Aunt Fong Speaks: The Hamster in the Wheel

I drew this picture for Aunt Fong years ago and she asked me to post her reflection on it.

Aunt Fong (translated by a friend and revised by me): One of my friends drew this picture. It has puzzled me for a few years.

Whenever I saw this hamster I would feel pity for it. The hamster is always desperately running on the wheel and cannot stop. Its eyes stare longingly at the dripping water droplets. This picture became lodged in my mind. I couldn’t understand why my friend drew this kind of picture and why he drew the water tank at this location. I couldn’t understand why the hamster’s eyes looked so desperate; why could it not be satisfied?

I finally asked the maker of the drawing: why?

The maker laughed and casually said, “The wheel is just a toy. If the hamster is thirsty, it can stop at any time to drink.”

I suddenly understood: it was self-contained. He had locked himself in an imaginary cage.

[Me again]: Of course, I am “the friend” and “maker of the drawing.” Aunt Fong had piles of these blank sheets of paper with only a black circle printed on them. She encouraged or pestered her students and friends to use pastels to draw pictures or abstract color combinations in the circle as some form of therapy. After doing this once or twice to indulge my aunt, I found each drawing request thereafter to be very tedious. So, one time, instead of making a color splash, I turned the black circle into a rodent’s running wheel and drew a hamster inside.

When I showed it to her, Aunt Fong seemed very troubled. Even though she says she couldn’t understand why the hamster was trapped in the cage(she called it a mouse until I persuaded her after dozens of reminders that it was a hamster), cruelly kept from the water, I remember trying to tell her plainly many times that it was a common running wheel and there was nothing to worry about. I suppose the sad look in my quickly drawn hamster’s eye lent itself to a tragic interpretation, and honestly, when I drew it I think I was transferring my own detached sarcasm and grief over my situation in life, in China, onto the page in one forgotten, frustrated sketch. Well, I thought it would have been forgotten. Aunt Fong has remembered it ever after.