The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  Ping Lian continued his speech and language intervention and occupational therapy. He left his Montessori school for a combination of homeschooling and classes at a special education center. His parents wanted him to begin behavioral therapy, but they couldn’t afford a professional therapist. Instead, Sarah hired and trained a student to come to her house a few hours a day and help with Ping Lian’s behavioral therapy.

  Sarah pitched in at night and on the weekends. Ping Lian’s fine motor skills were underdeveloped, and he still couldn’t hold a pencil properly or use scissors, so she held his hand and guided him through the motion of tracing letters and numbers, pictures and shapes. It was hard for Ping Lian to complete even simple tasks, such as standing up or sitting down, but he managed to sit still for tracing. It was a small victory, but it felt like a milestone; it “at least let us feel good that we can get him to sit down and do something,” Sarah recalled. Sarah spent months positioning and guiding Ping Lian’s hand as he held the pencil. Eventually, Ping Lian could trace on his own. He seemed to enjoy it; some days he traced more than ten pages’ worth of material.

  When Ping Lian was eight, he went to get ice cream with his father. When he returned, he rushed into the house and ran upstairs. Sarah followed and found Ping Lian sitting at his table, studying his ice cream wrapper, carefully reproducing the pictures on it, “totally focused and full of energy.” It didn’t hit her until later: Ping Lian wasn’t just tracing; he was drawing.

  From that point on, he drew constantly. He did it independently, without any coaxing. During therapy, he drew “anywhere and everywhere,” on whatever he was working on or whatever paper he had around: his books, his exercises, even his schedule. “He seemed almost obsessed with drawing,” Sarah recalled in a book she is writing about raising Ping Lian.

  That Christmas, the family spent some time at Sarah’s sister’s house with their relatives. Sarah watched as over the course of several days the rest of the cousins played, and her nine-year-old son drew—constantly. She had long feared for Ping Lian’s future. What kind of career could he have? How would he spend his days? Sarah had toyed with a few possibilities: maybe Ping Lian could work at a dim sum shop or café or maybe as a cleaner or a gardener—jobs that would give him some measure of independence but where he wouldn’t have to talk much. But Sarah began to wonder, could he be an artist?

  She signed him up for art classes with three different teachers. None of the three had any expertise in working with autistic children. Sarah gave them articles on autism and told them that she was planning a career in art for Ping Lian. The art teachers were nervous. It’s extremely difficult to make a living as an artist, they cautioned. Sarah told them that she was prepared to wait. She would give Ping Lian plenty of time to develop into a professional artist.

  Ping Lian’s output climbed at an almost frenetic pace. He sketched his family and movie characters; he painted animals and landmarks. There was a roughness to his early drawings, a rudimentary feel, but some of the details—the folds in Ronald McDonald’s pants, the angle of Woody’s body as he leans against Buzz Lightyear—hint at an observant eye and growing precision.

  Sarah focused on convincing Ping Lian that he had talent, “brainwashing him,” as she puts it. Every day, she told him that he was an artist. At the end of the year, Ping Lian’s work was included in a group art exhibition, Different Strokes—Diversity Through Art, at Malaysia’s National Art Gallery. For the first time, Ping Lian, then ten years old, was publicly presented as an artist.

  Two months later, Min Seng died of a heart attack.

  Ping Lian thought the funeral was a party. He enjoyed the food; he enjoyed the people. He didn’t understand what death meant. Sarah had to find a way to explain to him that his father wasn’t coming back.Once he grasped the finality of what had happened, Ping Lian worked through his emotions by drawing pictures.

  Sarah left her job to spend more time with Ping Lian, and he delved further into his artwork. He still had a short attention span for most activities, but he spent hours at a time drawing and painting, often humming while he created. His productivity was stunning; the house was soon brimming with his art. He worked quickly and with intense focus, appearing, as one reporter put it, “deep in the eye of his own creative hurricane.”

  Ping Lian still sketched and painted a wide variety of subjects—horses and family and flowers—but he began focusing more heavily on buildings and landmarks. He painted the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station and the Petronas Twin Towers, a pair of Kuala Lumpur skyscrapers; he painted a series of academic buildings, including the University of Malaya schools of dentistry and economics.

  The drawings have an abstract quality: Buildings lean at haphazard angles. Trees are partially individual entities, partially enmeshed in the landscape. Color darts through the sky, the buildings, and the scenery in a way that makes even inanimate objects seem lively and joyful; just like Ping Lian, they hum with activity.

  He exhibited his art often. By the time a year or so had passed since Ping Lian’s first exhibition, he had already sold many original works and prints. One of his pieces, Ubudiah Mosque I, a colorful depiction of a crisp, white-and-gold Malaysian mosque, raised north of $25,000 at a charity fund-raiser.

  There was some pushback from Ping Lian’s teachers over the amount of time he devoted to art. They worried that he was focusing too heavily on painting and drawing at the expense of other skills.

  Sarah never saw it that way. From her perspective, the opposite seemed true: helping Ping Lian develop as an artist didn’t impair his development; it contributed to it. By working with multiple teachers, Ping Lian was interacting with more people; the more he practiced socializing, the better he got at it. His frustration and hyperactivity decreased.

  Plus, drawing made him so happy. Sarah could see it in his actions; she could see it in his art—the forms he drew, the buoyant colors he chose. In a series of paintings titled “Happy Fishes,” the vibrant orange-and-gold fish almost seem to be smiling. Even if it didn’t pan out as a career, art was still a great hobby.

  Instead of encouraging Ping Lian to back off his artwork, Sarah tried to expand his audience. She sent a box of Ping Lian’s prints to Laurence Becker (the same educator turned agent who worked with Richard Wawro), hoping to arrange a U.S. exhibition. Laurence and Rosa C. Martinez, a woman who later founded Strokes of Genius, a nonprofit organization that develops and promotes autists’ artistic skills, set up an exhibition in Brooklyn, and Ping Lian and his mother traveled to New York.

  On the drive to Brooklyn from the airport, Ping Lian hit the windows; the sound of the air conditioner seemed to trouble him. At the exhibition, he reveled in the attention he received. Even in a foreign country, even surrounded by strangers, he felt a strong call to create. “Here we are in the gallery, and it didn’t faze him,” Rosa recalled. “He would walk right through the crowds like they weren’t there, throw his pad on the floor, lie down, and start drawing—anywhere.”

  When Ping Lian was twelve, the family moved to Sydney. Ping Lian was captivated by the city’s architecture. He did a series of intricate drawings and paintings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House; his subjects later expanded to the animals at the zoo and the creatures at the aquarium, and he filled his pictures with fish, koala bears, and kangaroos.

  Sarah introduced Ping Lian to an art market in Sydney Harbour where she and Ping Lian began making weekly appearances. They hung prints of Ping Lian’s vibrant pictures in a white tent and propped them up on a table in front of the booth.

  Trips to the market were partly a commercial exercise, but, more important to Sarah, they were also an extension of Ping Lian’s therapy. Sarah and Ping Lian observed the bustle of the market and practiced interacting with other people. Sarah worked with Ping Lian on relevant tasks: packing his materials, loading the car, and, eventually, teaching him how to set up the stall. They practiced counting money and servi
ng customers.

  Ping Lian’s reputation flourished. He was a featured artist at a pop-up art exhibition in Sydney. Two groups sponsored a permanent showcase of his work at the Art Commune in Malaysia; for several years, Ping Lian’s art hung in a curved white hallway until his permanent showcase was moved to a hotel in Malaysia. In the United States, his artwork was featured in exhibitions at Carnegie Hall, 100 United Nations Plaza, and New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. He participated in an exhibit in Tokyo and another in Singapore. His cityscapes (“imposing in their intricacy”), animal portraits (“vivid splashes of color”), and style (“bold strokes and cheerful colours”) were celebrated in newspapers, magazines, books, and documentaries.

  During a television interview, Sarah asked Ping Lian what he wanted to be when he grew up. Ping Lian, then an expressive seventeen-year-old, raised his hand above his head and smiled. “Great artist.”

  Ping Lian’s communication is still limited. He speaks only a few words at a time.

  But the family has seen him express emotion and demonstrate affection—qualities they once worried they would never witness—many times. They rejoiced when, while still a small child, Ping Lian rushed to soothe a crying baby at a shopping center. After his father and grandmother died, Ping Lian told his mother that he missed them—an unexpected communication of deep emotion. When he goes to sleep, he tells his mother that he loves her, and sometimes he gives her a kiss. He lets Sarah hug him.

  He’s less hyperactive. He uses the computer and plays the piano. He washes food, cleans dishes, hangs clothes on the clothesline, and vacuums the house. He loves traveling to new cities and staying in nice hotels. Just as Sarah hoped, Ping Lian’s art helps him to express himself; it helps him find common ground with other people. It has improved his self-esteem.

  From Sarah’s perspective, Ping Lian’s autism has had a positive impact on the rest of the family. He is on a unique journey; his talent is a gift from God. As she sees it, working with Ping Lian has molded her and her daughters into more patient and compassionate people. Life has many challenges, but as she once wrote, it has “become so meaningful and purposeful.”

  Training the talent isn’t usually a formal therapy that comes with a professional therapist and detailed instructions for parents. In most cases, it’s a somewhat ad hoc approach to autism. The basic idea is to identify autists’ strengths and interests, help to develop them, and use those areas of interest to engage and teach the individual. It’s an intriguing approach to autism, but it needs to be scientifically vetted for effectiveness. While behavioral therapy has been put through many, many studies, and some of the newer models of behavioral therapy (and another variety of therapy, Floortime) share some common ground with training the talent, no controlled experiments comparing training the talent with other therapies have yet been published.

  The delay in exploring training the talent as a comprehensive autism treatment may stem from the fact that it involves developing autists’ obsessions, which have historically been somewhat neglected by researchers. Though a tendency toward obsession is a widely recognized autistic trait (and included in autism’s diagnostic criteria), these obsessions are the subject of far less research than autists’ social and communication abilities. At least a few scientists, moreover, view autistic obsessions as an impediment to overall development. Some have proposed that when these obsessions take the form of a savant-like skill, there might be a trade-off between the development of that skill and the development of communication and social skills. Kanner, for example, questioned in his 1943 paper whether the pride that his autistic patients’ parents took in their children’s extraordinary memories—a pride that he believed led these parents to “stuff” their children with information—interfered with his patients’ communication skills. More recently, scientists considering the case of a savant artist questioned whether the time he spent painting and building models—solitary pursuits—impeded his linguistic and social skills.

  Like Sarah Lee, many parents adopt a train-the-talent approach to autism not at a scientist’s or a therapist’s recommendation but out of an intuition that allowing their children to pursue their interests may prove engaging and beneficial—or at least soothing. There’s some reason to think that they may be right. There’s evidence that, in contrast to individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder, who tend to experience their obsessions negatively, autists find time spent pursuing their obsessions enriching and enjoyable. These strong interests can also serve as common ground for friendships and social connections. Several small studies have found that incorporating autists’ obsessions into games increases the children’s social interactions with peers and siblings; others have found that using obsession-related rewards improves autists’ performance on tasks, reduces tantrums and aggression, and increases social interactions. Stories like those of Jacob Barnett and Ping Lian Yeak, moreover, turn the idea of a trade-off on its head. In both cases, developing special skills promoted social interaction and life-skills development.

  This idea has really been around since the beginning of autism research. In 1944, in his first published paper on autism, Hans Asperger described an autistic child who was clumsy, failed to recognize close acquaintances, and ignored school subjects that didn’t interest him. Despite these challenges, he was able to parlay an all-encompassing interest in math and shapes into an academic astronomy career.

  In 1971, Kanner published a follow-up study in which he investigated the status of his original autistic patients. The patients whom Kanner identified as “the two real success stories” both had caregivers who intuitively trained their talents. As a child, Donald T. was withdrawn, obsessed with spinning objects, and prone to temper tantrums. A couple who took him in for several years channeled his interests in measurements and numbers: in their care, Donald dug and measured a well and learned to plow corn while counting the rows. Later in life, he secured a job as a bank teller. The second success story, Frederick, was slow to speak and had limited interest in people as a child, but his parents and the instructors at his school helped him build his social skills based on his interests in music and photography. He ultimately received vocational training running a copy machine; he, too, held a steady job.

  The savant expert Darold Treffert cites training the talent as the approach adopted by the families of many of the savants with whom he has worked, as does Becker. Temple Grandin, the famous animal scientist and autism activist, urges parents to develop their autistic children’s talents.

  Not every child, of course, has or will develop a skill on which this technique could be used effectively. Training the talent isn’t necessarily a substitute for other kinds of therapy, nor is it a mind-set meant exclusively for autists. But it’s an orientation toward autism that seeks to develop the individual’s capabilities and interests, and it emphasizes autists’ strengths rather than their challenges.

  It’s still early days for training the talent. It needs to be further developed, standardized, and tested on large samples. But even once such programs are built and have been rigorously examined, investigating different therapies still only gets you halfway. It’s likely that a train-the-talent approach to autism, just like behavioral therapy, will be more effective for some kids than for others. Behavioral therapy, for example, might be highly effective for those with particular types of underlying biology, but less so for those whose autistic symptoms stem from different biological roots.

  The idea here isn’t to endorse train the talent as an alternative to other autism therapies. It’s to point out the practical importance of the ongoing basic science efforts to identify the underlying differences between autists and the specific mechanisms that can lead to autism. Eventually the findings that stem from this work may allow for more precise choices regarding intervention type and frequency. Trying to find a treatment that works for everyone based solely on similarity of symptoms is like trying to treat all people who have trou
ble breathing by giving them the Heimlich: it will help those who are choking, but it’s probably not the best answer for a person having an allergic reaction.

  To make informed decisions about treatment, you first have to know what underlying condition you are trying to treat. Until scientists parse out the different mechanisms that lead to autistic symptoms, there’s no way to predict which course of treatment will work best for any individual (or to predict who will recover from autism and why). There’s no way to tell, for example, who’s an Alex, a child who may respond extremely well to behavioral therapy, and who’s a Jacob Barnett or a Ping Lian Yeak, a child who may respond much more dramatically to efforts to support and develop his interests. The need to make optimal treatment decisions is one more—very pressing—reason for research to focus not just on autism’s behavioral symptoms but also on the genetic and biochemical abnormalities that lie beneath. As Insel put it in a 2014 blog post about autism, “The best way to better services will be through better science.”

  The possibility that there may be a genetic link between prodigy and autism then suggests an interesting question: Could the way to better science be paved by child prodigies?

  Chapter 11

  The Next Quest

  Child prodigies have long been a riddle, their abilities a great unanswered question. David Feldman and Martha Morelock once complained—only somewhat facetiously—that “divine inspiration, reincarnation, or magical incantation” were the best explanations for child prodigies that science had to offer.