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kicking until my last breath,” I replied. Yet the hopelessness began to drown me. It was hard not to give in. I felt weak and sick, but I still forced myself to get up every dawn and sit on a wooden stool in the neighborhood lawn. I tried to memorize English vocabularies from a dictionary. “A-p-p-l-e …
apple
; a-d-j-e-c-t-i-v-e …
adjective
; a-b-a-n-d-o-n …
abandon
.”
    “Do you have any talent? For example, art?” Joan Chen wrote. “You may try your luck in art school if you do.”
    “I grew up painting Mao murals for propaganda purposes,” I wrote back. “My Chinese calligraphy was average.”
    Joan Chen put me in touch with a friend of hers who explained tome the admission process of an American art school. A “portfolio” was what I needed. I wondered what was expected. I had no training at all. I could copy neither the masterpieces of Chinese traditional brush paintings nor the Western masters. The only great Western artist I knew was Michelangelo. It would be impossible for an amateur like me to copy him. I had heard about a new Western art exhibition in Shanghai titled
Impressionism and Cubism
. I decided to check it out.
    At the Shanghai art exhibition, I found myself confused and thrilled at the same time. Confused that Western society had abandoned Michelangelo for childlike paintings, thrilled that so-called modern art would be easy for me to copy. It was the first time I learned the names of Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Andy Warhol. I stared at the paintings and was not sure if I liked them. The strokes were clumsy and the subjects unclear and unrecognizable. The only thought that started to excite me was: If Americans preferred childlike paintings like these, I stood a chance to fool them.
    After coming home, I set out canvases, brushes, and colored inks. I painted throughout the night. I found myself having a good time. There was no master’s work in front of me. I was guided by my own nature.
    I felt like a child who had been given a magical brush. I painted earth, trees, bushes, and water in abstract shapes. I painted my deepest fear in the form of dark and broken strokes mixed with tearlike ink drops. I splashed my emotions on the canvases. My mother said she saw madness and death in my paintings.
    Three months later, I received a thick envelope with a catalog and an application. It was from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The glossy catalog scared me, for I knew that I wouldn’t be able to afford it. I didn’t let myself be discouraged, though, because I remembered what Joan Chen had told me: Most Chinese students managed to work to pay their tuition and counted on future earnings to pay off their debts.
    I attempted to fill out the application form but got stuck in the first line. I was supposed to fill in my name, but I didn’t have an English name. Do I spell “An-Qi” from the Pinyin system? Could Americans recognize that? For advice, I knocked on the door of the wise man inthe neighborhood. He suggested I spell my name as “Angel,” for it was an American name. I carefully copied the characters of “Angel” onto the application form, only I didn’t realize that I had spelled it as “Angle.”
    The next line was “sex.” I looked up the word
sex
in my English-Chinese dictionary. The word didn’t exist. I visited the wise man again for help. He instructed me to circle “female.”
    The line after “sex” was “field of interest.” I was supposed to check one of the following: drawing, painting, sculpting, designing, architecture, music, or filmmaking. I didn’t know which to circle. I scanned the remaining pages and sensed that I wouldn’t be able to complete the form on my own.
    I visited a friend of Joan Chen’s after work at ten P.M. I needed help with my application form. The friend was not home, so I waited by her door. After midnight, she appeared. She was a translator and tour guide. She had just gotten off work, returning from