The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (2 page)

A few months after we arrived in Beijing, my aunt and uncle’s property was seized. The People’s Liberation Army had ushered in a new era in China: the first measures were underway to give the State control over companies believed to be vital to “the nation’s economy or the life of the people.” My parents found themselves without anything, in a city they barely knew, with three small children.

Fortunately, my mother quickly found a job as a music teacher in an elementary school. But since my father remained unemployed, the financial burden for the family rested entirely on her shoulders. Although her upbringing had scarcely prepared her for it, she found the inner strength to take on the multiple challenges of feeding us, keeping the house clean, and making sure we were educated.

My mother, whose first name is Ruying, was born in 1918, at a time when a Chinese woman was supposed to remain cloistered, and when her prime responsibility was to be a “useful wife” and a “wise mother.” “Too much learning is a dangerous thing for a woman’s virtue,” so the saying went. Girls learned only what was strictly necessary for keeping house, and most marriages were arranged, very often with an older man. In line with Confucian thought, the Chinese placed more faith in the virtues of a “union of reason” than in the odd Western notion of a Prince Charming.

But Ruying had other ideas.

Not only had she gone to school, but she had always been the best student—to such an extent that, when she was older, my grandfather was in the habit of consulting her regarding his business affairs.

Therefore, he shouldn’t have been surprised when his daughter did not accept the rich gentleman he had found for her in Hong Kong. Ruying was stubborn and would not back down. She wanted to marry my father, although she had a number of good reasons not to—he was less wealthy than her, he was five years younger, and furthermore, he was a distant relative. My grandfather refused, and my mother dug in her heels. Finally, one day she left home. She disappeared for several weeks and was reported as a missing person. In the end, my grandfather gave in. My mother wanted a marriage based on love, and she got it.

As Mao was launching the first of his large-scale reforms, my sisters, Xiaoyu and Xiaoyen, the last of the children, were born and became the newest residents of our shabby little
siheyuan
. Five girls! In China, during this period, to have one girl was a burden, but to have two or three was an embarrassment. Five girls without a single boy was a real problem.

I can see my mother after her return from the maternity hospital following Xiaoyu’s birth. Her brow was hidden in a scarf, as Chinese tradition dictated; her face was white with fatigue, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. She looked like a ghost. Friends and colleagues filed through the house to congratulate my parents. I slipped into their room and approached the bed where my mother was resting. She was so tired that I wasn’t even allowed speak to her. I thought she was going to abandon me—that she was going to die.

“Why are you crying, Xiao-Mei?” my father asked.

“I’m afraid Mama is dying.”

“Everyone dies someday, you know that. But you also know that Mama is not going to die right away!”

“If I have to die, I want to die with Mama.”

Worried, my father looked at me; he wondered how I could have such ideas at my age.

Luckily, my grandmother was there. She had come to live with us after the death of her husband. She was very beautiful, and had been born into an intellectual milieu. At the time, according to Chinese tradition, if a girl wanted to find a husband, she had to have very tiny feet. This is why girls’ feet were bound when they were still children, in order to stop them from growing. But my grandmother’s parents could not bear to witness the suffering this practice caused; this is how she became one of the first Chinese women to be able to walk freely, and she was proud of it.

“But then how did you find a husband?”

She answered with a burst of laughter. One thing was certain: her large feet hadn’t bothered my grandfather!

She knew how to read and write a little, which was rare for her era. Her judgment was sound, and she had a strong sense of authority. She was the type of capable woman one finds in many of the great Southern and East Asian civilizations. She had always been the pillar of our family: gay, spontaneous, and generous. Each time she took us out, she gave us presents, as if money were of no concern.

I shared a bed with my grandmother, which brought us even closer. Each night, she told me a story:

“Only one, Xiao-Mei.”

Each anecdote was a joy, a light-filled moment.

She also told me stories about when my mother was young.

“She wanted to get her driver’s license, and she succeeded. But since she had a rather dangerous idea of how to drive, one day, inevitably, she ran into a tree.”

“And then what? Was she hurt?”

“No, but your grandfather forbade her to touch the car again!”

My grandmother laughed, and I laughed with her. Together, we forgot about our new life, about the gloomy walls, the tiny apartment, and the lack of money.

Why had our life changed so much? The answer can be summed up in one name: Mao Zedong.

Even as a small child, I knew who he was. His picture was everywhere. Thanks to him, I was told, China had been liberated. Since his triumph over the capitalist and imperialist forces, the lives of the Chinese people had been transformed. The victorious Communist Party had freed them from oppression and misery. A radiant future awaited us, one in which there would be neither rich nor poor, neither mandarins nor coolies. There would only be happy, well-fed workers and peasants, like the ones we saw in pictures. We small children should revere Chairman Mao because we owed everything to him. He was a father to us all, someone we should love even more than our own fathers. It was my parents themselves who told me these things; they were convinced they were true.

A storm breaks over Beijing. The sky is black, and rain runs down the panes. My mother looks out the window. The courtyard is covered in mud. No question of washing the laundry outside, as she does at the end of each day. That will have to wait until tomorrow. Our evening meal is ready; our homework is done. It is so dark I can only make out her silhouette. My mother lights a little lantern, takes me by the hand, and says:

“Come with me, Xiao-Mei, I’m going to play something for you.”

We go into her bedroom: she lifts the piano lid and begins to play. Notes fill the air with an infinitely gentle music. The first piece she plays for me is Schumann’s
Reverie
. Seated next to her, I listen with my mouth agape.

An entire world opens up. I have the impression that the music immediately belongs to me. Is it my grandparents’ love of Western culture that I feel rising in me? Or the message of this work, whose profound depth and unassailable human truth has rendered it genuinely universal? I don’t know.

My mother finishes playing. She turns to me. We look at each other. In this moment I believe she knows what I am thinking. I have but one dream—to learn to play this friend that has joined our family.

From then on, each evening when I return from nursery school, I open the lid of the piano and feel my way along; I explore. To occupy myself I try to pick out, with one finger, the songs I’ve learned during the day.

“You always play the same thing, Xiao-Mei,” my mother says. “It’s nothing but noise, and it’s driving me crazy!”

But one day, when she comes to pick me up from school, she realizes that in fact this is a tune I am reconstructing. She allows me to continue until she can no longer stand the repetitive melodies I endlessly hammer out. Finally, she speaks the words that for weeks I have been longing to hear:

“Xiao-Mei, I’m going to teach you how to play the piano.”

Day after day, my mother taught me how to read music. But not as others go about it. She had a way of making chords, progressions, and transitions clear as if by magic. Each note stood for a member of our family: instead of going from C to G, I went from Papa to Xiaoru: it was much more enjoyable. Then we tackled Czerny’s simplest exercises, scales, and arpeggios. She also had me play pieces from a collection known to every beginning Chinese pianist:
Piano Music Masterpieces
, published by Albert Weir. It contains simple, well-known pieces by the great classical composers. A favorite selection is “A Maiden’s Prayer” by Tekla Bądarzewska, a piece whose name won’t mean much to most readers, but is quite famous in China. No doubt, even if I returned after decades of absence, they would still ask me to play it.

My mother told me the story of her piano. As a young girl in 1930s Shanghai, she wanted to play an instrument, and her father offered to pay for piano lessons. Later, she attended art school, where she studied painting—the summit of Chinese arts—while still working on her music. The piano was a wedding present from her parents.

“Along with you children, my piano is the most precious thing that I have in the world,” she said. “It has always been with me, through good times and bad.”

It was because of the piano that she had been able to find work in Beijing in the elementary school—she brought the instrument there with her. Later she said her piano fed us, but at the same time, it revealed my parents for what they were.

“How is it that you own a piano?” my father’s colleagues asked him.

My mother understood the meaning of this question: only the bourgeoisie, the
Chushen bu hao
—people with “bad family backgrounds”—would have been able to own such an object of capitalist luxury. Little by little, my mother fell under suspicion, but the school needed her to teach children music.

Finally, they acquired a piano, and my mother was able to take back her own. This is how it ended up at our house when I was three years old.

When I listened to my mother speak, I sensed that for her, this piano was much more than an object. It was a friend, a confidant.

“You know,” she told me, “the emperor Kangxi, who some two hundred years ago was the first to own a piano in China, demanded that the instrument be hailed as a dignitary during court ceremonies.”
¹

I also viewed the piano as if it were a person. When music rose from under my fingers, it seemed to me that the piano was singing, that it was telling me something. When I touched its keys, it responded in kind. I adored working with my mother. She never scolded me; instead she instilled in me the desire to make progress. We advanced step by step: for her, it was better not to work too much, like not eating too much. This didn’t keep her, ever the astute psychologist, from urging me on:

“Xiao-Mei, my students your age already play this piece.”

She encouraged me to tell stories through music, to let my imagination soar. I composed little melodies, and my mother, who was good at improvising, accompanied me. These sessions of four-handed playing were the apex of happiness: all of a sudden the piano drew together its lowest and highest voices, and I had the impression of ruling the whole world. I never wanted to stop.

In contrast, everything around me seemed darker.

This included my father. I don’t understand him well, and I understood him even less during this period. He was harsh with us, sometimes even violent.

“You must obey me!” he would thunder.

For him, children should follow the teachings of his master, Confucius, for whom “filial piety and respect for one’s elders is the basis of humanity.” As soon as he returned home, the atmosphere changed, became tense. We no longer dared to move or to speak. He flared up at the smallest thing.

One evening, my parents gave my older sisters and me tickets for the circus. We decided to return home on foot to spare them the cost of the bus, and we arrived home later than expected. My father was waiting for us, enormously worried. But he didn’t utter a single caring word. Instead, he began to shout at us and hit us with his shoes. It was something I never forgot.

The truth was that my father was suffering terribly from his situation. He had found work, but it was far beneath his capacities and his education, and he couldn’t support his family as he would have liked. Deep inside, he loved us, but he never let it show. We, his daughters, feared him above all.

It wasn’t until I had started to play the piano that I ceased to be scolded. Did the sound of the instrument cause my father to imagine a better life, like the one that his parents had once enjoyed?

My father is, above all, an honest man, to such an extent that it’s pathological. When he began to teach me how to write, the first ideogram he showed me was “honesty”:

He drew it for me before providing an explanation:

“Xiao-Mei, the cross at the top represents the number ten. Below, there are eyes, and in the corner to the left, a person. Ten eyes are watching you. That is honesty.”

My father practiced honesty every second of his life. When he did the shopping, he would return with fish that was not fresh and unripe fruit, for fear of depriving others. One of my earliest memories was hearing my mother say to him in Shanghai dialect:

“How foolish you are!”

The next time he came back from the market, I repeated this little sentence to him:

“How foolish you are!”

Everyone around me laughed. In the end, my father was forbidden to do the shopping.