I arrived in Penang in Malaysia this morning with my family. It was ________ and hot, so we decided to go to the beach near our hotel. My sister and I tried ________ I felt like I was a bird. It was so exciting!

For lunch, we had something very special — Malaysian yellow noodles. They were delicious! In the afternoon, we ________ bicycles to Georgetown. There are a lot of new buildings now, but many of the old buildings are ________ there. In Weld Quay, a really old place in Georgetown, we saw the houses of the Chinese traders from 100 years ago. I wonder what life was like here in the past. I really enjoyed walking ________ the town.

Three days after she was born, parents of Liu Xinming were told by doctors that the girl would not see the world forever.

For years her family members tried to pull Liu out of the darkness through various means. For example, they took her to the Xinmu Cinema, a small studio in Beijing where visually impaired people gather to “see” movies with the help of volunteers who tell the story and describe subjects mentioned in the films, and Xinming seemed to “see” a rich scene and the emotions of the characters between the lines. It was there Liu heard that people like her could also learn painting. And since then all the imaginations, emotions, and stories she had is no longer only black and white.

Thanks to her parents and the volunteers, she began to know about colors by connecting them with the emotions, the feelings of warmth or coldness, the ups and downs of the rhythms (节奏) in music and so on. Based on her limited knowledge of the world and infinite imagination, Liu started to layer, to splash and even to pat colors directly with fingers on paper.

By using various colors to show what she has heard, touched, felt, and experienced in life, Xinming simply creates miracles with her brush! The now-teenage girl has brought a large number of her works to Blooming in the Dark, her solo exhibition at the Ici Labas gallery (美术馆) in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, running through September 10th.

The colorful works reveal the richness of her inner world, and show her enthusiasm (热情) to know more about the world through which, one gets to reflect on himself whether he has been open enough to the world behind him.