The Meaning of Love

At first, I was simply trying to gather the courage to create my first piece of art. To make the beginning feel less intimidating, I decided to start with something small, so I chose ACEO cards. (ACEO stands for Art Cards, Editions, and Originals.)

I didn’t have any blank miniature cards to draw on, but then I remembered that my husband plays the One Piece trading card game and has stacks of unused cards. I asked him to give me a few, and the very first card I randomly pulled out to paint on was called: “You May Be a Fool… But I Still Love You.”

Out of all the possible cards, that was the one I received first.

Later, I painted a beautiful rose garden series over those cards, but that is not really the point. What stayed with me was the question the card quietly left behind: What does love really mean to me?

To answer that question, my mind returned to my childhood.

When I was very young, I did not really understand what love was. My earliest memories come from a boarding kindergarten in China, where I was sent at four years old.

By today’s definition — or at least by my understanding — love feels warm. It feels safe.

The four-year-old version of me felt neither.

Memories can become blurry over time, but feelings rarely do. We were a group of small children who depended entirely on adults to care for us. Nannies were watching us day and night, making sure we were dressed, fed, and kept from getting hurt. But I was smaller, thinner, and slower than the other children, and the nannies were not particularly fond of me.

If I were cold outside on the playground, no one brought me a jacket. If I ate too slowly, my food would be taken away because they needed to clean up. One teacher spanked me because I could not sit still or kept asking questions. Other children’s parents visited weekly, while I barely remembered what my own parents looked like.

Later, when I learned the word “orphanage” from a book, I remember quietly wondering if that was where I had actually been all along. In reality, that was not true. My parents were simply busy for most of my childhood, and they believed the boarding kindergarten they chose for me offered the best education and opportunities possible.

There was probably another reason neither the adults nor the children liked me very much: I cried constantly, day and night.

One midnight, my crying disturbed everyone in the room so badly that a nanny took me outside and left me sitting alone on the staircase for what felt like a very long time. No one came except the nighttime janitor auntie.

She noticed me curled up in the corner of the stairs and walked over. I cannot remember exactly what she said, but I remember she took a piece of ginger from her tea bottle and told me to keep it in my mouth so I would stay warm.

That moment was the first time I remember feeling love.

Warmth. Safety.

Maybe that was the very first time those feelings ever appeared in my life.

It was a heartbreaking way to begin a human life, wasn’t it?

But my story did not end there.

I am now thirty years old. I have lived, learned, and experienced enough to realize that love is far more complicated than the definition I created as a child. After everything, I think love, to me, is ultimately a sense of freedom.

It is the safety of being allowed to exist as who I truly am — without discrimination, stereotypes, control, or fear.

That is enough.

Most of the time, I still think I am a fool, just like the card said. But I am lucky enough to have people in my life who have shown me what love can look like. People who chose to stay. People who protected me when they did not have to. People who made space for me to become myself.

And maybe that is why I started painting in the first place.

Not to create something perfect, but to finally create something honest.

Perhaps love is not a grand declaration after all. Perhaps it is simply the quiet act of making warmth for yourself and for others — the same way a stranger once handed a lonely child a piece of ginger on a cold night.

May every piece of art I make from now on be my way of returning that warmth back into this cold world. Little by little.