Children from the Stars

Every character in the painting has a shadow. But the shadows never seem to belong to the people casting them. They stretch in directions the characters have never faced and take on fantastical shapes that don't belong to the owners. A stick-figure superhero’s shadow curls into the shape of a dog. A robot’s shadow shines like stars. The characters and their shadows occupy the same world, yet they seem to live by entirely different rules. 

This piece of artwork came from an eight-year-old kid. Compared to eight-year-old me, he enjoyed being quiet. Walking into the community center every Saturday, I saw him sitting in the front right corner of the classroom by the round blue table. He always had his head bowed, eyes fixed on nothing but the tip of his pen, sweeping across the page in certain strokes as a new world took shape beneath it. 

Across the room, the Paw Patrol theme song blared from the TV, while a crowd of kids sat cross-legged and wide-eyed in front of it. Nearby, a debate about the best cartoon character erupted into shouting, voices rising over one another. 

None of it reached him. He didn’t glance up, didn't flinch, and didn't even seem to hear it. The noise crashed against him like waves against a rock, and he just kept drawing.

I pulled a little plastic chair over and sat down beside him, low enough that my knees bumped the edge of the table.

“That’s a lot of shadows,” I said quietly. “Can I see?” He didn’t answer, but he slid the paper an inch toward me. I took that as a yes.

Huh. 

“Is your superhero’s shadow his sidekick puppy?”

He looked at me for a few long seconds, saying nothing.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.” I pointed at the robot’s shadow, “I like these stars though.” He was quiet for a moment longer. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and held it up to me. Displayed on his lockscreen was a picture of him sleeping on the sofa, with his arms wrapped around his dog.

Later, his parents told me about Oreo—the golden retriever in the photo—who was his best friend growing up. The child didn’t like speaking or interacting with strangers, sometimes even his parents. But with Oreo, he was different. He would go outside just to throw a frisbee for him, again and again, until they were both worn out. Whenever older kids picked on him at the park, Oreo would step between them. When Oreo got hurt, the boy who barely spoke to anyone cried all the way to the vet, then tried the hardest to explain what was wrong.

In his world, that little puppy was his superhero. 

In Chinese, we call children like him ‘来自星星的孩子’, which translates into ‘children from the stars’. I never understood the saying until I sat beside him at that blue table. Just like the stars, he seemed far away from everyone else. But being distant didn't mean he wasn’t watching. He noticed things, felt things, and put them on paper in a way that was entirely his own, untouched by what anyone told him. I looked at the tree I had drawn for everyone to copy: a brown trunk, a green cloud of leaves, the same tree I had drawn at his age. I was so proud of how neatly the other kids followed it. But neat was all it was. In comparison, his drawing, though messier and stranger, was something no one could have given him. Instead of making the shadow look the same as the external figure of the master, he made it represent its owner's nature—a superhero wasn’t Spiderman or Captain America, but a golden retriever who followed him everywhere and stood up for him when he couldn’t himself.

By most of the measures for intelligence, he would not do well. He rarely spoke, he didn’t follow instructions, and if I had handed him a worksheet that day, it might have come back blank. For a long time, I understood intelligence as answering quickly and following the method. The tree on my whiteboard was built on that idea. 

Still, his drawing made me question it. His ability to hold his focus for hours, his deep understanding of loyalty, and his creativity to turn a dog into a superhero, made him shine, just like the stars in a dark night. Thanks to the distance between the stars up in the sky and other people on the earth, his understanding of things around him was independent  from what others were saying. Rather, he had his own system in processing and perceiving information that was rooted completely in his personal experience and insights. 

Weeks later, I still thought about the robot. Though he never told me what it meant, I think I already knew. Robots don’t talk much. They don’t cry or laugh where people can see. Most people look at it and assume there is nothing inside. 

His robot’s shadow was full of stars.

Maybe that’s what ‘children from the stars’ really means. These children carry the stars quietly with them in places most of us never think to look.