The Many Ivans

Weiqing Yuan asks his students to call him Wei. He’s a large man who shows his teeth and tilts his head back when he laughs, which he does often, especially after telling a sad story. When I took his watercolor class at the National Academy, he gave no assignments. There was no model. He simply sat beside each student and asked us what we wanted to paint.

I didn’t know what I wanted to paint, just that I hoped to bury my anxiety under phthalo blue and cadmium red. Wei perched on the plastic stool beside me and asked about my life. I’d just moved back to New York and was living in my grandmother’s apartment. I stared into the jam jar I’d filled with water and told Wei that I’d written a novel about a Japanese would-be artist in 1970s New York. I was waiting to hear back from agents.

From then on, and probably to encourage me,