My grandpa thinks the Chinese zodiac is really cute (I think to the many
times he cut out the animals from free calendars from Chinese grocery
stores and hung them up around the house). It is for this reason that he
is represented as a monkey, and I am represented as a rabbit.
My grandma was born in the Year of the Rat, and she always had a bit too
much pride to celebrate that fact, so I've chosen to render her as a
human. However, I have not tried to capture her actual likeness... hair
dyed jet black each time white roots grew visible in the slightest,
rotating formal purple vests reminiscent of her past as a principal, a
scrunched smile that looked at you the same way when you were five years
old and ran into her arms after school to show her the token you got for
walking a mile and when you were seventeen and went straight to your
room after school, shutting the door behind you, dead-faced, in
silence... these are not things that a semester-long project can even
begin to attempt.
"Everything in the Garden" refers to the idiom, "everything in the
garden is rosy," typically used negatively to suggest that things are
not as perfect as they seem...