A sense of home --- from our patio in our backyard on June 13, 2016 my 25th anniversary of moving from China to Canada and calling Brandon my home.
Each year I will mark this special day in my life with a painting reflecting on aspects of my life as a journey. As I have shared before on Facebook with friends Three existing life circumstances accompanies my early years of growing up in the then Communist China : I lived a life of political repression, a life of sensual deprivation, and a life of geographical isolation. Instead of diminishing me in their intended ways, each inadvertently empowered and enriched me in its own unique way. It seems a bit paradoxical for me here to express my thankfulness for each of these forces.
I am thankful for my early life experience with political repression in China. Without that dark passage of my early life, I would never have been so keenly appreciative of what a world of light we are living in today in Canada with so much freedom of choices.
I am thankful for my early life experience with sensual deprivation in China. Deprivation of things materialistic has made me easily satisfied and satiated with simply things in my life as if any more of it would be way too rich for my simple palate,on the other hand the deprivation of my early opportunity to be exposed to what is best from human civilizations in terms of knowledge, art and culture has only created an avalanche of unquenchable thirst and desire in me for anything that is beautiful under the sun. I remember the yearning for reading was so strong in me when I was a young boy, and the pang of deprivation of any access to books in particular and education as whole was almost as painful as hunger and starvation. I remember how in late 70s when the changes in China suddenly lifted ban on what we were allow to read , the sense of joy from the fact that I had the freedom and opportunity to read again was so visceral . Who would find his heart palpitate so much at the mere sight of a new book on a bookshelf in a bookstore as if he were on his first date.
I am thankful for the geographical isolation that I found myself in the moment I was born. Fenced in by Altay Mountains on one side and blocked in by Gobi desert on the other, I literally could not see the distant horizon. The sense of isolation was so strong and so tangible that it only created an unstoppable urge and momentum to break the physical barrier to get out of it despite of all the odds. It is the same force of desire to see a distant horizon that propelled me to pick up English from scratch at the age of 18 totally on my own. There was simply no utilitarian value of learning a foreign language then in China. Only in my mind’s eyes I somehow instinctively felt that the English language might eventually open a new window onto a distant horizon. It did eventually. It led me first out of the isolated Northwestern China to the coast area of China and then eventually led me all the way out of Post Tiananmen Square China to Canada.

25 years ago today, on 13 of June 1991 Having been flying over the pacific ocean for 12 hours after bidding my farewell to my loved ones left behind in China, and when I caught first sight of the beautiful west coastline of Canada from the air, I sobbed uncontrollably, two forces were tearing through my heart at that particular moment: overwhelming sense of sadness over my separation and overwhelming sens of joy over the start of my new life in Canada, the two mingled together and melted into stream of tears.