RED

"What’s with all these lipsticks? You’re weird."

As a kid, I thought my sister was some kind of a lipstick dealer. What little space she had in
her pocket-sized room was always filled with lip products. I remember standing before rows
of neatly arranged lipsticks, confused as to why you would need so many.

"I just bought crimson."

"This is rosewood, and that’s burgundy."
"I’m wearing scarlet today though."

So you like red. Got it.

Little me was proud of those "one-word descriptions." "My sister’s lipsticks are red." "Trees
are green." "My mom is strict." They made life simple, easy to understand.

Then came art.

Junior year of high school marked the first time I picked up the brush. Lesson one: Colors.
The task was to recreate the color of a tree in our school yard. Easy-peasy. "Trees are
green," and I already got a tube of green paint. Just one stroke of the brush and… wait, that
did not match the tree I was eyeing at all. I moved my hand again. The green darkened
slightly, though still far from what lied outside the window. Soon, minutes turned to hours as I
struggled with the somehow mysterious color until my confidence all but vanished into thin
air. At one point, frustrated, I tried to fill the canvas with white, wanting to erase the mess I’d
made. Yet when I did so, something strange happened: with an added layer of white, the
green changed, still different from what I wanted, but also nothing like what I started with. It
was a shade I’d never seen before. In that moment, it dawned on me how unimaginably
diverse colors were. Perhaps my sister was not a lunatic after all.

Since that day, I began to see new shades everywhere I looked. On the familiar path to
school, one I’d walked a hundred times before, I noticed leaves blushing red and orange with
the coming of autumn. I saw the azure sky shed its skin at dusk, shifting from navy blue to
deep dark blue, until only the engulfing darkness remained. There were such intricacies to
these scenes that a single word could never do justice, which made me wonder: what other
truths had I turned a blind eye to all this time?

“Look what happens when you go to bed late!” My mom’s incessant nagging at the way I fell
ill from staying up past midnight was maddening. How could she not understand that my
homework was not going to finish itself? But as she scolded me for the umpteenth time, I
decided to cease my resistance and meet her eyes instead. There, just beneath the intense
look on her face was something more worrisome - a concern, and behind that concern,
affection, so dazzling it stunned me. My mother was frowning not in anger, but for care for
my health. When it comes to the human souls, there exists neither complete black nor pure
white.

Knowledge, as it turns out, is much the same. “Feminism has lost its way.” “Feminism is no
longer about equality.” Such conclusive “facts” were at first my go-to source of information
while researching for a school assignment. Yet as the memory of hours spent adding layers
to my paintings resurfaced, so did a newfound desire to understand more about women’s
rights. I threw myself into books and articles, learning how historical contexts of nations
shaped the movement, how it varied from East to West, from third world countries to global
superpowers. Indeed, there was never any clear “right” or “wrong.”
In this world that is as infinite as the color wheel, the depth of my vision is the depth through
which I see the nuances of everything. Here and now, endless possibilities excite me, calling
me to gaze at the abyss inside my surroundings and fill my being with thousands more
colors (red lipsticks included!)