The Prodigy's Cousin (24 page)

At first, his parents thought it was just a phase. Ping Lian, who had a round face, dark eyes, and a sweet smile, was handsome. His gross motor skills were good. Other parents reassured them that boys just developed differently than girls did. They were more active; they spoke later.

But when, at nearly four years old, Ping Lian still spoke only a few words, his parents had him evaluated by a speech therapist. During his appointment, Ping Lian kicked the door and threw things. He was restless and rarely made eye contact. He imitated some speech sounds and occasionally pointed, but his communication was limited; the evaluator estimated that he could say only about sixty words, mostly single words and stock phrases like “I don't want.”

The somewhat cryptic wording of his final report characterized his condition as follows: “
Ping Lian presents with moderate to severe speech-language delay characterized by deficits in receptive and expressive language skills and reduced pragmatic (social interaction) skills. In addition he presented with attention deficit and hyperactive traits. Ping Lian's ability to comply was negligible at this time.” Sarah and Min Seng took him for an evaluation at a hospital where they were told that Ping Lian had ADHD with autistic features.

Sarah, a petite woman with black, curly, shoulder-length hair and a happy, bustling energy, was relieved. She focused on the hyperactive aspect of the diagnosis, and that seemed like a common enough problem. Sarah and Min Seng signed Ping Lian up for the recommended speech and occupational therapy. They waited for him to get better.

About a year later, Ping Lian's speech therapist chastised Sarah for her lackadaisical attitude: You can't take this so lightly, the therapist
told her. You need to do more for your son. Sarah and Min Seng bought a computer with an Internet connection so they could learn more about Ping Lian's condition. The more they read, the more it became obvious that Ping Lian wasn't just hyperactive; he was autistic. They were shocked and distraught. “Devastated,” as Sarah put it. They thought about Ping Lian's future, and what they envisioned crushed them.

Sarah and Min Seng set out to learn everything they could about autism. They read about it online, attended seminars, joined parent support groups, and pooled their money with other families to buy autism books from overseas. They read somewhere that autists don't understand love and affection (the same idea that had led Lucie to kick one of Alex's behavioral therapists out of the house), and the thought was crushing. “
I tell myself, if he can't talk, it is not a big problem, but if he has no feelings of love, that is a big problem,” Sarah recalled. Sarah and Min Seng focused on Ping Lian's emotional development. They let him sleep between them and stroked him soothingly. They played him stimulating music, and, even when he was sleeping, they whispered that they loved him—anything to try to break through to him.

Ping Lian continued his speech and language intervention and occupational therapy. He left his Montessori school for a combination of homeschooling and classes at a special education center. His parents wanted him to begin behavioral therapy, but they couldn't afford a professional therapist. Instead, Sarah hired and trained a student to come to her house a few hours a day and help with Ping Lian's behavioral therapy.

Sarah pitched in at night and on the weekends. Ping Lian's fine motor skills were underdeveloped, and he still couldn't hold a pencil properly or use scissors, so she held his hand and guided him through the motion of tracing letters and numbers, pictures and shapes. It was hard for Ping Lian to complete even simple tasks, such as standing up or sitting down, but he managed to sit still for tracing. It was a small victory, but it felt like a milestone; it “at least let us feel good that we
can get him to sit down and do something,” Sarah recalled. Sarah spent months positioning and guiding Ping Lian's hand as he held the pencil. Eventually, Ping Lian could trace on his own. He seemed to enjoy it; some days he traced more than ten pages' worth of material.

When Ping Lian was eight, he went to get ice cream with his father. When he returned, he rushed into the house and ran upstairs. Sarah followed and found Ping Lian sitting at his table, studying his ice cream wrapper, carefully reproducing the pictures on it, “
totally focused and full of energy.” It didn't hit her until later: Ping Lian wasn't just tracing; he was
drawing
.

From that point on, he drew constantly. He did it independently, without any coaxing. During therapy, he drew “
anywhere and everywhere,” on whatever he was working on or whatever paper he had around: his books, his exercises, even his schedule. “
He seemed almost obsessed with drawing,” Sarah recalled in a book she is writing about raising Ping Lian.

That Christmas, the family spent some time at Sarah's sister's house with their relatives. Sarah watched as over the course of several days the rest of the cousins played, and her nine-year-old son drew—constantly. She had long feared for Ping Lian's future. What kind of career could he have? How would he spend his days? Sarah had toyed with a few possibilities: maybe Ping Lian could work at a dim sum shop or café or maybe as a cleaner or a gardener—jobs that would give him some measure of independence but where he wouldn't have to talk much. But Sarah began to wonder, could he be an artist?

She signed him up for art classes with three different teachers. None of the three had any expertise in working with autistic children. Sarah gave them articles on autism and told them that she was planning a career in art for Ping Lian. The art teachers were nervous. It's extremely difficult to make a living as an artist, they cautioned. Sarah told them that she was prepared to wait. She would give Ping Lian plenty of time to develop into a professional artist.

Ping Lian's output climbed at an almost frenetic pace. He sketched
his family and movie characters; he painted animals and landmarks. There was a roughness to his early drawings, a rudimentary feel, but some of the details—the folds in Ronald McDonald's pants, the angle of Woody's body as he leans against Buzz Lightyear—hint at an observant eye and growing precision.

Sarah focused on convincing Ping Lian that he had talent, “brainwashing him,” as she puts it. Every day, she told him that he was an artist. At the end of the year, Ping Lian's work was included in a group art exhibition,
Different Strokes—Diversity Through Art,
at Malaysia's National Art Gallery. For the first time, Ping Lian, then ten years old, was publicly presented as an artist.

Two months later, Min Seng died of a heart attack.

Ping Lian thought the funeral was a party. He enjoyed the food; he enjoyed the people. He didn't understand what death
meant
. Sarah had to find a way to explain to him that his father wasn't coming back.Once he grasped the finality of what had happened, Ping Lian worked through his emotions by drawing pictures.

Sarah left her job to spend more time with Ping Lian, and he delved further into his artwork. He still had a short attention span for most activities, but he spent hours at a time drawing and painting, often humming while he created. His productivity was stunning; the house was soon brimming with his art. He worked quickly and with intense focus, appearing, as one reporter put it, “
deep in the eye of his own creative hurricane.”

Ping Lian still sketched and painted a wide variety of subjects—horses and family and flowers—but he began focusing more heavily on buildings and landmarks. He painted the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station and the Petronas Twin Towers, a pair of Kuala Lumpur skyscrapers; he painted a series of academic buildings, including the University of Malaya schools of dentistry and economics.

The drawings have an abstract quality: Buildings lean at haphazard
angles. Trees are partially individual entities, partially enmeshed in the landscape. Color darts through the sky, the buildings, and the scenery in a way that makes even inanimate objects seem lively and joyful; just like Ping Lian, they hum with activity.

He exhibited his art often. By the time a year or so had passed since Ping Lian's first exhibition, he had already sold many original works and prints.
One of his pieces,
Ubudiah Mosque I,
a colorful depiction of a crisp, white-and-gold Malaysian mosque, raised north of $25,000 at a charity fund-raiser.

There was some pushback from Ping Lian's teachers over the amount of time he devoted to art. They worried that he was focusing too heavily on painting and drawing at the expense of other skills.

Sarah never saw it that way. From her perspective, the opposite seemed true: helping Ping Lian develop as an artist didn't impair his development; it
contributed
to it. By working with multiple teachers, Ping Lian was interacting with more people; the more he practiced socializing, the better he got at it. His frustration and hyperactivity decreased.

Plus, drawing made him so
happy
. Sarah could see it in his actions; she could see it in his art—the forms he drew, the buoyant colors he chose. In a series of paintings titled “Happy Fishes,” the vibrant orange-and-gold fish almost seem to be smiling. Even if it didn't pan out as a career, art was still a great hobby.

Instead of encouraging Ping Lian to back off his artwork, Sarah tried to expand his audience. She sent a box of Ping Lian's prints to Laurence Becker (the same educator turned agent who worked with Richard Wawro), hoping to arrange a U.S. exhibition. Laurence and Rosa C. Martinez, a woman who later founded Strokes of Genius, a nonprofit organization that develops and promotes autists' artistic skills, set up an exhibition in Brooklyn, and Ping Lian and his mother traveled to New York.

On the drive to Brooklyn from the airport, Ping Lian hit the windows; the sound of the air conditioner seemed to trouble him. At the
exhibition, he reveled in the attention he received. Even in a foreign country, even surrounded by strangers, he felt a strong call to create. “Here we are in the gallery, and it didn't faze him,” Rosa recalled. “He would walk right through the crowds like they weren't there, throw his pad on the floor, lie down, and start drawing—anywhere.”

When Ping Lian was twelve, the family moved to Sydney. Ping Lian was captivated by the city's architecture. He did a series of intricate drawings and paintings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House; his subjects later expanded to the animals at the zoo and the creatures at the aquarium, and he filled his pictures with fish, koala bears, and kangaroos.

Sarah introduced Ping Lian to an art market in Sydney Harbour where she and Ping Lian began making weekly appearances. They hung prints of Ping Lian's vibrant pictures in a white tent and propped them up on a table in front of the booth.

Trips to the market were partly a commercial exercise, but, more important to Sarah, they were also an extension of Ping Lian's therapy. Sarah and Ping Lian observed the bustle of the market and practiced interacting with other people. Sarah worked with Ping Lian on relevant tasks: packing his materials, loading the car, and, eventually, teaching him how to set up the stall. They practiced counting money and serving customers.

Ping Lian's reputation flourished. He was a featured artist at a pop-up art exhibition in Sydney. Two groups sponsored a permanent showcase of his work at the Art Commune in Malaysia; for several years, Ping Lian's art hung in a curved white hallway until his permanent showcase was moved to a hotel in Malaysia. In the United States, his artwork was featured in exhibitions at Carnegie Hall, 100 United Nations Plaza, and New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal. He participated in an exhibit in Tokyo and another in Singapore. His cityscapes (“
imposing in their intricacy”), animal portraits (“
vivid splashes of color”), and style (“
bold strokes and cheerful colours”) were celebrated in newspapers, magazines, books, and documentaries.

During a television interview, Sarah asked Ping Lian what he wanted to be when he grew up. Ping Lian, then an expressive seventeen-year-old, raised his hand above his head and smiled. “
Great artist.”