“Oh, sure. Women were painting—including Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. But we haven’t always been seen. I think that’s changing now.” She turned the laptop back to face me. “But tell me why you’re looking up Bernice Bing. What led you to her?”

“I saw this poster yesterday.” I showed her the photo on my phone. “I thought it was interesting. I mean, I wanted to know more.”

She zoomed in on the photo. I wondered if she was reading the tagline about Bernice Bing as a visionary Asian American lesbian artist. I wondered if she would say the word lesbian out loud. I wanted her to.

But she gave me back my phone and said evenly, as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all, “That’s where it all begins. Wanting to know more. You should keep looking.”

—

That afternoon I went back to the studio, taking my old telescope with me. I opened all the windows and put one of Grandpa’s astronomy tapes on the TV, listening to him talk about sunsets while I opened the telescope case. The last time I used the telescope I must have taken it apart, because it was completely disassembled. I laid out several halves that would snap together to form the long barrel of the telescope, multiple O rings that would clamp it together, the focuser tube halves and several lenses that were smudged with fingerprints and needed to be cleaned.

“What color is the sun?” Grandpa was saying. “Contrary to popular childhood crayon colors, it’s not yellow or orange. The sun is white, which you can see if you observe it from space. Or, if you’re not in space, at noon when it’s highest in the sky.”

I found a folded-up printout at the bottom of the telescope box that contained the assembly instructions. I smoothed it out on the worktable and started to sort the pieces.

“When the sun sets or rises, though, it appears to be yellow, orange, or even red. Why? This is due to the scattering away of light particles by the atmosphere.”

Grandpa pulled up a slide that illustrated light scattering. It showed a series of suns—a white disc overhead at noon, descending through shades of darkening yellow-orange to an orange-red disc at sunset, low over the horizon. A beam of light emanated from each sun, and as it struck the atmosphere, which was symbolized by a fuzzy white line, particles of light were reflected in all directions. The light particles looked like squiggly arrows colored blue or violet or green, to illustrate the color of the light that was scattering.