From the time I was a little girl I have always been fascinated with eyes. I was mesmerized by the different colors of irises and fascinated with how eyelashes grew. I sort of think it’s a shame that I did not hold a fascination with my own eyes, because I inherited my maternal grandmother’s large, almond shaped eyes, complete with very dark brown irises and an epicanthic fold which serves as a small clue that I am of Japanese descent.

By the time I was three years old, I began drawing constantly and would lose all sense of time as I allowed my imagination and my more skilled left hand to create image after image on paper. My mother always encouraged me to express myself, and I never felt like I had to put a rein on my creativity. One day when I was four years old I was in my room and my mother was in the kitchen. She realized that I was very quiet and figured I had to be up to some mischief, so she crept quietly into my room. She found me sitting cross-legged in front of the wall in the far corner of the room, drawing a human eye on it. What she found more disconcerting was the fact that I had been working on my little masterpiece for a while and had managed to cover a poster-sized expanse of white wall with an assortment of eyes, some complete with eyelashes, pupils, and irises. Needless to say she was not pleased and I was punished for my creative foray into wall murals!