The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  The Secret Piano

  Text copyright © 2007 by Zhu Xiao-Mei

  English translation copyright © 2012 by Ellen Hinsey

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  The Secret Piano was first published in 2007 by Editions Robert Laffont as La Rivière et son secret. Translated from French by Ellen Hinsey. Published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2012.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61109-077-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011916330

  The Secret Piano

  From Mao’s Labor Camps to Bach’s Goldberg Variations

  Zhu Xiao-Mei

  Translated by Ellen Hinsey

  Table of Contents

  ARIA

  PART ONE: CHINA

  1. The Solemn Hour

  2. Mother’s Library

  3. First Teacher

  4. Downfall

  5. From Mozart to Mao

  6. This Piano Was Acquired by Exploiting the People

  7. A Bonfire of Bach

  8. A Revolutionary

  9. Departures

  10. Camp 4619

  11. A Piglet and Five Kittens

  12. A Friend Arrives

  13. The “Villa Medici”

  14. From Mao to Mozart

  15. A Seagull in Hong Kong

  PART TWO: THE WEST

  16. The Land of Freedom

  17. A Western Master

  18. With Oliver

  19. An Act of Love

  20. The Power of Emptiness

  21. Dreaming of Paris

  22. Starting Over

  23. The Goldberg Variations

  24. A Haven

  25. The Tree of Mama Zheng

  26. Life Starts at Forty

  27. A Wounded Life

  28. Music, Water, and Life

  29. Wisdom and Non-Being

  30. Return

  ARIA

  For my mother

  This book would not have been possible without the support of Michel Mollard.

  Aria

  My grandmother liked to tell this story:

  “The evening you were born, I looked out at the sky over Shanghai. The setting sun was breaking through the clouds. I had never seen such a beautiful sunset. I remember thinking that your life would be a resplendent tapestry, just like that palette of reds. I was sure of it.”

  That was a few weeks before Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. “Never again will the Chinese people be enslaved,” he had declared on that occasion in Tiananmen Square. Rarely has a prophecy proved so true, and at the same time so false.

  I hesitated a long time before telling my story.

  My father often reminds me how useless it is to speak of the past:

  “What does it serve, Xiao-Mei? When you die, you shouldn’t leave a trace. Even if you want to, it’s not possible. Your footsteps along life’s path are always erased by the sun, snow, and wind.” He likes to add: “Think of wild geese—they fly high in the sky, covering long distances without landing or leaving any tracks. Take them as examples, not the sparrows, which settle on the earth. The sparrow will never understand the dream of the wild goose.”

  He’s right. For quite some time I thought I didn’t have any particular reason to write—don’t I express myself through music? I even thought that I didn’t have the ethical right to do so. Among the Chinese of my generation, my suffering was not the worst, far from it.

  But, as is the case in life, every being, every thing has two sides.

  And I wanted to write. First, for those who had fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution. Forty years later, not much is said about this period, and I have often noticed how little is known in the West about these events.

  I have had the opportunity to live in both China and the West, in three different countries. Through this, I have learned a lifelong lesson: it is critical to bring cultures together, to initiate dialogue among them. I also wanted to describe this experience, which I believe to be particularly important.

  This book is made up of thirty chapters—like the thirty variations in Bach’s masterwork, the Goldberg Variations. Thirty chapters plus an opening and closing aria, bringing the work full circle like time’s continuum—like the wheel of life.

  I am often asked how a Chinese woman, brought up in such a distant cultural milieu, can play Bach. My hope is that after having read this book, the reader will understand and, above all, have the desire to listen, or re-listen, to Bach. I also hope that he or she will have the desire to read or reread Laozi, the great Chinese philosopher.

  For these two sages are very much alike, and their two cultures—Chinese and Western—are not so dissimilar.

  PART ONE

  CHINA

  1

  The Solemn Hour

  I have witnessed many men

  Silently weeping

  In the night

  (Tang Qi, “The Solemn Hour”)

  There it stands, in my parents’ bedroom. The room is so small it takes up all the available space. The movers had a real struggle getting it through the door, stopping a number of times, sweat running down their faces. Out of curiosity, the neighbors file into the courtyard one after the other to peek through the window and observe what is going on. Finally, it is in place. Freed from the dirty cloths it was wrapped in, it makes its appearance.

  I fearfully take refuge behind a chair. My mother draws near, circling, looking, and examining it. She opens its lid, and a name appears: Robinson. Its ivory keyboard gives off a pale glow that illuminates the shadowy room. For a few brief seconds, my mother lets her hand pass across the small, yellowed keys. A melody issues from the piece of furniture, rising into the room. It can talk? A smile has barely crossed my lips when my mother pulls her hand back and closes the lid. The mysterious voice falls silent.

  My mother turns to us and sighs:

  “How happy I am—”

  I didn’t know what it was, a piano. I was barely three years old, and I had never seen anything like it. I was fascinated. I wondered where it had come from, this object that spoke when you touched it.

  Strangely, my mother never played the piano. But every morning, she dusted it: her first act of housework.

  “Such dust! In Shanghai, there wasn’t so much dust. Why did you bring me here?” she would add, turning towards my father.

  She never missed an opportunity to complain about Beijing. The weather was terrible, the city was polluted, and it was difficult to eat well. Sometimes in the morning when I got up, I had the impression that she had been crying. I would ask her what was wrong.

  “It’s nothing, Xiao-Mei. The smoke from the stove has gotten into my eyes,” she would answer.

  I watched her decorate the piano with paper flowers, the way in China one adorns the jitan, the altar to one’s ancestors. In the house we didn’t have a jitan, but we did have a piano.

  I had the impression that the piano was just for me.

  I would open its lid and randomly bang on its ivory keys for the pleasure of hearing the sounds fill the room. If I went to one end of the keyboard, the piano’s voice sounded like a dragon. At the other end, like a bird. Very quickly, however, I felt powerless and gave up. That certainly wasn’t music.

 
Sometimes, when other children came to the house, I would show them how to strike the keys, and the cacophony would entertain us for a while. It was amusing for us, but not for my mother. One day, she firmly shut the lid.

  “OK, that’s enough, I can’t stand it anymore. You’re hurting it—get out!”

  And the piano fell silent once again. No one touched it: neither she, nor I, nor anyone. Still, it had become a new member of our household.

  Our apartment: two rooms for seven people, just over five hundred square feet within a siheyuan—a low square of houses built around a small central courtyard. There was one water tap and one toilet for eleven families. Badly washed diapers hung from the windows. The floor was black and eternally damp, and the noise the mice made each night gnawing in the ceiling terrified me. Still, we were not the most unfortunate. The other residents of the siheyuan were even worse off, like the widow whose ten children all slept in one big bed.

  We had lived there since my parents moved to Beijing to be with one of my father’s sisters, nicknamed “Momo,” which means “aunt” in Shanghai dialect. She suggested that my parents come and work in the small shop that she and her husband owned. They accepted, because there was no longer any place for them in Shanghai.

  The troubles had started in the winter of 1949. The weather had been so harsh that, in Shanghai, hundreds died from cold and hunger. Each morning, the sun rose over new groups of emaciated, frozen corpses on the sidewalks. The civil war between the Communist Party and the Guomindang was over, but it had left the country in chaos. Administrative structures had collapsed, public transportation was often either blocked or requisitioned, and many companies had either gone bankrupt or were barely functioning. My grandparents’ fortune had melted away like snow in the sun.

  In the eyes of the new regime, my grandparents were flawed in almost every possible way.

  My father’s father had been a businessman who was fascinated by the West. By turns he had been a furniture manufacturer, a farmer, a tailor, a restaurant owner, a building contractor, and the director of a dance studio and a cinema. A simple desire to create, to take risks, had led him into all sorts of professions. Introducing Western customs, organizing an evening dance in 1920s China—could there have been anything more unconventional?

  Where had this fascination come from? A mystery. My father, who was only thirteen when my grandfather died, was never able to explain it.

  My mother’s parents, the Shengs, had made a fortune in import-export. My grandfather had not learned English at school but he spoke it fluently because of his business affairs. They were steeped in foreign culture, which mingled with our own. Because of them, starting at a young age my mother was familiar with European art—she knew about the finest paintings in the Louvre as if she had seen them herself.

  With the Shengs’ support, after their marriage my parents were able to move into a duplex in an elegant building in the former French Concession. Their windows looked out on a wide avenue lined with plane trees, across from Fuxing Park. It was decorated with rosewood furniture and porcelain vases, and the scent of camphorwood chests perfumed my mother’s dresses. At that time, despite the damage done by the war, Shanghai was still a little Paris, refined and bustling.

  However, everything changed during that terrible winter. The clinic where my father worked lost its patients, or at least those who could pay for consultations. It was forced to close its doors.

  If my father had not had family obligations, he would no doubt have gone on working for free. He was a dreamer and an idealist—he still is. This was due to his years of study with an old Chinese master, whom my father patiently assisted on his rounds visiting the sick and on expeditions in search of rare plants in the mountains. It was also the result of my father’s childhood. Because his mother died shortly after his birth, his older sisters had taken on the task of raising him.

  My father—Qixien—was a strange child. He was never hot, nor cold, nor hungry. He seemed so incapable of expressing himself that there were doubts about his intelligence. Absolutely nothing affected him. Perhaps he had withdrawn into himself after his mother’s death, not wanting to know anything more of the misfortune that surrounded him. My grandfather, however, saw my father’s condition differently. Such wisdom, and at such a young age! The greatest philosophers spent a lifetime trying to reach such a state of detachment, and here his son had already attained it. He paid particular attention to my father—care that his son repaid in full, and for a lifetime. Later, my father confided that during the worst moments of his life, he thought of his father in order to find the strength to go on.

  Thus, my father would have continued practicing medicine free of charge, but he did not have the liberty to do so. He had a wife and three daughters to feed: me and my two older sisters, Xiaoru and Xiaoyin. Since he could not practice his profession, he had to give up medicine and take whatever job he could find—as an accountant, a sales representative—anything to support his family.

  Then my parents received Momo’s invitation to come to Beijing and work in their little shop. They accepted, and in the summer of 1950 we left Shanghai.

  Our family came very close, however, to having a different destiny altogether.

  It was a few weeks after I was born. My father had received several letters from his brother, Qiwen, who had moved to Taiwan. He had found work and asked my father to join him. My parents hesitated. The offer was tempting, but did it make sense? China had a new government: its leaders had noble ideas, they were honest and sincere, anarchy was waning, and the future looked hopeful. On the other hand, was there a place in this new future for them?

  Finally, they made up their minds. They bought tickets and were ready to depart when it was suddenly announced that leaving China was strictly forbidden. Their life was turned upside down: my parents did not go to Taiwan, and for more than thirty years the regime held Qiwen’s departure against my father.

  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 l
ove, 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.