Rothko Chapel

Trigger Warning: suicide

When I close my eyes, I see the sun. I see it roaming through the blue sky. I see it drifting behind cumulus clouds. I see it rising. I see it setting. Ever since I was born, I’ve seen the sun. I think it has to do with my epilepsy. I had my first fit when I was six, in the hospital waiting room. My little brother was being born. My father thought I was throwing a tantrum. I wasn’t. He rushed me to a room to see a doctor, and he ended up missing my brother’s birth. I always thought he would have been mad at me for that, but he never talks about it. Our family doesn’t talk much about the past. Wasn’t that why my parents came to America? Because they wanted to look to the future?

I suppose they must have retained something of the past, since they gave us Chinese names. They named me Chenglong, after their favorite actor, Jackie Chan. And they named my little brother Xinsheng, new life. I didn’t like my name. When I was old enough to go to school, I immediately found that it was an oddity. By second grade, I had changed my name to John, much to the surprise of my parents when they had to have a lengthy discussion with the teacher on what their son’s name was. My brother liked his name.

He liked baseball too, and all that was American. When he was a little kid—I guess he never stopped being a little kid—he was a star on his baseball team. I tried to get into it too. I told myself every year that I would play baseball with my little brother and stick with it for at least a whole month, but every time, I would give up on the first day. I was an artist, not an athlete. My dreams were to design and paint my own Rothko Chapel. I couldn’t handle baseball on top of that. So I postponed it until the next year, and then the next. And now, there isn’t a next year for me to play baseball with him anymore.

I never very much liked America. What had I to do with it, besides being born there? Isn’t that just a matter of luck? Of course, I never very much liked China either. I only ever went there once, and I got queasy on the plane ride and dizzy in the cities. Everything was foreign. But I always felt too that America could never really be my home. So I was stuck.

But back to my brother: he’s the important one here. I couldn’t bear to write a eulogy for him, or a memorial, so this will have to be neither. Only a reminder that he’s dead, and nothing I know of can bring him back to life. Eight months ago, in my freshman year of college, I came back home during my spring break only for my parents to tell me that he had passed away. He had passed away two weeks earlier actually, but my parents wanted to wait until I was safe at home before the news reached me. My little brother, barely thirteen, had jumped off a bridge, and the police after days of searching had found his lifeless body adrift in the river. My father gave me a little bit of time to digest this news and then added on: “Don’t take your own life. Everyone will be upset. It’s no good.” At the time, hearing that comment felt like I had been pitched a curveball. But the more I distance myself from it all, the more true it seems to me.

I found out later that my father didn’t take any days off from work. He couldn’t. My mother took a few days off, “to think about it all” alone in her bedroom—“What she was thinking about,” said my father, “who knew?” But eventually, she too went back to work. It’s a strange feeling, normalcy. All of us were changed; that’s all I can say. How we were changed, I can’t tell. There was a smothering air hovering over everything. We had to move on, but it was impossible. It was impossible in the little details. Assorted clips from TV shows he watched. Things he touched. Foods he liked to eat. Worst of all was looking at his old room.

I still think about it all. That’s why I’m writing, of course. A week after I got the news, it seemed like the feelings would never pass. But then a month after, they began to fade away. Two months after, they faded further. And now it’s eight months after. It seems like it should’ve been over by now. It should’ve all faded away. But all I feel are violent pangs whenever it all resurfaces.

Maybe that’s why I took a walk early in the morning yesterday, the day after Thanksgiving, the day after I came home from college once again. Maybe underlying all the superficial reasons, there was a deeper thought that tied them all together. Superficially, I was thinking about my Rothko Chapel. I was looking for inspiration. I was looking for beauty and the divine. I wanted to see the sun rising, spreading its beautiful colors across the distant horizon. I wanted to walk through the peaceful silence and see the rabbits and foxes waking up. I wanted to feel the chilly morning air against my skin. So I went walking, long enough to get lost, or at least as lost as you could get in the little suburb that my family’s house was in. I let my inner sense of the sublime guide me. That must have been why I came to the bridge, the bridge where my little brother had his last thoughts. It wasn’t a good place to view the sunrise. There were trees in the way, and I had to keep walking if I wanted to see what I had set out to see. But I couldn’t bear to go on without stopping at the bridge.

I stood there, looking down at the water below, and I thought about what my brother must have been thinking. What had driven him to jump? Every time I pictured him in my head, he was either laughing or giving a ridiculous grin. What had I missed? Was it something at school? Was it family matters? Was it me? I closed my eyes and concentrated, but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t see the sun. I saw a dreadful thunderstorm, and going through my mind were racing thoughts, throbbing, escalating, uncontrollable. I saw the violent flashes of blinding lightning and the cruel crashes of swung thunder. I saw raindrops curving through the air like baseballs from the hand of a professional pitcher, making brutal thuds on impact. And I saw no more Rothko Chapel.

I closed my eyes harder and concentrated, gazed deep into the storm, and looked for what must have been an eternity. And then all of a sudden, the sun started to peek through a hole in the clouds. And then it carved a bigger hole, and a bigger one, until the storm clouds disappeared one by one, conquered by the sun. The lightning flailed until it was finally defeated, and the rain was bested in a mighty war. Soon, the sun covered the whole sky and turned it a boyish blue, and I could see Rothko Chapel again, lying unassumingly on the horizon just ahead.

The Rothko Chapel is both a place to pray and a piece of art. There are fourteen Rothko paintings in the Rothko Chapel. They are simple paintings, so simple that upon entering, a visitor unfamiliar with them might ask where the paintings were. They are painted in dark hues, with a washed and flowing texture, constantly changing, morphing, metamorphosing, and yet they have the presence of eternity. The architecture of the chapel itself is art as well, with its minimal and rather unique design. I’ve never gone there. I’ve only read about and heard of the holy atmosphere inside, the beautiful sculpture and reflecting pool outside, the potential for deep meditation, the miracles of the lighting, . . . Morton Feldman was inspired by it all too and wrote a beautiful piece of music for it. It takes one’s mind somewhere else, transports it to another world.

And I saw the Rothko Chapel in the distance while I had my eyes closed at the bridge. I heard Morton Feldman’s music playing, and I saw the sun shining in an assertive, bright sky, and I remembered with a grin, my little brother’s grin—the sunrise! Hadn’t I gone out to see it? Had it already happened while I was fighting the storm in my mind? I opened my eyes, and—lo! The morning star had already risen, and it was high in the sky.

Artwork: "Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right" by Fran Kenney