The Girl in the Snow Globe*

My mum likes telling the story about the picture I drew that made it into the school calendar when I was five years old. “Anna drew Miss April,” my mum would say, looking at me coyly and chuckling. Her friends would laugh too, and I never understood the joke until I found that stack of old Playboy magazines under grandpa’s bed when we were clearing out his house a few years ago. There she was, Miss April 1966, from Billings, Montana, red-lipsticked and high-heeled, wearing a cowboy hat, a belted holster and not much else. Her exposed breasts, tipped with sequinned red stars, were so overwhelming to my tween eyes that I couldn’t look away.

By comparison, my Miss April was far more demure, far lovelier. To be honest, I don’t remember drawing the calendar picture, but I do vividly remember how much I loved my Crayola markers when I was small; how they fit perfectly into my little hands, just so, and how my little hands felt strong and powerful when I was armed with my markers. Like an ice skater, my pens would skim effortlessly over the surface of all manner of paper; construction, lined, scrap, luminous white. On weekends, mum would spread a sheet of white cardboard on the floor or over the entire top of our dining room table, an open invitation that both thrilled and terrified me. However, I’d forget my fear the moment I started drawing: dogs, birds, castles, flowers, cityscapes. And lots and lots of happy, dancing girls.

I’d started with stubby crayons like any other preschooler, but mum says I soon tired of their imprecision and uneven rendering. I then latched on, like a thirsty newborn, to colouring pencils, finally graduating to indelible marker pens with their bold, dizzying and spectacular hues by the time I was in kindergarten. I’d evolved a fairly distinctive style of drawing by then as well, particularly in the hair department. My girls sported bouffant hairstyles that I depicted with long, curling flourishes, the particularly fine example in my calendar picture belonging to a fairy princess in a snow globe.

My mum finds it ironic that the school I eventually got into (and have been attending for more than a decade now) originally turned me down at the nursery interview stage (yes, kids are interviewed for school spots quite early here in Hong Kong). Their reasons? “She didn’t say anything.” “We gave her some painting materials, but she wasn’t interested.” If the teachers had asked, I would’ve told them that I didn’t like making art with paints and brushes (I still don’t). Perhaps they would’ve provided me with some marker pens and paper instead and my Miss April would’ve made her appearance a year earlier and I’d have knocked the ball out of the nursery admissions park. But no matter. My fairy princess in her snow globe is forever immortalised in a now outdated calendar, as is my mum’s cringey joke that accompanies it, and every time I hold a marker pen in my hand, it feels like I’m wielding a wand, and the magic that emerges from it is positively limitless.

* Parts of this piece are fictional, in particular the bit about the Playboy magazines. The only magazines grandpa read were about engineering and golf.