs with the railings smothered by charcoal smudges. As I clutch the banister, heading to my weekly Saturday morning class, I pass by canvases littered with foreign Vietnamese scrawl in ruby. He has taught me not to ask, but I learn most through the unsaid – the rough outlines of an infant and a woman, the paintings of a foreign land, the crimson of a war zone. I never question why he lives alone, though I spend my time imagining his heroic escape from Vietnam, an anonymous national hero who found sanctuary in our little town.

He rarely speaks of Vietnam. He is no Rembrandt, nor Da Vinci, but when he tells me of how he found art, his eyes gleam yellow and his denim pigments brighten in excitement. It is hard not to do the same.

The first color he ever created was red – red, for his love of his country. He shows me the evidence on his denim jacket, the red of thirty years ago. It was not an easy task when he set out in denim armor at four feet tall to find red; all he found was blue. Blue was the color when he looked at the sky, when he looked in the rivers. Vietnam was not a country for the red; safety was in the peaceful aquamarine that ensured its people did not bleed crimson. However, he loved red so much that he continued to search, until he chopped up dandelion wisps with peppermint extract and fresh ginger that he had sneaked from his mother’s kitchen, to make the color of human love.

The same color tints my cheeks when he mutters in disapproval when I skip class. The aromas of artificial paint and bottled ink are so strong that my five-year-old self can no longer focus on the pretty pictures. I do not want to draw anymore; I cannot draw anymore. My eyes are tarnished with purple postcards that prove I cannot love art as much as my art teacher does; art is for the strong. 

However, he does not allow me to succumb to passive purple; we are in the state of red, in the state of passion.

Draw! he says.

Paint! he says.

Sketch! he says.

I can’t, I say.

It is only when I revolt that I see his denim fabric scrunch in anger and his shoulders hunch in tautness at the five-year-old, pigtailed rebel who refuses to paint the colors of the sky. His slurs are laced with Vietnamese venom I can only understand in individual strokes, but I know I am in trouble as I watch dark wine spill over his cheeks, dancing with danger.

Two weeks later, I come back on a Saturday morning. He still cloaks his denim shield, but the colors seem darker now. He sees me and his eyes light up, his smirk proving he knew I could not stay away from my charcoal friends, or his stories, for long.

I ask him what he would like me to draw, and he begins to show me. I freeze. He has taken off his denim jacket, and I am not sure I recognize him anymore.

Draw the fabric, he says.

My fingers shake like the wobbly steps of this haven, yet no matter how hard I press the charcoal on pure white sheets, I cannot capture the carmine in denim cuffs and wrinkles that bear more tears for colors he does not let on.


The author's comments:

Grace Qing(she/her) is a teenage writer passionate about Asian passivity, unseen barriers, and cultural identities, using words as a means to explore what it means to be human. Her experiences detailed in Scarlet allow her to intertwine prose with human stories to reconstruct the broader societal narrative, memorializing both the strongest highs and weakest lows in life. Her work is published and forthcoming in the Young Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, The Blueshift Journal, Glass Poetry Press, The Woman Inc, and more. 


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on May. 1 2017 at 2:43 pm
HereSheIs BRONZE, Wellesley, Massachusetts
3 articles 0 photos 187 comments

Favorite Quote:
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." -Plato

Your prose is AMAZING, and almost poetic. That should be part of a book