Art has always been my first language

Art has always been my first language, grief-struck, after Tiananmen Square (a poet friend, Bei Dao, escaping to the west), all I could do was draw. I sat on the floor of CA Museum of Art (LBC, Santa Rosa—Marsha Connell and I were teaching an art class to kids), and I drew vast images of rows of trees, over and over. That was all I could do. That, or cry. And I couldn't do that in front of the kids. The trees became receptacles for my tears. A floodgate of leaves. Not words.