7yo and I were chatting in the car today, and we got on the topic of when things would go back to normal. “It will probably be gradual,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”
He didn’t, so I explained that it will happen little by little. Like how next week he’s headed back to school for an afternoon, and how at that moment, we were on our way to 10yo’s first soccer scrimmage in a year. Maybe soon we’d be able to host friends inside our house again. These will feel special at first, but that specialness will fade over time until it’s just…normal. Not a flip of a switch, but more like a slow shifting back into place, a lingering exhale.
Highlights from this week:
We finished Warrior on HBO Max. It’s still a novelty for me to watch Asian-American stories unfold on screen. This one is so well-done, both entertaining and thought-provoking to watch especially with the recent increase in hate crimes against Asian-Americans.
I taught an “Art in Action” lesson to 10yo’s class about Jacob Lawrence, one of the pre-eminent African-American artists of our generation. We studied “The Studio” and then I showed the class how to make one-point perspective drawings of their own rooms using a vanishing point and orthogonal lines. This turned out to be pretty hard to do over Zoom.
“The Studio,” Jacob Lawrence, 1977
I’ve been thinking lately about how important stories are — not only the ones we see, but the ones we don’t. Warrior was originally pitched by Bruce Lee when he was alive, but not made until decades after his death because the studios didn’t believe a show with an Asian lead could achieve commercial success. Jacob Lawrence didn’t see the African-American experience represented anywhere, so he painted it himself.
It makes me optimistic to see more stories about people that look like me (and other POC) in books and on screen. One day it will no longer be a novelty but the norm.