1981 (Part Nine)

Madam Ngu finally cornered me in the buka.

If I had any inkling she was coming to that buka that fateful day, I would rather have starved than be found dead there. She had been looking for me for weeks. And I had been evading her. I was trying to break free of her influence and she was trying her very best to ensure that she stamped herself into my art, my being, my style of creating, and my idioms of expression. She had studied at the Royal College in London and was trying to make me a master draughtsman who painted in the European fashion. And I was a radical looking for a way to break out of the western mold of painting.