The pencil marks on my mind

Peeping through a door more than 30 years ago left an indelible mark that still holds many lessons

When I was 5 my mother took me to a painting class at a nearby "cultural palace" - a three-storey building made up of a ground-floor movie theater and many rooms open to children during the school holidays. There I received my first art message, not in my own class, but the one next-door.

Before that day came, I had done plenty of doodling on sheets of paper my mother brought home from school. (In the mid-1980s it was a minor luxury for an average wage-earning Chinese family to provide their child with an unlimited amount of good-quality painting paper.)