In ancient Buddhist sutras, the lotus flower was regarded as a symbol of purity and the spirit of unselfishness. Every summer they blossom, with their petals of transparent lavender floating on the water and their leaves rippling in the gentle breeze blowing across the pond.

For four decades, lotus flowers have inspired Hsi Muren, 55, a popular Taiwanese artist and writer. From March to May this year, Muren held two exhibitions in the northern Taiwan cities of Taipei and Hsinchu, displaying more than ten large-scale oil paintings of lotuses. Her paintings show lotus petals glistening with early morning dew, the flowers floating on water that reflects the fiery glow of the sky at sunset or lorded over by a brilliant moon. The sensitive artist can always hear a familiar voice calling to her from among thousands of lotus flowers.

"Our memory fades with the passing of time. Only when lotuses blossom do my memories of things related to those flowers come rushing back, bringing details that I knew I would remember or those I thought I had already forgotten over the years."

Fond of painting lotuses, Muren recalled her first sight of the aquatic flower during a boat ride with her father on Lake Hsuanwu in Nanking, mainland China, when she was five years old. The color of the flower faded in her childhood memory. It was not until she received her initial education in the arts at National Taipei Teachers' College that she drew her first lotus in the Taipei Botanical Garden. Feeling ashamed of her poor watercolors, she hid herself in a secluded corner far away from her classmates to learn how to control the moisture of the paint. Even later at National Taiwan Normal University, she continued to paint lotuses executing every single stroke with full concentration to achieve the desired effect of transparency to create an atmosphere of ease and freedom on her canvases.

Muren admits that she never succeeded in watercolors, but her affection for the flowers has never dimmed and she now paints them with oils. Almost every summer, she drives all the way down to southern Taiwan and arrives before sunrise at Paiho, a town outside the southern city of Tainan, famous for its blooming lotuses. She stands by the edge of the pond and silently waits for the instant when light suddenly brightens every surface of that mirror-like maze. She attentively listens to the hardly audible sound of petals growing from tightly closed buds. The beauty and aroma of the flowers serve one purpose-to give birth and develop life-like a woman.

Year after year, she feels that she has not yet painted the lotus she wants to paint, but she has discovered that she gradually grows and changes with her experiences and memories. "Every time I look at a lotus, I see little details that never occurred to me before." She will spend her whole lifetime waiting for the appearance of a truly beautiful lotus on her canvas.

Acknowledging that she herself has little patience, Muren attributes her enthusiasm for painting to lotus flowers. "Painting is something I have never abandoned. Almost always, the reason I picked it up again was the blooming of the lotus in summer."

In 1943, Muren was born in Chungking, Szechwan Province, to a family of Mongolian descent. During the war, the family retreated from the mainland to Hong Kong and then settled down in Taiwan. She was then eleven and one year younger than her classmates in junior high school. Frustrated at failing her final math exam, she swore that she would never take another math class. Math was required at all high schools on the island, except for the art department of the National Taipei Teachers College.

She quickly regained her confidence through her outstanding performance in painting. Whenever there was a day off, she took her drawing tools with her to do sketches. She was fully occupied with painting and she enjoyed herself immensely in the world of art.

In 1959, Muren entered the fine arts department of National Taiwan Normal University, one of the best in Taiwan. Her college days were full of fun, fun and more fun. "I'm a person who loves to travel, and painting offers me a reasonable excuse to enjoy it." She and a couple of good friends would carry their painting paraphernalia and set out for the Central East-West Highway, which passed through some of the most spectacular scenery in Taiwan. At night, they would camp by a creek on a mountain. They would lie down on the earth and watch the crowded stars in the summer night sky. In the morning, after a few brush strokes on their canvases, they would jump into the creek and start a water fight. Perhaps they returned home with blank canvases, but she explained with ease, "Nobody would expect you to have a finished painting at that moment. Once you have been to a place, it will stay in your mind and your feelings toward it will come out some day."

After graduation, Muren served her compulsory one-year teaching stint in a junior high school. In 1964, she went to the Brussels Royal College of Art in Belgium for advanced studies in the fine arts, concentrating on oil painting. She showed her diligence in painting by producing six large paintings a week, instead of the normal one assignment per week. The quality of her paintings was internationally recognized, for many of them were selected for international art exhibitions. Painting brought her happiness and success, yet she never admitted that she had any special God-given talent. "Well, looking back, I can only say that I would not be who I am today if my math teacher in junior high school had let me pass that exam," she remarked quite firmly. "Seriously, I do feel grateful to him."

Far away from home, the young single girl from Taiwan was inevitably lonely, but the solitary life did not last long. Muren met her future husband, Liu Hai-pei, who was working towards a doctorate in physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was a cat lover with a deep, charming voice and perfect accent. Most importantly, whenever he played table tennis with her, he always managed to lose. Afterward, he would gently invite her to take a walk in the park. Secretly falling in love with him, she waited for a chance to let him know of her feelings. One weekend, Hai-pei was sick in bed and she cooked a bowl of rice gruel for him. The traditional meal was a taste of home that other Taiwanese students regarded with envy. When he sincerely expressed his thanks for her gift, she knew that he understood what she wanted to tell him. Four years later, they got married in Belgium. The lucky groom stopped playing table tennis and the happy bride, he soon realized, never did like to cook.

In 1966, Muren graduated at the top of her class. While waiting for her husband to complete his doctorate, she continued her study in bronze etching and held personal exhibitions of her paintings in several major cities in Europe. She will never forget her first exhibition. She could not afford to hire a truck to haul her fifty-some paintings to the exhibition, so she carried them by herself on the train. Remembering this, she is still surprised. "I still can't imagine how I did that all by myself. I guess I took my work very seriously."

When Hai-pei graduated in 1970, Muren was pregnant. Deep in her heart, she hoped to raise her child in the place of his ancestral culture. "At that time, I had never had a feeling of belonging in that foreign country, and I didn't want that to happen to my child," she recalls. "So we came back and prepared the best home we could for our baby in his homeland." The couple returned to Taiwan and Muren started her career as a teacher at the National Hsinchu Teachers College, where she taught for the following twenty-five years.

Three years ago, Muren retired from teaching and now lives with her husband in Tamsui, in northern Taiwan. Their artistically decorated house is located on a hill with a great view of the sunset over the Tamsui River. The couple are accompanied by their dogs and cats. "Without them, there wouldn't be much conversation in our family," she laughed.

The cozy house does not keep Muren from concentrating on her painting or enjoying her free time. She has journeyed several times to the Mongolian plateau, the ancestral homeland that has haunted her thoughts and dreams for almost fifty years. In the summer of 1989, when the late President Chang Ching-kuo lifted a ban on travel by Taiwanese civil servants and teachers to mainland China, Muren finally had the opportunity to lay eyes on the grassy plains of her forefathers.

The civil war in mainland China fifty years ago separated her family from their native land and left them with a recurrent sense of nostalgia. When she first met people on the plain who so closely resembled herself, she felt overwhelmed. "It was like all of a sudden that surprise, helplessness and melancholy did not belong only to me, but to my deceased grandmother and my parents as well."

The new acquaintance with her ancestral land made her anxious to return to the Mongolian plateau. There she picked up again the dialect that she had spoken until she was five. She also quickly learned to sing a folk song with perfect accent. Her older sister later told her that it was the song that their grandmother used to sing as she combed their hair every morning when they were small. Then she realized that her stubborn longing for home was tied to an inner need, a need imposed on every group of people by culture and race. "It is a need that you can't help and you have no choice," she added.

Like a wild goose, Muren has flown north to the Mongolian plain from Taiwan every summer for the last three years. She has taken pictures of the vastness of the plain and she has written of the feeling of it in her books. Each time she returned to Taiwan, she gave lectures on Mongolian culture throughout the island.

"All my life, I had been looking for a feeling of belonging. However, when I stepped foot on the Mongolian plateau, I suddenly found out that I already belonged in Taiwan. But they are both my homes. One is my ancestral land and the other is my home."