Leaving China by James McMullan

Author:James McMullan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2014-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

The Russian Artist

I HAD NEVER EXHIBITED ANY OF MY FATHER’S MUSICALITY, but it turned out that I had a good ear for spoken accents. I also had an accommodating personality and was able quickly to adjust my speaking voice so that it mirrored the voices I heard around me. After only a few months with the Wilsons I had lost most of my crisp English speech and had taken on more of the flat vowels of the Canadian dialect. This new semi-Canadianness in the way I sounded made it much easier this time around for me to fit in with the other students in the school. I also discovered that telling my schoolmates stories of my past in China, embellished with details about warlords and pirates, kept a certain amount of bullying at bay.

The trips home after school were another adventure. The school bus took Alan, two neighbor children and me to a bus stop three miles from the Wilsons’ house and, unless it was raining or very cold and Ella used precious rationed gas to pick us up in her car, we walked the rest of the way home. The four of us dawdled and teased and joked our way up the hills and along the farm fields, counting deer and always looking out for the dangerous cougar that never appeared. The only house we passed was a small modern bungalow set in a valley next to the steep road we climbed. We had heard that the man who owned it was a Russian aristocrat and an artist. We always hoped to see him outside his house exhibiting some weird behavior worthy of someone who had fled from Russia, possibly under dark circumstances. And then, one sunny afternoon, there he was, standing at an easel on his patio, painting a landscape. The others were disappointed that he seemed so normal and matter of fact in the way he calmly put one stroke after another on the canvas; I was fascinated with my first view of an artist at work. My companions quickly decided to move on, but I hung back for a little while to watch this simple process that seemed strangely magical.

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