ABSTRACT
When she started school, Maxine Hong Kingston did not speak to her teachers—but she did paint. She made houses and flowers in the sunlight, and then she covered them all with black paint. Her teachers saved her paintings, one black curling paper after another; they worried over them and then called her parents. The adults did not know that, for Maxine, those paintings were not signs of sadness or doom but of joyful possibilities. At home, she spread her pictures out and “pretended the [black stage] curtains were swinging open … sunlight underneath, mighty operas” (Kingston, 1975, p. 192).
