Letters to my father
I had planned to study abroad for at least eight years, and I could only take two bags.
I wondered how I could pack more, so I kept trying this and that, here and there. I bought a compression pack, and as I filled my bag, folding and folding again, my sister teased me about my anxiety, saying, “Are you trying to take the whole house with you?”
That day, my dad, who had been quietly watching me, gently handed me a watercolor palette.
He said, “Even when you go to America, keep drawing.”
My dad likes that I draw.
My dad, who is an engineering designer, may have felt a kind of kinship with me through my drawing.
When I suddenly decided to change my major to design in my third year of high school, he was the first to support me, and he was always the one who stood in front of my artwork, taking pictures of each piece at every exhibition I joined.
Thinking back, I used to place my report card in front of the TV, almost like I was showing off. But my dad never really looked at it. Instead, he would study my little doodles with quiet interest, as though I were a curious child exploring the world.
And again, when I was suddenly leaving for a faraway place to study psychoanalysis, the last thing he told me to do—somewhat unexpectedly—was to keep drawing. When I asked him, “What about my major?”, he replied calmly, “Don’t try to force yourself to study hard. Just let it flow naturally.” I remember thinking, “What good is that advice when I already have so much to carry?”—but his words lingered. Eventually, on the morning of my departure, I quickly packed my palette and the No. 8 brush I often used into my bag.
Is that why?
Ironically, it was during my time studying psychoanalysis—after I had put down my painting and left the country to study—that I became closer to painting again. After long days, when I was overwhelmed by emotions I couldn’t express in words, I would quietly open a blank piece of paper.
My rule was simple: I would draw a circle on the paper with a pencil, and I would keep drawing until my hand stopped within it—until I felt “complete.” This was not as easy as it sounds. Inevitably, I would feel a kind of loneliness in front of the blank sheet. The more infinite the freedom, the deeper the loneliness. Whether I drew or stopped, whether the shape became something or not—it was all up to me.
I often felt lost. I often wanted to give up. A single stroke already drawn starts to whisper that the drawing is ruined, gently urging me to turn the page. But still, I pushed on in silence until I felt I had completed that day.
And then I would quietly look at the shape I had created. It is difficult to lie in words, but drawings are more transparent. The colors of that day, the rhythm of my hand, the shapes drawn in circular lines—they reflect me like a self-portrait.
The drawings I made like personal doodles at the end of the day, and everything I still scribble even now, are perhaps all small greetings to my dad.
Dad wants his second daughter to be a little more free—because he couldn’t be, when he was my age. And maybe these drawings are quietly saying:
“Dad, this is what I was like today. I made it through the day.”
It feels like a whispered reply to my father.