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

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  “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.

  2

  Mother’s Library

  I didn’t know how to read.

  Mother was my library.

  I read mother

  One day

  The world will be at peace

  Man will be able to fly

  Wheat will sprout in the snow

  Money will have no purpose

  (…)

  But in the meantime

  Mother says

  We have to work a lot.

  (Lu Yuan, Fairy Tales)

  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 o
ne’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.

  My grandmother also passed on to me what was important to her. This is why, one day, she got it into her head to introduce me to the Beijing Opera. “To broaden your musical culture,” she told me. But perhaps also as a way for her to escape her daily life.

  The Beijing Opera is the height of accomplishment in the Chinese theatrical arts. The performers act, sing, dance, mime, and do acrobatics amidst magical sets. They devote their lives to their career, and their talent is based on a thousand-year-old tradition dating back to the Tang dynasty.

  For the occasion, my grandmother had slipped a lily into the buttonhole of her jacket. Sitting next to her, filled with anticipation, I watched as the lights dimmed. The orchestra, which was next to the stage, played a drum roll followed by a furious clashing of cymbals. The actors appeared, spectacularly made up, wearing magnificent, sparkling, multi-colored costumes. They began to sing, talk, and then dance. A few minutes passed. I was completely confused. Why were they all jumping about, and why were all the female roles played by men? I looked around me: everyone in the audience seemed so happy. They applauded the actors while eating and drinking. Peanut shells littered the floor. “For the people, food is heaven,” as a Chinese proverb says.

  Today I’m able to understand it, and I’m moved by this way of appreciating art, which reflects a simple, ancient tradition and a natural way of living. But that evening, I saw it differently. I turned to my grandmother:

  “I’m afraid. I want to go home.”

  “That’s impossible! You don’t know how lucky we were to get tickets!”

  I shut my mouth and absently observed the show. But nothing caught my attention, nothing appealed. Before I knew it, I had closed my eyes, and a few seconds later I drifted gently off to sleep, roused occasionally by cheers that erupted at critical moments in the performance.

  What a strange Chinese girl I was: moved by Schumann’s music and put to sleep by the Beijing Opera…

  My grandmother didn’t always understand me, but my mother did.

  During those moments we spent playing together, she too forgot everything around her: the damp, the dust, and the fatigue. But then she had to stop, start the laundry again, scrub and mend our clothing, and count and recount the money—which kept dwindling. For some time now, she had been forced to weigh the food she gave us, in order to keep expenses down.

  Every month we went to the Dong An market, the large market for Beijing artisans. For my sisters and me, it was a real outing, a great pleasure. We didn’t know where to look first. Fabric, clothing, toys: we breathed in the smells and our eyes devoured the sweets. What we didn’t know was that our parents used these occasions to secretly sell my mother’s jewelry, which fell in value each day, because to wear it had become suspect. You had to have been bourgeois, Chushen bu hao, to have acquired such things.

  Then came the day when my mother had sold everything of value. One evening, I heard my father ask her:

  “What are we going to do now? We have nothing left.”

  “There’s still the piano,” my mother answered.

  I felt my parents exchange glances, and then my mother said:

  “But we can’t sell it. Xiao-Mei plays it.”

  “Xiao-Mei plays it.” For me, in 1955, this sentence had taken on a different, less joyful meaning. Gone the nursery rhymes and playful scales, the four-handed tunes practiced while laughing. I had just turned six, and my mother wanted me to take the entrance exam for the children’s music school, a preparatory program for the Conservatory. She underestimated herself; she didn’t think she was competent enough to be my only teacher.

  I passed the exam and in the process discovered another world.

  The children’s music school was run with an iron fist; the professors were very exacting, too much so for me. I hungered for music, for discovery, and they forced me to work endlessly on the same few pieces. They weren’t wrong, but the consequences were not long in coming: I went to my weekly lessons with less and less pleasure, and I neglected my exercises.

  So much so that my teacher came to the house to complain about me. Our neighbors, always nosy, didn’t miss a trick about the visit, and rumors immediately spread through the siheyuan: “Did you see, Xiao-Mei’s professor came because she is not applying herself at school!”

  My parents were mortified.

  “If you don’t want to work anymore, I will close the piano, but I hope you won’t regret it,” my mother said to me gently.

  Since I didn’t answer, she carried out her threat. Over the course of three weeks, I acted as if nothing were wrong. But my mother finally opened it up again. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  I went back to work.

  What my mother didn’t know was what I was learning at school in addition to my piano studies.

  To begin with, I learned that all students were not equal. There were those, like me, who came to school in clothes that were worn and mended. There were others who always had new clothes. There were some who went for vacations by the sea, who took airplanes. And there were others whose only world was their little siheyuan.

  There were the “young pioneers,” who could be identified by the red handkerchiefs they tied around their necks. And others who weren’t allowed to join the organization, for mysterious reasons.

  Little by little I discovered that the well-dressed children who took airplanes were often in the young pioneers as well, and that their parents had high-level posts in the government or in the army of the New China. Other children had parents of whom they should be ashamed. This was my case.

  This was the period of the Great Leap Forward, which had been launched by Mao Zedong. The goal was to make up for the country’s economic backwardness: we had to catch up to Great Britain as quickly as possible. To meet the challenge, they said, we had to pull together, forget about bourgeois individualism, and put ourselves at the service of the people. All at once, classes were canceled and we found ourselves in the streets: our task was to gather all the iron implements we could find and bring them to foundries. In this way, even ten-year-old children c
ould contribute to the collective effort of industrialization. Our lives revolved around the word collectivism. Each day we learned that it was paramount, even more important than family.

  In order for collectivism to advance and for individualism to recede—and to put the spirit of Communism into our little heads—every Saturday morning we attended a session of self-criticism and denunciation. The principle was simple: our thoughts did not belong only to us, but also to the Party. We had to submit them, even our most private ones, for judgment, because only the Party knew what was good or bad, right or wrong. In this way it could eliminate “contradictions among the people.”

  For us, it meant you had to report on who had behaved well during the week, and who had not. A name was read out. You gave your opinion: had he truly worked on behalf of the collective? Was he a good revolutionary? Those who were not in agreement spoke up: no, he is not a good revolutionary because he was lazy, he cheated in class.

  These sessions were presented as a way to help us make progress. But we were so young. Mostly, we wanted to be accepted or we were afraid of being rejected. If our schoolmates criticized us, we felt ashamed, and we no longer dared look at them; we lost our friends.

  The more time passed, the more we dreaded being seen as bad revolutionaries. And progressively, like all children, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to be loved and admired.