I Draw The Eyes In
By Jasmine Gui
Jasmine Gui - I Draw The Eyes In (2022), Digital Collage
Image description: The digital collage features a chimerical dragon stitched together from various stock illustrations and found images online, disappearing into the eye of the artist whose face has been enlarged, digitally textured, and covers most of the collage’s surface area. At the top left corner float some illustrated white clouds against a blue background.
畫龍點睛
Zhang Sengyou comes to town. He has been asked to paint dragons on the temple wall for an upcoming festival. Over the next few days, people notice that the four dragon forms he’s created have no pupils in their eyes. If I draw them in, he explains, they will come to life and escape this wall.
The townspeople are skeptical. They request the eyes be painted in. Zhang steps up and dots in the eyes of two dragons. Lightning strikes the wall and both newly-seeing dragons leap into the sky, disappearing into the clouds.
—First recorded in Zhang Yanyuan’s Tang epic, Notes Of Past Famous Paintings
* *
The first time I experience the power of dragon eyes is at bedtime. My father is a skilled storyteller, spinning episodes of a protagonist, Xiao Ming, on adventures with talking monkeys, hungry tigers, and sly Javanese mynahs. Old jokes are told and retold, sprinkled with classic fables and groan-inducing sayings on wisdom and foolishness. My sister and I, instead of being lulled to sleep, clamor for more.
My father is also a notorious trickster in the everyday, often mixing degrees of truth with fiction to confound, confuse, and entertain. Since childhood, countless aunties and uncles in our lives have told us, Your dad is 99% bullshit, and 1% truth. Gatherings are uproarious retellings of his elaborate pranking history, a pastime he has been indulging in since he was a little boy. He is the first Zhang Sengyou of my life, painting dragons that spring from walls into skies. Through him, I learn delight and wonder.
* *
Postscript #1
The seeing dragons are summoned to a life of flight without warning. They leap off the wall, propelled by the power of vision rippling through their bodies into expanding spaces where horizons receded. Somewhere in transit, heading toward unknown sky, however, they nurse some disorientation: I see. I can see. There is so much. What am I looking for? What do I do now?
* *
This essay is about language, all mine in different ways, all dragons on the wall. At the end of 1999, my father hangs up a newly purchased map of China, and points to a tiny dot on its eastern coast, saying, “This is where we are going to live.” I am eight, and this news is bewildering. I understand departure but don’t understand relocation. I stare at the map. I have always boarded a plane certain of its status as a detour: a visit to my maternal extended family in Sarawak; a short vacation. I have never questioned the return flight. My father’s proposition of a new home is beyond me. “China is shaped like a big rooster,” my dad continues, amusing my sister and I with details to distract us from this strange turn of events. “We are going to its chest.” He points. “A place called '蘇' Su, and '州' Zhou. ”
My family moves from Singapore to Suzhou in January 2000 as part of a wave of Singaporeans working short-term contracts in the newly built China–Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park. We stay for four years, and in that time, I am baptized into the Chinese language. In this historically literary city of famed gardens, mountains, and scholarly courtyards, I experience language brushed on calligraphic scrolls; accompanying a flute or two-stringed erhu; carved on rock; crowning the curves of a stone gate; framing the wood threshold built to trip ghosts. Mandarin tumbles with the Suzhou dialect amongst traffic, in menus, shops, streets, and the sucking mouths of fat carp: Have you heard of the episode where Wu Song fights the tiger? I am a spectator drawing dragon forms in the sand. The poetic excess and abundance of Mandarin sprouts in me a visual and interior capacity that will form the grounds of my future creative practice. I take to this language with flashing hunger.
On the cusp of my teens in 2004, I experience a second disorientation when my family moves to Hong Kong, a turn of events I receive with great indignation and a sulk that persists for six months. This city is worn down and bustling, life crammed into every concrete block, and a stark contrast to the nostalgic sheen of Suzhou’s preserved historicity. Its people dart between the drip of air-conditioning units affixed to windows overhead. Cantonese here is alive with its traditional characters—the buzzing of neon signage; the side of double-decker buses; messy sharpie labels stuck into medicinal herb piles; spray-painted advertisements on concrete; wheat pasted to the wall. I attempt new tones and new characters, speak haltingly, words jumbled and incoherent. My tongue does not grip sound the way it should. It clunks with onerous effort. I trace the dense strokes of characters I thought I knew but am now learning again. I pop my head into the quiet manga loan shops in the town plazas and eat the language up. Where spoken Cantonese eludes my control, reading is a trusty legend in navigating this city. I learn new strokes in guesswork, in gestural communication, in panic-induced speechlessness.
* *
Postscript #2
Countless miles and years later, the dragons discuss the subject with each other for the hundredth time.
How do you feel about this perpetual wandering? One asks. Given the choice, would you want this again — vision, the sky, the possible world, but no guarantee of grounding? I don’t know. But I miss the others, says Two. I wonder how they weathered all these years on the wall.
* *
My family speaks Singlish, that chimera of dialects and languages birthed from the sea-based, semi-nomadic, and colonial histories that make the island of Singapore. Singlish pulses at the family dinner, over the phone, in private conversation on transit. It is playful and irreverent, and for us, an aural archive of familial migration. My Singaporean father speaks Teochew. My Malaysian mother speaks Foochow. They also speak Hokkien. Everyone speaks Cantonese, sort of. All these languages I have heard since young and possess no critical mass of fluency in. Yet, rather than disorientation, this cacophony of tongues is comforting and grounding. I still find solace in spaces where the general chatter around me is ambient, inaccessible sound. In the cities I have relationships with, their soundscapes of legible and incomprehensible languages are consistent and familiar presences of my life.
In 2009, when I leave Asia for Toronto, Canada, I experience breakage again. I am a fluent English speaker but my tongue is chubby and hesitant. I have never been familiar with its weight. The stresses of words are wrongly distributed, the 'a' and 'th' utterances out of place. I adjust my accent toward back-of-throat Canadian English; this language forms my postsecondary education.
Three years later, my sister—herself just arrived in Toronto—and I find ourselves in a funny situation when we try to talk to each other while in a group conversation. Our sentences falter and trip; our accents become confused—Singlish spills out and is adjusted away as the sentence progresses, reemerging and disappearing––a clumsy dance. We laugh and debrief on the way home. Now that you are living here, which accent should we use? We agree on some rules. We become very good at moving through them.
* *
Postscript #3
The townspeople make pilgrimages to the wall long after the miracle is over. There they retell and embellish the thrilling moment of dragon flight. There they admire Zhang’s two remaining eyeless dragons. Over dinner, they discuss dragon sightings and possible returns. Amidst the chatter, Zhang Sengyou is claimed / unclaimed / owned / disowned / recognized / unrecognized. Depending on the day, mood, and group at the table, he is magician, a possessed and dangerous man, the town’s pride and joy, a passing traveler, or a genius of unknowable, but surely, humble origin.
* *
After everything, I possess a forked tongue. The absent second “T” of “Toronno” follows me back to Asia. My 'a' sounds are flat and nasally. I work in Chinese translation. I transcribe and edit Singlish interviews for the library archives. I write forked-tongue poetry. In conversation with family, my graduate English is grown into Singlish like those magnificent tree roots clenched in concrete. More and more often, my parents respond to me with “Too cheem for us lah.”
Cheem is a Hokkien word that indicates something that seems intellectually profound, but also difficult and bewildering. Used to express both incomprehension and admiration, cheem is a line drawn in the sand where the language begins to crack between my family and me. Surely, to the people who sent me all this way across the world, this gap is an indicator that I have succeeded in some way, even if the “what” isn’t clear.
One night, before I fly back to Singapore for a visit, my father sends a gentle text reminder to shed my Canadian accent when I’m back, so as not to sound too cheem to my extended family. You might sound arrogant, he says.
My parents are faithful supporters of my work. My mother collects the magazines that publish my writing. My art has pride of place on their walls. In our calls, it is routine to ask me for updates on what I am working on. Over WhatsApp video calls I sharpie a diagram with arrows to explain to them how my doctoral funding works. I recognize how a record of work accumulates in lieu of my physical self. Dragon forms left on the wall for dinner conversation. These are graspable artifacts of my effort and subsequent success, both enthralling and cheem.
When I speak, however, there is also the jarring consequence of separation. The words are recognizable and strange, the tones are familiar and distant. I am recognizable and strange. I am familiar and distant. In the space of miles and years, other strange and unknown stories have emerged on my tongue.
These stories cluster together into a familiar success mythology of the diasporic Asian. During homecoming season, I am prodded to recite achievements at communal gatherings. I am invited to explain what I do and perform eloquence about life “over there”. “Tell them about that thing.” “What are you doing exactly?” I am modestly praised and encouraged for my educational and professional achievements. I know this is an attempt to close the gap so I draw my dragons’ eyes in and soar. Somewhere, somewhere, I have also become a storyteller. I tell tales, animate histories. I paint anecdotes and answer questions. I reenact. I debunk. Lightning strikes. They listen; they nod; we are all entertained.
Other times, I have become too different. Do not forget where you come from. My thoughts are dismissed. “Too foreign.” I am gently admonished away from what appears to be a slow but deviant pathway. Claimed and unclaimed / owned and disowned / recognized and unrecognizable. After modest praise, the groan-inducing sayings of wisdom and foolishness appear again. (How timeless and persistent they are!) Instead of bedtime stories, though, they are now well-wishes–– advice for me as I am sent on my way. After all, I am both the story and storyteller and so, there are walls elsewhere to paint. There are other dinners to grace.
* *
Postscript #4
The spectacle is, at first, enthralling. Then as with all spectacles, it is eventually forgotten.
One day Zhang Sengyou develops a headache after yet another crowd disperses. Fuck, he says, facing the half-empty wall. I caved to their demands again. I wanted their praise. Who am I without the spectacle? Where can I go next?
* *
Zhang Sengyou’s story forms the Chinese idiom “To draw the eyes of the dragon” (畫龍點睛). It refers to an artist’s ability to call forth—through deft and detailed touches at crucial moments—art to life.
About this idiom, I have questions:
Does Zhang Sengyou hesitate in the act? Does he grow numb to the praise eventually or is it gratifying every time? Does he, too, get invited to house dinners afterward, and do people find him cheem? How many crowds have demanded eyes from him, and how many dragons has he lost? (Released? Grown? Summoned?) Does he see the empty wall space as indicative of mastery? Okay, but is he lonely? What about the dragons? What kind of worlds do they see? Where do they land in the end? Are there caves big enough to house them both? Is it odyssey or exile? Do they find wonder or longing? Are they, forked tongue and all, worldly or lonely?
I am tender towards the artist who grants vision, proud of the dragons who manifest and inspire awe. I am grateful and impatient towards the crowd who praises and gossips nosily. I am partial to the sounds of their discussion, lively and fading. I draw the eyes in to dialogue with my family bearing witness––to make them proud; to keep them close. They want to celebrate the moments I make dragons leap off the wall of my life. I know I am a dragon leaping off their walls. I know the effort they make to see my life in the act of making. The questions they ask to map my outline, to embrace in a tenuous and tender hold; over great distance, with great effort. So I keep painting dragons. I keep taking flight, knowing I will lose both the certainty of the wall and the noisy crowd along the way.
I affirm that old myths turn into new ones. This is my story after all, where I paint the wall tediously, with much effort, in reiterative language; acknowledge how every retelling is burdened with the need for new and repeating narratives and definitions. This means this. That means that. Do you see what I mean? Yah? You see what I mean?
Jasmine Gui is a Singapore-born interdisciplinary artist and arts programmer based in Tkaronto. She runs Teh Studio and San Micropress, working in writing, spatial installation, and bookmaking. She is the author of two chapbooks and collaborates on experimental paper arts as one-half of the creative duo, jabs. She is currently a second-year PhD student at York University.
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