[ESSAY] “Off the Map” by Miên Túc
It was an August day in 2006. Almost ten years old, I took some paper, pencils, and crayons to do what I had always loved to do in my free time: sitting by the stone bench in front of my house and drawing characters from my favourite manga.
My uncle, who had dropped by to visit my parents, came over to look at my drawing. After a long silence, he prised the pencil from my hand and laid a fresh sheet of paper over my unfinished drawing. “I’ll teach you how to draw!” “But I’m drawing my own thing.” “But can’t you see your figure is out of proportion?”
My uncle was right. In my drawing, the epic superhero from the book had become a wacky humanoid. To help me, my uncle talked passionately about focal points and proportion while his hands sketched straight lines to form a scaffold in the middle of the page. The thing is, I was happy with my own cockamamie work. Yet he was my uncle, and I was expected to obey my elders. So I simply sat there in silence, waiting for him to finish his lecture.
“Now it’s your turn!” My uncle put the pencil back in my hand and looked at me expectantly. I began to sketch my own scaffold, but things soon fell apart as I made a mess of the shapes and details. I heard my uncle sigh in despair. Glancing back, I caught his look of disappointment: “That’s enough. You can’t draw. You are not a son of this family!”
I knew it was just a careless remark, perhaps a joke, a vile joke, that my uncle had thoughtlessly tossed at me. Yet it hit me hard. Though there are no artists on my father’s side of the family, artistic talent has always been a source of pride for them. My youngest uncle is an art teacher and part-time tattooist, and my eldest aunt often claims to have the best handwriting in her company. My father, a tour guide, loves to impress his clients with graceful origami and lively clay models. My cousins have proudly turned their bedrooms into personal galleries. Artistic talent runs in the family, but it seems to have skipped me. I love drawing, but I am not skilful enough to produce a proper piece.
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I spent my first ten years in Vinh Long, a small town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Like any child of that age, I lived in a continuous cycle of studying, playing, and sleeping. To please my parents, all I had to do was stay glued to my chair and try to be diligent. As a result, at the end of every year, my kindergarten rewarded me with a stack of notebooks. To while away the summer, I used those notebooks as my canvas. I drew my toy truck, my neighbour’s fierce German shepherd, and an idyllic scene I had seen on television.
However, I never completed a single piece. Within about five seconds, I would make a mistake. Every time this happened, I turned to the next page and started a new drawing, only to make another mistake. This went on until my parents realised that I had wasted every single notebook. “I can’t believe you’ve ruined fifteen notebooks with a few scribbles on each page,” my mother would lament each time. Fortunately, since I did not need notebooks for kindergarten, my parents spared me any punishment. This pastime came to an end when I started primary school.
Unsurprisingly, I was not an outstanding student in art classes. My drawings always felt wrong to me. I struggled to find what I loved to draw and sometimes even wondered whether my interest in art was merely an illusion created by my family’s pride.
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In 2005, my family moved to Binh Minh, a rural district where we could live near our relatives, and I transferred to a local secondary school. There, one of my goals was to impress the art teacher, so I was determined to create a clay elephant of splendid form and intricate detail for an upcoming class. A week before the class, I began studying countless photographs of real elephants, watching several wildlife documentaries, and practising modelling elephant body parts in clay. Even my mother was excited by my preparations. “I can’t wait to see your elephant.” “Wait and see! The whole class will be surprised by my work.” Three days before D-Day, my confidence peaked.
Then it plummeted. However much I longed to produce excellent work, my hands disobeyed me like a mischievous child. My elephant was monstrous, and I had not even refined the trunk and tusks. Its four legs were too unsteady to support its heavy, ball-shaped body, so it collapsed the moment I took my hands away. Fury slowly set my blood boiling. I shouted in agony and threw every piece of clay, every reference image, everything, out of the window. I could not see clearly. Was anger blurring my vision, or was I crying? Perhaps both.
Hearing my outburst, my mother rushed into the room. “You’re angry just because you can’t make a clay model?” “How can you behave like that? Are you crazy?” “I’ll ask your dad to make you another one. Take it to class.” “Just don’t tell your teacher that it’s your dad’s work.” Each of her remarks was followed by a long silence: my silence. I could not say a word.
The next day, I took my father’s elephant to class. It was, of course, magnificent, so my teacher knew at once that it was not my work. She asked me to pass on her compliments to my father.
“You are not a son of this family!” My uncle’s words echoed in my mind whenever I wanted to do anything artistic. They still do. I continued to draw, casually, but I always felt ashamed of my lack of talent. I kept my paintings no larger than a notebook page so that I could hide them easily. No one, not even my parents, was allowed to see my work; otherwise, the shame would have become unbearable.
❧
It was another August day, this time in 2009, when I found an old globe in my late grandfather’s wardrobe. It was quite small but meticulously crafted. The wooden axis was still sound, though the paper had faded to a soft sepia over the years. As I turned the globe, I spotted place names I had never heard before: Malaya, Rhodesia, and Bechuanaland. Then I studied the territories. Somehow, I was drawn to the shapes and colours of each country. In some regions they looked chaotic; in others, as orderly as a large jigsaw puzzle. A thought popped into my head: how about drawing a map?
I went back home and rushed to my room. Like an artist who has just found his muse, I drew a map of the world from memory. Strangely enough, I found real joy in this peculiar drawing. How about something creative? I turned to the next page of my sketchbook and drew the world as I imagined it. At first, I felt a little awkward about what I was doing, but the feeling did not last long. Let there be a coastline, and I relaxed. Let there be rivers and mountains, and my excitement rose. Let there be borders and capitals, and I truly felt the joy of drawing. Finally, I drew a lake at the North Pole. The legend beside it read: “My shame has retreated here.”
I was not sure what it was about maps that helped me steadily regain my joy in drawing. Perhaps maps were an unusual subject to draw, or perhaps, because there were dozens of possible versions of a map, I could be as creative as I wanted without being judged. “How could my uncle say whether my map was ugly or beautiful?” I asked myself every time I finished one. I became more experimental with my drawings. Once, I mixed colours to give each country in Asia its own hue. Another time, I used dots to shade the mountain ranges and left blank spaces for rivers and lakes. And so my collection of maps grew larger and larger.
But the shame was still there; it had retreated but had not been defeated. Every now and then, the memory of the lame elephant returned to remind me how talentless I was compared with my father. “I want to overcome this haunting ghost. What kind of exorcism should I perform?” I spent a whole year searching for the proper “ritual”. Drawing map after map brought me joy but could not dispel that feeling of guilt. At last, an idea dawned on me: “I’m going to make a map, a real map.”
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To begin with, I drew a map of my country on paper, coloured it, and cut it out. Next, I pasted it onto a large, thick piece of cardboard. Using a sharp craft knife, I scrupulously traced the coastline. Each time I pressed the knife down, I held my breath without realising it. My eyes were fixed on the blade. “This is going to be a perfect map. One false cut and I’ll have to draw a new one.” Holding the knife firmly, I guided it steadily and smoothly, producing a neat, clean piece of cardboard in the shape of the mainland. Then I glued it onto a sheet of transparent plastic so that the land appeared to rise above the surface of the ocean. The last step was to add a star for the capital, dots for the cities, and stripes for the peninsulas.
I could hardly believe that I had made this map myself. It was the artwork I had longed for. I had finally done it. Looking at the map, I felt nothing but relief.
I did not show this map to my parents. I realised that what I had been seeking was neither my parents’ recognition nor my uncle’s. Nor did I fear being the black sheep of the family any longer. All I needed was to create one proper piece of work, to know that I was capable of something. Drawing maps not only made me happy but also taught me to appreciate my true self.
How to cite: Túc, Miên. “Off the Map.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/28/off-the-map.
Miên Túc is an essayist, reporter and translator based in Saigon. His work has appeared in The Margins, Yellow, Undertow and Public Seminar. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Student Program award, through which he completed his MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at the New School in the United States.