Chapter 1
ROONEY
I’ve always thought of Washington Square Park in New York City as a place where people say good-bye. InWhen Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal—with a laundry bag, duffel, and baseball bat in tow—walks away from Meg Ryan as she drives off in her pale yellow Toyota Corona wagon. InBarefoot in the Park, Robert Redford drunkenly laughs and tells Jane Fonda that she’s the one who should leave their apartment instead of him. As he shouts at her to “Get out!,” this park has never looked so hopeless.
But for the past week, Washington Square Park has taken on a new meaning because I’m attempting to change the narrative. As the location for my first-ever public art installation,Entangled, this iconic park will be a place where people are brought together. After years of small-scale string art installations in less-frequented galleries and at art fairs, this is my big break. I stand at a distance under the giant marble arch detailed with intricate carvings and spy on my creation, just like I have each afternoon for the past six days ofEntangledbeing up. Each visit feels like I’m seeing my work for the very first time.
Surrounding the fountain in the center of the park, my red string installation curves and loops past the fountain, through the grassy corner plots, under the trees, and around the globe lampposts. There’s no way to identify where the beginning and end are, which is entirely the point. It’s one continuous loop.
“Rooney! Why am I doing all the heavy lifting?” my mom, Wren Gao, says breathlessly before dropping a cardboard box to the ground. Her breath puffs out visibly in front of her and floats for a second before disappearing in the cold February air. “You know I’m almost seventy, right?”
“Careful!” I bend down to grab the box. “You’re going to pull a muscle.”
“If I didn’t grab these, someone else would’ve. I fought off a twenty-year-old with purple hair to save that,” Mom says proudly.
I give her a look. “She’s one of the interns who helped set all of this up. She just picked those up from the printer.”
Mom crosses her arms. “I guess that would explain how she knew my name. I thought she was clairvoyant or that she recognized me.”
“Not everyone knows who you are,” I say playfully. I heave the box onto my hip as Mom and I circle around the installation to a spot behind a row of barren hedges.
Mom smirks. “Maybe not, but enough do.” She says it with the confidence of someone who’s earned it. As a now-famous visual and performance artist, Mom creates attention-grabbing work with statements on reproductive rights and social issues. My unashamed and unapologetic mom got her career going in the late seventies, and it stayed fairly steady.
By the time she was twenty-eight, the age I am now, she had already been in the business for five years, making a decent living off her work. But it wasn’t until I—an unplanned bundle of joy—was born in the mid-nineties that she catapulted to international fame. That’s when everything changed for her. At forty-one years old, Wren Gao had become a name that was read aloud in newspapers and whispered about around dinner tables. Even when she toted me around as a kid from country to country, her career didn’t slowdown once. If it takes eighteen years and giving birth for a career to take off, then I have a very, very long road ahead of me.
I shouldn’t compare myself with her. Our careers are completely different. My mom is a famous artist whose work now commands five-to-six figures at auction, and I can hardly scrape by with string pet portraits. Not that she doesn’t offer to help me out. I just don’t want her money or connections. My career is supposed to be something that I accomplish on my own. And when I one day match or, better yet, exceed her level of success, I’ll know it was because of my efforts.
We hide behind a thick tree trunk, watching people’s reactions from afar. I’m pleased to see that their attentions are drawn from their phones mid-walk, which is not an easy feat.
Mom waves her arms toward my installation beyond the trees. “How did you pull this off?” she asks.
I set the box gently onto the crunchy brown grass. “A group of students from the School of Visual Arts helped string this up. That way, no one knows it’s me.”
“At some point, you’ll be figured out,” Mom warns. “Your Red String Girl cover-up can’t last forever. Certainly not these days with cameras everywhere.”
“Not if I can help it,” I tell her.
“Your work is imaginative. Let yourself shine, baby!” Mom says as she readjusts a wool hat I knitted her over her silver hair.
“I like being anonymous. It’s more private. I can let the work speak for itself. It’s not about me,” I explain. “I never wanted it to be.”
Mom studies me for a moment. “People like having a face to the name. If you’re unknown, you’re forgotten.”
I wrap my arm around her shoulders. “As usual, we’ll agree todisagree. Besides, I want to get people talking about something that isn’t me,” I justify. “With this installation, I’m creating a destination for people to go to after the rush of the holidays. There’s no competition and doing this in the winter brings beauty to the gray landscape. In the summer, exhibits are expected, but then they just become any other day. This will last in people’s memories.”
“Yeah, well, people will also remember your installation as the day they got frostbite,” Mom says, wiggling her gloved fingers.
“Hilarious. I really think we’re pulling this off, though. Talia is also helping manage this. All you have to do is enjoy the show,” I say, using a key to slice the tape open on the box.
“Did someone say my name?” a voice says behind us. “Wren, great to see you!”
I turn to see Talia Ma breezing toward us in a chic belted winter jacket. Talia’s my best friend who I met in art school. We bonded over being mixed-race Chinese American and our belief in the Red Thread of Fate. She’s one of the very few people who know that I’m Red String Girl. After years learning the ropes at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Talia now owns an art gallery in Chelsea specializing in showcasing new local painters and ceramic artists with plans to open a second location on the West Coast. She was the first person to sell my string art pet portraits in her gallery when I was starting out.
Fine. She’s still trying to sell them. Enough people buy pet portraits for me to get installation materials. All that string adds up. What it doesn’t provide? The freedom not to have to live with my mom. Yeah. I won’t accept money or connections, but I will accept a room to sleep in.
“How was your tour?” Talia asks my mom.
Mom sighs. “Exhausting, fulfilling. It’s my last one. I’m done being a show pony. It did take me all throughout Asia and Europe. I sold a few paintings to wealthy art collectors and museums,” sherecounts. “All in all, I can’t complain, except, of course, for missing Roo’s opening day.”
