ABSTRACT
C hildlike though artists, especially unmarried artists, tendto be, actual children were scarce in Artists’ SoHo, at least at the beginning, as most couples weren’t married and those that were legally hitched were too devoted to their careers or too poor to think about having kids. There were no children residing in my building until the 1990s, though one of my partners had children who lived with their father. Lacking children to befriend other children, I got to know artists’ kids through their parents. Among the first remembered by me were the tall twin sons of the technological artist Wen-Ying Tsai mentioned before-Lun-Yi and Ming-Yi. At a Christmastime party in the late 1980s one or the other asked my advice about writing his application to college, I guess on the grounds that a professional writer had superior intelligence about this particular subliterary form. (I assured them that I didn’t.) In their respect for the imaginary competences of arts professionals the Tsai twins were very much products of the Artists’ SoHo hothouse.
