What I Want People to Know
Mei-Ling was my closest friend for eleven years. We met on the first day of the foundation course at Central Saint Martins and I knew quite quickly that she was the kind of person you do not let drift out of your life. She was quiet in a way that is easy to misread. She was not shy. She was paying attention. She absorbed things — a conversation, a piece of music, a tree — at a depth that most of us do not manage. And then she made things from what she had absorbed. Her sketchbooks, which I have now been asked to help archive, are extraordinary. She drew what she saw, but what she saw was not what everyone else was looking at. She had been meditating seriously since she was twenty-two. She talked about it without pretension or evangelism — she just did it, the way she did everything she committed to. I went on one retreat with her in Scotland and she sat for six hours in a way that looked entirely natural. Afterwards she was hungry and made tea and was completely normal. I am going to miss her for a very long time. I am going to miss the particular quality of being known by her, which was gentle and non-negotiable and irreplaceable. I hope she knows how much light she left behind.