VeeStudio89/Getty Images
There's a moment when you receive a compliment, and you shrug it off immediately as though an insect had just landed on your shoulder. That happened to me when I was sitting on the floor of my fourth-grade classroom, painting a poster for a school project.
The poster-maker job fell into my lap after I lost a game of "Not it." Truthfully, I was happy to sit quietly and draw instead of fussing with my classmates about how to do our book report.
When my teacher came over to check on our progress, she leaned in and told me how much she liked my painting. I felt a mix of embarrassment and disbelief at being singled out for such praise.
I was even more surprised when Miss J, as we called her, showed up at school one day with a large shopping bag. Inside were paint brushes, watercolor paints, and two sheets of paper rolled up and held together with an elastic.
She said she wanted me to paint her something and that the second canvas was meant for my mom so I could make her a Christmas present.
A blank canvas can be anything you want. It's a scary thought for someone like me who overthinks everything, but that's precisely what Miss J wanted me to do: paint anything of my choice.
At 9 years old, I had dozens of paintings under my belt, but never this size and not on paper that didn't buckle and warp as soon as you touched it with a wet paintbrush. The paints seemed too nice and new to use on something other than a school project.
I thought of the books my mom would read to me and decided to paint something from "Winnie the Pooh." I chose the original version of the character for my teacher and the Disney version for my mom since she had a certain fondness for the Pooh Bear look, as you can tell from baby photos of me wearing a top with no bottoms.
Courtesy of the author
I had a VHS tape of a Winnie the Pooh movie and set out to recreate the cover for my mom's painting. I sketched the design in pencil first.
Then, I began the daunting task of trying to fill this oversized canvas using my once pristine tubes of paint, now squished and dented.
When you're from a different cultural background, sometimes people overlook what you have in common. For example, a colleague asked me what my family does this time of year despite encouraging everyone else to share their Christmas plans. Remarks like these single you out, and not in the caring way of a teacher who pays you a genuine compliment.
As one of a few kids in my fourth-grade class from an immigrant family and a single-parent household, everywhere I looked, there was someone whose life looked different from mine. But instead of assuming I didn't celebrate Christmas, which I did, my teacher just wanted me to feel included.
Her generous gift showed me I had a talent worth buying and actually using quality art supplies. She even had my painting professionally framed like my mom did.
I saw it once when we drove by her house in the sixth grade. It was, just as she said, right in the middle of her living room, surrounded by custom matting.
The teacher I saw every day, who introduced me to Maya Angelou and Jane Goodall, took a leave of absence when she found out she was having a baby. I moved on, too, starting high school a year early.
As an undergraduate student, I bumped into Miss J one evening. She was sitting in her car like she was waiting for someone, and I felt hesitant to approach her.
Maybe she wouldn't recognize me until she pointed at me and smiled. Her son came out of a nearby building, and she pointed at me a second time and told him, "That's the girl who painted the Winnie the Pooh picture in your room."
In grade six, I gave her a second painting as a baby gift. Thirty years later, I can't remember exactly what these paintings look like.
I just know that I wanted to capture the feeling of playing in the Hundred Acre Wood, the fictional place where Pooh Bear and his friends would gather.
My teacher's gift reminds me of something we all want: someone to acknowledge and remember us. I'll never forget her.
