Chapter 172: Bich Draws
Bich drew her first firefly at age four.
Not because anyone taught her — the specific, Cho-family transmission of artistic DNA that skipped certain generations and expressed itself in others had, in Bich’s case, produced a child who picked up a crayon at two, held it with the grip that Wang Lei had described as “ninety-fifth percentile,” and began making marks on every available surface with the unselfconscious urgency of a person who had discovered a new language and intended to speak it constantly.
The first firefly happened on a March morning in 2047 — Soomin’s birthday, the jade tree’s birthday, the specific, annual confluence that the family treated as a dual celebration and that Bich, at four, understood only as “the day everyone goes to the garden and the tree has flowers.”
She was sitting at the base of the tree. The spot that Namu had claimed at age two and that Bich had inherited at age one, the specific, multi-generational sitting spot where the smallest Cho touched the bark and existed in the patient, wordless communion that the tree offered to everyone who accepted the terms (no talking required, no activity expected, just sitting).
She had a crayon — green, the specific shade that Korean crayons labeled cho-rok, the color of new leaves and jade and the first things that spring produced. She had paper — a sheet torn from a sketchbook that Soomin kept in the garden shed for exactly this purpose, because Soomin understood that artistic impulses arrived without warning and that the proper response was always available materials.
Bich drew. Not with instruction, not with reference, not with the specific, trained methodology that art schools taught and that Soomin had mastered at Seoul Arts High School and refined at SNU. Bich drew with the four-year-old’s methodology: hold the crayon, move the hand, see what appears.
What appeared was a firefly.
Not a realistic firefly — a Bich firefly. A green oval with two circles for eyes and a yellow scribble at the abdomen that was, in the four-year-old’s artistic framework, the glow. The wings were triangles. The antennae were straight lines. The overall composition was the specific, unpolished, entirely genuine product of a child who had seen fireflies in the garden every summer and who had decided, on this March morning, to put one on paper.
Soomin found the drawing at noon. Bich had left it at the tree’s base — propped against the trunk, beside the brass plaque, in the specific, offering-position that visitors used when they left things for the tree. The drawing was not an offering in the formal sense — Bich was four and didn’t understand the concept of offerings. But the placement was instinctive. The tree was where things went. The tree held things. The drawing was a thing. Therefore: the tree.
Soomin picked up the drawing. Looked at it. Looked at the tree. Looked at the specific, green-crayon firefly that her four-year-old daughter had produced without instruction and without precedent and without any of the accumulated, twenty-seven-year history of firefly art that Soomin had created.
And cried.
Not from sadness. From the specific, overwhelming recognition that the cycle was continuing. The firefly — Soomin’s firefly, the symbol she’d been drawing since she was four, the image that had become her art and her father’s metaphor and the family’s visual language for everything that mattered — had appeared in the next generation. Not through teaching. Through the specific, genetic, inexplicable transmission of artistic impulse that DNA performed when it felt like it and that produced, in a four-year-old sitting at the base of a thirty-three-year-old tree, the same image that another four-year-old had produced twenty-nine years earlier.
“She drew a firefly,” Soomin told Daniel that evening. They were on the bench — the thirty-three-year-old bench, the depressions deep and numerous, the surface holding the accumulated history of every important conversation in three decades. “Without being taught. Without seeing my drawings — I haven’t shown her my work yet, she’s too young for galleries. She drew a firefly because she saw fireflies in the garden and she decided to draw one.”
“Children draw what they see.”
“Children draw what they feel. The firefly wasn’t a copy of what she saw — it was an expression of what the seeing produced. The green. The glow. The specific, intermittent light that fireflies produce and that Bich, at four, found important enough to put on paper.” She held up the drawing. “Look at the glow. The yellow scribble at the abdomen. She used a different color for the glow — she chose yellow, not green. She understood, at four, that the glow is different from the body. That the light comes from a different source than the structure.”
“She’s four. She chose yellow because yellow was the next crayon in the box.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she chose yellow because yellow is the color of light and she understood, instinctively, that the firefly’s purpose is light and that the light deserves its own color.” Soomin looked at the drawing. “Appa, when I was four, I drew fireflies on a pandemic calendar. Green blobs with antennae. The drawings were terrible by any standard — artistic, technical, aesthetic. But they were honest. They were the honest expression of a four-year-old who believed that light was the answer to darkness.”
“And Bich’s drawing?”
“Bich’s drawing is the same thing. Different hands. Different generation. Same impulse. The impulse to make light visible.” She set the drawing on the bench between them. “The firefly cycle continues. I drew them. Bich draws them. And whoever comes after Bich will draw them too. Because the firefly is not a Cho family art project. It’s a Cho family gene.”
“Firefly drawing is not genetic.”
“Everything is genetic. The sitting is genetic — Namu inherited it from Haraboji without being taught. The cooking is genetic — I inherited Halmeoni’s hand for the pear without being taught. And the firefly is genetic — Bich inherited the impulse to draw light without being taught.” She paused. “The tree is the only thing in this family that wasn’t inherited. The tree was planted. Everything else was passed down.”
Wang Lei received the drawing via video call. He was in Shenzhen — the monthly dinner screen, propped on the table where his physical self had sat for sixteen years. He was seventy-eight. The tremor was part of him now — not a symptom but a feature, the specific, visible signature of a body that had lived honestly and that showed its living in its motion.
“She drew a firefly,” Wang Lei said, looking at the photograph that Soomin had sent through the screen. “At four. The same age you were when I gave you the gold ink.”
“The same age. The same impulse. Different hands.”
“The hands are always different. That’s the lesson of every craft I’ve ever practiced — calligraphy, tea, the specific art of surviving two lifetimes. The hands change. The impulse persists.” He looked at the drawing — the green oval, the yellow scribble, the four-year-old’s rendering of the thing that glowed. “I promised to give her gold ink at four. The promise stands.”
“You can’t fly to Seoul anymore.”
“I can ship gold ink. The gold ink doesn’t require my physical presence — it requires my intention. And my intention is the same whether I’m standing in your garden or sitting in my apartment in Nanshan.” He paused. “Soomin, the gold ink I’m sending is not the Suzhou ink. The Suzhou ink was the last production of a farm that no longer exists. I’ve sourced a new gold ink — from a manufacturer in Kyoto who produces gold pigment using techniques that are four hundred years old. The color is slightly different — warmer, more amber than gold. But the intention is the same.”
“A different gold.”
“A different gold from a different source for a different girl in a different generation. Everything is different. The impulse is the same.” He smiled — the real smile, the one that the gold firefly had unlocked years ago and that the tremor hadn’t diminished. “The circle continues, Soomin. You drew fireflies at four because the garden had fireflies. Bich draws fireflies at four because the garden still has fireflies. The garden is the constant. The fireflies are the constant. The girls who draw them are the variable. And the variable is always the most interesting part of the equation.”
“Auntie Soojin would approve of that metaphor.”
“Auntie Soojin would quantify that metaphor. There’s a difference.”
The gold ink arrived from Kyoto two weeks later. A small bottle — glass, sealed, the amber-gold pigment visible through the container like liquid sunlight. Wang Lei had included a note, written in his trembling calligraphy:
For Bich. Age four. The gold ink is for the fireflies. The fireflies are for the dark. The dark is where the light matters most.
Draw everything. Draw the tree and the bench and the garden and the people who sit in it. Draw what you see and what you feel and the difference between the two, which is where the art lives.
Your great-uncle started with perfect strokes and ended with shaking ones. The shaking ones were better. Because the shaking was honest. And honest, in calligraphy and in life, is the only kind of beautiful that survives.
Uncle Lei
Soomin read the note to Bich. Bich listened with the specific, total attention that four-year-olds deployed when something was being communicated by an adult who was not present but whose voice, through the reader’s translation, carried the weight of significance.
“Uncle Lei says to draw everything,” Bich said.
“Uncle Lei says to draw what you see and what you feel.”
“I see the tree. I feel the tree.” She looked at the jade tree — the thirty-three-year-old tree that had been her sitting companion since she was eleven months old and that she knew, with the four-year-old’s complete and unquestioning certainty, was the most important thing in the garden. “I’ll draw the tree. In gold. Because the tree glows.”
“The tree doesn’t glow.”
“The tree glows when the fireflies are in it. In summer. The fireflies sit in the branches and the tree glows. The tree’s glow is the fireflies’ glow. They share it.”
Soomin looked at her daughter. At the four-year-old who had just described, in three sentences, the relationship between the tree and the fireflies that Soomin had spent twenty-nine years painting and that the art critics had called “intimate naturalism” and that was, in Bich’s four-year-old framework, simply what the garden did in summer.
“Draw it,” Soomin said. “Draw the tree glowing.”
Bich opened the gold ink. Dipped her finger — not a brush, a finger, the four-year-old’s preferred instrument because fingers were more direct than brushes and directness was, at four, the highest value. She pressed her gold finger to the paper and drew.
The tree. In gold. The trunk a smear, the branches lines, the glow a scattered constellation of gold fingerprints in the canopy — each fingerprint a firefly, each firefly a light, the whole thing a four-year-old’s rendering of a thirty-three-year-old tree lit by the specific, biological luminescence that the garden produced every June.
The drawing was not art. It was not technically proficient or aesthetically sophisticated or any of the things that galleries required and critics assessed.
It was true.
The truest thing in the garden.
A tree that glowed. Made by a girl named Light. In gold ink sent by a man whose hands shook. At the base of a tree that held everything.
The cycle continued.
The firefly continued.
The light continued.