Four times a sitter asked "does it look like me?", and what they were really asking

"Does it look like me?"

I hear that every afternoon on the pedestrian street, from before the streetlights come on until the last electric tourist carts have stopped running. Some days ten times, some days twenty. Twelve years, so roughly more than fifty thousand times by a rough count. My folding easel stands right at the edge of the paving stones, beside a pot of bougainvillea, and whoever sits on the small wooden stool in front of it, fifteen minutes in, twenty minutes in, will at some point lean over, glance at the paper, and ask exactly that.

At the start I answered it literally. Eyes not quite there yet, I said the eyes were not there yet. Nose done, I said the nose was done. I assumed they were asking about the drawing, because the paper was the only thing there to ask about.

It took me years to hear that most people on that stool are not asking about the paper. The four times below are the four I heard, in the order I remember them, and each one left me something small I could use at home, at work, with the people I meet every day.

Not every question has a second layer

I have to say this first, because I once fell into the opposite ditch. For a while I read hidden meaning into everything. Whoever asked "does it look like me?" I figured was begging for love, and I answered with something very profound, and people looked at me like I was a fool. Plenty of customers only want to know whether the nose looks right. If their nose has a slight bend and the paper has it straight, they have every right to want it fixed.

So this piece is not claiming that every question hides another. It is only about the times when the answer "the nose is fine, the eyes are a bit off" made the asker go quiet, not because they were angry, but because nobody had answered what they actually asked.

Half a drawing, and a question that came too early

A girl named Trúc sat down at five in the afternoon. Twenty-two, backpack on, hair tied high, fiddling with a strap on her top. I had only finished the eyebrow line and half of the left eye, the pencil still very pale, the page almost blank. She leaned forward, glanced at the paper, and said:

"Does it look like me?"

"Only the eyebrow so far, dear."

"Oh." She settled back and sat up straight. But her shoulders drew in a little, and I noticed she stopped looking at me. She looked off toward the row of bougainvillea.

I had drawn up to that point hundreds of times without ever seeing this: when the page has nothing on it, the sitter cannot be asking about the page. There is nothing to resemble. A "does it look like me?" that early is a different question: am I sitting right, are you looking at me, do you see anything? And the answer "only the eyebrow so far" answered the words exactly while the question itself dropped to the ground.

The layer beneath is what stayed with me longest. Being looked at closely, in silence, is hard, even when the one looking means well. Twenty minutes holding still while a stranger studies your face, nothing in your hands. "Does it look like me?" is the pretext a person grabs so they can hear a human voice, not the scratch of a pencil. And it is the same at home: the person at the stove who asks "is it salty enough?" before the salt has even dissolved, the person in the meeting who asks "is it okay if I put it this way?" before finishing the sentence. They don't need a verdict yet. They need someone to let them know they are being heard, the kind of hearing that listening without composing a reply talks about.

I began trying this, and it is so small I thought it was not worth writing down until I saw it change a whole afternoon.

With Trúc that day, I said: "Your eyebrow tilts down a little at the end, I'm drawing along that slope." She smiled faintly, the first time, and turned back to look at me. She didn't ask again whether it looked like her until the drawing was done.

At first it felt odd, because it didn't sound like an answer. But after a few weeks I noticed that listeners tended to stay where they were sitting instead of pulling away. Some people also looked at me a bit startled, as if I'd answered off-topic, and they repeated the question. Then I just said it straight: "The eyes aren't there yet, I'll keep fixing." Both answers have a place.

The version for a rushed moment: say a single concrete word, "slope," "dark," "soft," whatever you really see. One word is enough to let someone know there is somebody looking.

Where I tend to slip, and I've seen many people slip, is naming too many details at once, sounding like an inventory. "Eyebrow sloped, double eyelids, hair tied high, thin lips." The person feels I'm reading out a table, not looking at them. One detail only, and pick what you actually see, not what you think will please them.

The husband who asked for her, and the wife who sat silent

The couple came by at dusk. Mai sat on the stool, her husband Hưng stood behind me with his arms folded. She sat very straight, hands resting on her thighs. For the first ten minutes they said nothing to each other. Then Hưng stepped right up to the easel, tilted his head, and said to me without looking at his wife:

"Does it look like her? She always says she looks ugly."

Mai didn't move. I saw her bite her lower lip once, lightly.

The part I have never known is what came next: whether she really does say she looks ugly, or whether he was speaking for something she'd never said. I sat there with the pencil still in my hand and realized two people were being asked about, and only one of them was answering. The small wooden stool had no room for her.

So the layer beneath "asking on someone's behalf" isn't a lack of care. People who ask for someone usually love the person in the chair. Hưng wasn't asking because he wanted to leave her out. He was afraid she'd be flustered, so he took on the speaking. Only the person who is spoken for over a long time stops reaching for their own share. They keep sitting there, smiling at the right moments, going quiet inside, until the one standing behind can no longer hear them.

I turned to Mai before answering him:

"Do you feel it looks right? I've drawn your eyes this far. Is there anything you'd like me to change?"

She paused a second, a little surprised. "My eyes... did you draw them a bit big?"

"A little big. If you want them smaller I'll make them smaller."

"Smaller, please."

Hưng, behind her, laughed awkwardly. "I thought you liked big eyes."

Mai didn't answer. But she looked at the paper a while longer, then turned to me: "I like real eyes better."

I don't know how the two of them talked after that day. I only know that in the last ten minutes she changed the way she sat. Her shoulders dropped, and she looked straight at me instead of at the bougainvillea.

The exercise here is very small and slightly comic, so plain that people look down on it. When a question is about a person, ask that person first, even if they're right there and seem shy. The first few times you do it, they may not know what to say and glance at you. Some will say, "he can answer for me," and I don't take it back from him. I don't want to force anyone to speak. The question only has to pass through them first, and then they can hand it to whoever they like.

The hard part is when I'm the one standing behind. I once did exactly what Hưng did, with a friend who was shy at a client meeting. I offered to speak for him "so he wouldn't have to strain." That day he agreed, and afterwards he asked me along less often. I'm not sure the two are connected. But since then I've tried leaving one beat of silence before accepting the job of speaking for someone, and often the other person speaks before I do.

One more thing has to be said separately, because it is different from habit: if at home you are the person who is always spoken over, who isn't allowed to answer, who gets mocked or insulted when you open your mouth, or if you feel afraid to speak in front of the other person, then this is no longer about learning how to ask. Tell someone you trust, or someone who does counselling work, and think about your safety first. If that heavy feeling lasts for weeks, talking to a professional is perfectly ordinary.

The old man who said draw me however

Mr. Sáu sat down one Saturday afternoon, leaning on a cane. He hadn't asked the price, hadn't asked anything. He just said: "Draw however you like. I'm old, pretty or not it's all the same."

I knew that tone. Before, I would have said "of course, sir, I'll make it handsome" and drawn, and he would have paid and gone. This time I stopped, because his "whatever" sounded like Trúc's "does it look like me?" earlier that day. The same sentence, from the other end of life.

I am not sure what lay beneath his line. Maybe he truly didn't care about the drawing. Maybe he was testing whether I'd care. I guessed, and I knew I was guessing.

What I did know is that a wide question like "how are you, sir?" would only get a short answer. So I asked something only he could answer:

"Sir, this scar over your right eyebrow, would you like me to draw it in?"

Mr. Sáu touched his eyebrow as if he'd forgotten it was there. "That one? From the army. A piece of brick."

"Yes. Shall I leave it in?"

"Yes. Leave it in."

He told me a little more about the scar, not much, two or three sentences, about a brick yard somewhere whose name I didn't catch. Then he fell quiet, and I drew. When I finished, he looked at the paper a long time, didn't say whether it looked like him, just pointed a finger at the scar on the paper and nodded once.

I think many older people say "whatever" when they fear being a bother, and for them a specific question about themselves is how they find out someone is really looking. But I can only say it at the level of "I think," and next time I may meet an old man who truly just wants it done.

There is a trap here that I've fallen into as well: asking into a sore place. If that scar were something he didn't want to mention, my question would have been like pressing a hand on a bruise. So I always ask in a way that leaves an exit: "would you like me to draw it in?", not "what happened to you?" If they say no, I let it go and never ask a second time. A good asker is someone who can hear a "no" without keeping it in their face.

In a family the equivalent is one small detail: the dish Dad always cooked, the photograph in its frame on the cabinet, the tree in the corner of the yard. Ask about that, lightly, along the lines of "who planted this tree, Dad?", not "how have you been lately, Dad?" Some people answer at length, some say "yes, I planted it," and either is enough for a day.

The customer who said "it's very like me" with her eyes lowered

This is the time I was wrong.

Vân, around forty, sat for a gift for her younger sister. I was nearly done when she asked "does it look like me?", and I had already seen her look at the paper longer than usual. She said: "Very like me." Her voice was flat. I was glad, because that was the sentence I'd been hoping for, and I drew the last few strokes, signed it, rolled the paper, took the money.

She took the roll and left. She didn't look at me as she said goodbye.

A week later she came back. She sat down, laid the paper across her knees, and said it straight: "I'm sorry, I said it was very like me but really I think my mouth looks a little sad. I was too shy to say. Could you draw it again for me?"

I went red hearing it. That day I'd met every sign: the long look, the flat voice, the eyes lowered at goodbye. I saw all of it and chose the easiest thing, which was to believe the words "very like me" because those words let me finish. I'd taken "that's fine" as the last word, when for many people "that's fine" means "I don't want to put you out any further."

The layer beneath is this: when people say "whatever," "that's fine," "it's okay," it is often not because they're okay but because objecting costs more than putting up with it. To object means making the other person lose face, dragging things out, opening a conversation they haven't prepared for. The one who says "it's okay" is sometimes paying the bill on the listener's behalf.

I don't know how many of my customers have done this and never come back. I only know that Vân is the one who did, and she is the only one I know of.

Since then I've changed one sentence. As I near the end, I no longer ask "does it look like you?" I ask: "Is there one stroke you'd like me to change? Just one, even a tiny one."

That sentence works, at the level I can feel: it hands people a door already open. Asking "is there anything to fix?" makes "no" easy to say, but "which stroke would you change?" presumes there is one, and people are less shy about pointing. About half the customers name a spot, usually tiny, the corner of the mouth, a hairline. The other half say "no, it's right," and this time I see eyes really on the paper, something loosening in the shoulders. I can't measure this by anything other than my own sense of it.

The familiar mistake, carried into daily life: pushing people to choose on the spot in a crowd. "If something's not right just say so, I won't be angry." It sounds like opening a door, but it puts the person in the position of having to speak up in front of you, and "I won't be angry" makes them think you will be. What I do instead is give a small place and a way out, like a private message or another time: "Look at it tonight and message me one spot you'd like to change, if any."

If you tried it and it didn't work

Last week I tried "your eyebrow slopes a little, I'm drawing along it" on a young man who kept jiggling his leg. He looked at me and said: "Can you draw faster? I have somewhere to be." I felt I was having a deep conversation with someone who only needed a picture in fifteen minutes, and the answer I'd prepared fell into empty air.

The first reason came to me at once: I'd guessed the wrong question. Some people ask "does it look like me?" and mean exactly that, and for them a remark about the eyebrow is off-topic. The way forward is to watch instead of guessing: if they look at you while they ask, it is usually a question about you; if they look at the paper or at the clock, it is usually a question about the paper. I guess wrong about one time in ten, maybe more.

The other reason is less comfortable: the person may not want to be looked at closely. For some people being noticed is pressure rather than comfort, and they will feel you're going too far. In that case, stop. Not everyone needs what you hear underneath, and a direct answer, "eyes are fine, the nose is still off," is the right gift.

And if you've tried for a few weeks and listening beneath the question just wears you out, if it doesn't fit how you talk, that's fine too. Some people answer straight, and for them the straightness is how they love. Everyone has their own way of caring, and some people care with an answer as straight as a ruler.

The piece on listening with full presence says nearby things, from the side of love. As for this evening, the lights on the pedestrian street came on later than usual. A girl of about ten sat on the wooden stool, her feet not touching the ground, swinging. I had only just put down the first eyebrow stroke.

"Does it look like me, sir?"

"I'm drawing the slope at the end of your eyebrow," I said. "Do you know whose slope that is?"

The girl laughed, and her finger went up to her eyebrow before I'd even finished looking at it.