How Do Urbanized Kids Draw Home?

My daughter showed me her homework for school. It was a simple ditto requesting that she draws a picture of her house. Normal.

I’ve had to do these all the time in grade school. The teacher would give us the same exercise and we’d all, almost invariably, make a line drawing of a box with a triangle on top of it. Home. Maybe we’d add a tree (two vertical lines topped with a curvy circle) and a sun (a circle with spoked lines radiating from it). I reminisced.

Then I was shaken with a realization:

How was my daughter going to draw our house?

I grew up in the countryside; the pictures I drew of my house in school looked at least somewhat like it really looked. My daughter is growing up in China. She has spent the bulk of her memorable life in little apartments stuffed within giant high-rises.

What would she draw? A big ugly elongated rectangular prism with an arrow pointing to a random window? A likeness of the door leading to our room? What kind of nonsensical trick exercise was this? Urbanized people don’t live in homes, they live in capsules.

“How are you going to draw our house?” I asked my daughter with genuine curiosity.

“Just draw it,” she said simply.

“What, you mean the inside of it?”

“No, the outside.”

I realized that I had absolutely no idea how my daughter visualized the place that we live.

This is what she drew: