Jumping into the Sea

Picture Story

VI. Jumping into the Sea

During that time I went to the sea every day. Not swimming — jumping. From the reef into the waves, letting the body be swept away, soaked in salt, dragged by the undertow into the deep. Sometimes I did not want to come back. Sometimes I hoped that force would carry me straight to where he was.

At the centre of the painting, a blaze of gold and orange-red rises from the surface of the sea — sunset, flame, the residual warmth of the cremation furnace, and the character “Qiao” (乔) of my father's name burning in the daylight. Below, the deep blue and cyan-green waves churn — Lethe, the dark river, the white flash that explodes before the eyes at every plunge. In the distance a pale island appears and fades — the other shore, the gathering place of “us,” but every time I swim toward it the backwash pushes me back.

Not wanting to die, but wanting to feel the edge of being alive — the boundary between the last breath in the lungs and the first mouthful of water, the temperature difference between the cold of this shore and the warmth of the other.

“Those days I thought I was Zhuangzi — only laughing, never crying. Who knew tears would disobey and keep falling, not knowing whether it was the incense smoke before the Buddha stinging my eyes, or the onions of the mortal world coaxing the tears.”

Zhuangzi “drummed on a bowl and sang” when his wife died — not crying but laughing. I used to think that was detachment, transcendence. Now I understand — laughter and tears are not a binary; they exist at the same time and transform into each other. I learn farewell in tears and continue forward in a smile.

A friend dreamed of my parents. My mother said to my father: “I am already on the other shore; you should stay a while longer with our child.” My father answered: “I too can come to find you — our child can stand on his own now.”

Finally, graduation. Not a student's graduation, but a child's graduation — graduating from the shelter of parents, graduating from tears, graduating from smiles.