Hoa Lục Bình - Water Hyacinth

A painting for my cousin, and a childhood I carry with me

I lost my cousin not long ago, after a long battle with cancer.

This painting is for her.

Growing up in the city, I didn't know countryside life. But every summer my parents sent me to stay with my cousins in their rural home — a world completely different from everything I knew. Their house sat beside a quiet pond filled with floating water hyacinths. Bamboo grew along the edges. Dragonflies moved above the water in flashes of color.

And there was a guava tree.

Pink-fleshed guavas, the sweetest kind. We climbed that tree, ate the fruit straight from the branches, played around it for hours in the summer heat. The kind of childhood memory that lives in your body, not just your mind — the rough bark under your hands, the smell of ripe guava, the sound of cousins laughing.

Hoa lục bình — water hyacinth — is what we called those floating flowers on the pond. I painted them the way I remembered them: framed like something precious, bordered like something worth keeping. And I painted the guava too. Because she was there. Because we were all there together, in that simple, irreplaceable summer world.

Sometimes a painting isn't about art at all. It's about holding onto someone. About saying — I remember. I remember the pond, the dragonflies, the bamboo, the pink guavas, and you beside me in that summer light.

This one is hers.

This painting became July in my botanical calendar. Summer felt like the only right place for it.