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

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  After the Cultural Revolution, there were no important trials, except one for the Gang of Four. Nothing at all like the Nuremberg trials organized in the West in the wake of World War Two.

  No doubt this is because the truth of Mao’s disastrous reign has yet to be precisely established, due to a lack of well-researched historical studies. How many deaths were caused by the Cultural Revolution? By the Great Leap Forward? The full extent of the catastrophe remains unknown, as well as the real reasons why it happened. The time has not yet come for an objective assessment of what occurred.

  It is understandable that the Chinese people wish to turn the page on those dark times and finally lead normal lives. I think, however, there is a deeper source for this attitude, which is their concept of life. It can be found in the first great book of Chinese philosophical thought, the I Ching. Its title—known in English as The Book of Changes—says it all. Life is a continual process of transformation, and it is this process of change that we should honor, rather than a return to the past. Criminal acts are not forgotten, but a sort of natural justice that only the passage of time can bring about eventually supplants human justice. Chinese philosophers have an expression for this: bu de liao—knowing when to leave the past behind, instead of endlessly seeking revenge.

  On the other hand, the absence of criminal justice is evidence of a profound weakness. The trials that followed World War Two immensely buttressed the West’s resolve: by enshrining the principle of “Never again!” Western nations encouraged a sense of vigilance. They strengthened universal moral standards and forged new ones, all of them designed to prevent, now and forever, the return of the Hydra.

  28

  Music, Water, and Life

  Great sound is silent.

  […]

  The Tao is hidden and nameless;

  Yet it alone knows how to

  render help and to fulfill.

  (Laozi)

  In 2003, I was seated in Dr. Krishna Clough’s office at the Institut Curie. My tests had come back positive, and his diagnosis left no room for doubt. I thought about my mother, who had refused chemotherapy. Like her, I was scared to undergo this type of treatment, not so much because of the suffering involved but because I feared it would destroy my energy. I asked the doctor how long I would have if I did nothing. He hesitated a moment. Three years, at the most.

  For the first time, I was confronted with the truth that we all try to hide from: one day, we all pass away. Oddly, this thought, which could have plunged me into despair, relieved my anxiety. After all, three years is a long time. I had led a very rich and varied life.

  I had experienced everything—except for happiness and peace—but I didn’t think that they were within my reach.

  I was still sitting in Dr. Clough’s office when I became aware of what I still desired to do. I wanted to play the entire piano repertoire, to record as much as possible. The final sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, to understand what those towering figures were attempting to say as death approached. The complete Well-Tempered Clavier, my constant companion since Zhangjiakou. For the longest time, I had thought it was easier to play than to listen to, but I now glimpsed the possibility of communicating it to a wider audience.

  What I wanted to do was to play music, to record masterpieces, to not leave this earth regretting that I hadn’t done that. I wondered if three years was too short to fully accomplish it. No, it should be possible.

  And yet, when I returned home, I fell apart, overwhelmed. Just as I was beginning to become successful, everything came crashing down, one more time. It didn’t make any sense.

  My friends urged me to follow Dr. Clough’s recommendations and undergo treatment. Finally, Josette, the friend who had introduced me to this eminently sensible doctor, found the right thing to say:

  “Be reasonable. Here, you are surrounded by family—your family of friends. Your illness has been detected early, don’t waste any time. Take matters in hand.”

  I was tempted to seek the solitude of the mountains in China, where I thought I could regain my health in the silence of nature. But I couldn’t play or record there. It was then that I decided to follow my friends’ advice.

  I was extremely touched by the expressions of friendship that poured in. While I was still in the hospital, I received invitations to perform. One difficult month followed another until, one day, I returned home and was reunited with my beloved Steinway. That day I found myself as emotional as when I had come across that worn-out accordion in the courtyard at Yaozhanpu, or when my piano arrived at the Zhangjiakou train station. I played the Goldberg Variations. And I was reborn.

  Once again, I was saved by music.

  While I was still a child, I lost everything, but music helped me to survive.

  Then, at the Conservatory, ideology got the upper hand. It convinced me that books and musical scores should be burned, that The Little Red Book was enough. When I arrived at Zhangjiakou, I had been reduced to a brainwashed wild child. During my first year there, I don’t remember having felt a single emotion. Like my companions, my mind was empty. We had all been turned into puppets, into machines programmed to blindly obey the regime’s every command. Music became something of minor interest; my revolutionary activities were so much more important!

  Mao had always understood the power that art—and music in particular—had over the people. He knew that artists were dangerous individuals, constantly questioning reality, always demanding more freedom. For this reason he attacked them, and allowed his wife to appropriate art through her Yangbanxi. Mao actually considered knowledge itself to be dangerous—his organized, systematic, and extremist obscurantism is proof of that.

  But the power of music is such that it inexplicably thrust its way back into my life. The weakness and gullibility of “Thousand-Drops” played a role in this rediscovery. Far less intelligent than Mao, he had no idea of the domino effect he was setting in motion by not banning our concert. He was unlike any of the other commanders of artists’ camps, where it was strictly forbidden to touch an instrument.

  Like my companions, I also sensed that the regime, in all its madness, had pushed us to the brink of total dehumanization. So far, in fact, that we couldn’t go any further. The Cultural Revolution was on the verge of stripping us of our humanity completely, and this was impossible. Just as we were about to be transformed into beasts, some sort of instinct saved us. Deep inside us, there remained a spark of humanity. At their peril, totalitarian regimes—which underestimate a human being’s resources—always forget this fact. Music blew on this spark and revived it.

  Our reawakening to music, and to art in general, changed everything—both for me, and for my camp companions. Music gave us back our humanity. It offered us a glimpse, far off in a corner of the sky, of the possibility of spirituality. It taught us how to love again, including in the most concrete sense of the word: five couples were formed at Zhangjiakou.

  It was in camp that I understood music’s power, and how fortunate I was to be a musician.

  Music brings people together, in ways that politics or religion cannot. It instills a powerful love of humanity that allows you to overcome every hardship. When you play music, you give of yourself unconditionally—and this is my definition of love.

  Only now I am able to understand the extent to which my experience of the Cultural Revolution taught me to never use music’s power to impose anything on my audience. I suffered too much under the yoke of servitude, and I prefer to speak rather than to compel. Perhaps this is what moves certain listeners. I often think back to my seat companion on the flight to Los Angeles, who quoted Laozi:

  The best man is like water.

  Water is good; it benefits all things

  and does not compete with them.

  It dwells in lowly places that all disdain.

  This is why it is so near to Tao.

  I can now better comprehend what Laozi was saying. Water is useful, it serves. It descends and does not r
ise. It nestles in the unloved hollows, not in the heights where everyone dreams of world domination. It competes with no one, and yet it overcomes rock—the hardest substance in the world. Without water, life would not exist.

  This is one reason why, since I have lived in France, I have tried to bring music into prisons, retirement homes, hospitals—places of despair.

  I remember one concert I gave in a prison in Bergerac. It was under the auspices of Musique Espérance, an association created by the Argentine pianist Miguel Ángel Estrella. Before the concert, I gave a great deal of thought to the program, hesitating between light, accessible works and more serious pieces. In the end, I once again chose the Goldberg Variations. I shared my plans with a few friends: they were skeptical, they thought the work was too long and not right for the “general public.” They instilled enough doubt in me that I finally decided to perform only a few of the variations.

  Before I started to play, I said a few words to the hundred inmates who had decided to come to the concert:

  “I don’t know why all of you are here, in this prison. But I can tell you that I was also once in prison: I spent several years in a labor camp in China. There, at one time, it was believed that people who liked the music I’m going to play for you needed to be ‘re-educated.’ It was composed by Bach, and is entitled the Goldberg Variations. Since it’s quite long, I’m only going to play ten of its thirty variations.”

  The prisoners didn’t want me to stop, and one hour later I had played the entire piece. The small upright piano on which I performed was totally out of tune, but I gave it everything I had. Then, an older prisoner spoke up:

  “Could you play some Beethoven for us?”

  I obliged with the Waldstein Sonata, which I often interpreted at that time. He came up to me at the end of the concert:

  “I know who you are. I recorded one of your concerts that was broadcast by France Musique. You played the Waldstein then as well. I listen to that cassette every single day.”

  As I was leaving, I asked one of the guards why the man was in prison.

  “A crime of passion,” I was told.

  After everything I have experienced, I cannot take an intellectual approach to music. When I play, I try to speak to people, to tell them something, to show them the beauty of a work, to move them. Having an audience is crucial for me. Some of my fellow artists assert that they play for themselves rather than for an audience. I take the exact opposite approach: my goal is to share with others.

  Humanity is the truth of music. What is important to me is that, this evening, I may be able to reach one person, someone who is not a musician. That I might be able to reveal a part of his or her humanity, of our shared humanity, of which he or she may be unaware. And one day, who knows, perhaps this may help that person to speak out when what is essential is threatened.

  29

  Wisdom and Non-Being

  He who conquers himself is truly strong.

  (Laozi)

  These days, when I get together with my former classmates from the Beijing Conservatory, they always bring up the same topic:

  “Xiao-Mei, you don’t have any safety net. Who’s going to take care of you if you’re ill?”

  What this means is, You haven’t really achieved success because you aren’t able to assure a comfortable lifestyle for yourself. But since we are really old friends, they add:

  “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you when you’re old.”

  For many of them, the impact of the Cultural Revolution had been too overwhelming; they gave up on their artistic careers, thinking that it was too late to start again. One became a real estate agent, another is an acupuncturist, others work in piano import-export. Even those who became musicians invested their money, and nearly all of them have become wealthy. The Cultural Revolution destroyed their idealism. But, by an odd twist of fate, it turned them into capitalists instead of communists!

  My friends are not wrong, of course. After I recovered from my illness, I thought a great deal about how uncertain my situation was; I worried how I would earn a living if a relapse put an end to my musical career. That said, material success is the exact opposite of what I am seeking, of the feeling of accomplishment I am after.

  And I have come close to this feeling. I experience it each time I think I’m ready to interpret a work after many years of practice. The first time this happened was when I performed the Goldberg Variations in Paris. It seemed that nothing bad could happen, and that I knew—as strange as it seemed for someone who lives in a perpetual state of doubt—exactly what had to be done.

  Yes, those moments—which one hopes for all of one’s life—are blessed moments of clarity. But they are rare and pass too quickly. The Chinese word for happiness, kuai le, says it all—it literally means: “fleeting happiness.” For Chinese people, there are moments of bliss, in a day or in a lifetime, but they never last.

  Also, it often seems that when people finally fulfill their dreams, it is too late. This is something with which I have often been confronted.

  In 2001, when I was finally granted French citizenship, I asked my parents if they would like to come visit me in Paris. My father refused, which I was half expecting. As a good Chinese philosopher, he saw travel as superficial and useless.

  “What good would it do?” he asked. “How can you discover a country in just a few days? Don’t hold it against me, but to me traveling seems pointless.”

  My mother, on the other hand, accepted with pleasure. She had longed for such a trip since she was a child. She came with one of my sisters and her husband.

  When I met her at the airport, she was in a wheelchair. Several years ago she had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, but I immediately saw that her condition was now considerably worse. My sister explained how hard it had been to get through customs—our mother had forgotten everything, even her own name.

  I took her to all of Paris’s great museums: the Musée d’Orsay, the Picasso Museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne, and of course, her beloved Louvre, where we went nearly every day. I wheeled her through the painting galleries, where she talked about each work of art. She already knew many of them from art books, or from having copied some of them. I felt that she was happy. But once we had left the Louvre, she almost immediately forgot that we had spent the entire afternoon there.

  A friend took her on a tour of Paris in her car. We drove past the Théâtre de la Ville:

  “That’s where Xiao-Mei performs,” she said.

  My mother looked at her:

  “But what does Xiao-Mei do for a living?”

  My mother had always hoped to see me play in a great concert hall, but she never imagined that it would happen in Paris—Paris! And now her dream had come true; her daughter was a “success” in her understanding of the word, and now this was something she could no longer grasp.

  Success in itself is nothing. Once you have achieved it, the most difficult task still lies ahead—mastering yourself.

  Some people are helped by religion. Others, like my mother, don’t seem to need it. They draw instead on a sort of natural strength—an inner power, fate—or simply life itself. In any case, it is something spontaneous and unconscious. I admire such people. There exists a life force in spontaneity and the unconscious that is often underestimated. This can be seen in Zhuangzi’s story of Hui and the Centipede. One day, Hui asked the Centipede:

  “I walk by bouncing on one foot. I can’t imagine doing as you do. How do you use so many feet?”

  And the Centipede answered:

  “I do it naturally, without knowing either how or why.”

  A baby cries but never harms its voice. Drunks, like sleepwalkers, rarely hurt themselves.

  In order to play, one must avoid thinking too much, so as to rediscover one’s spontaneity and the power of the unconscious. Because it is in those moments that receptivity to others and to the world’s vital, spiritual energies come together—and inspiration may descend.


  Wisdom dwells within us, it seems to me, but finding that wisdom requires efforts that are often painful. All my life, I have defined myself by my relationship to what is exterior: people’s opinions of me and the various forces to which I have been subjected. For a very long time, the endless sessions of self-criticism and denunciation—which I find so difficult to forget—kept me from being myself.

  Now I am beginning to understand: for the truly wise, the exterior is unimportant. Their strength is inside them. Even when they are imprisoned, rejected, and reviled, they understand that liberation lies within.

  The piece that expresses this best for me is Beethoven’s final sonata, Opus 111. It was the favorite piece of both of my masters, though one lived in the East and the other in the West. Its second movement consists of variations. Once again it seems that, in order to express the inexpressible, one must speak of a process of transformation, parallel to that found in Chinese philosophy. A simple, unadorned theme, close in its essence to the aria of the Goldberg Variations.

  The theme of the arietta in Opus 111 leads us forward in the same gentle way as the Variations’ aria. An initial variation followed by a second, in fugato, heightens the tension. The third variation then arrives; many pianists play it as if it were a furiously paced piece of virtuoso jazz, although I feel that it is imbued with nobility. We are nearing the renunciation. The fourth variation lifts us into another world; with the rising pianissimo, we break the bonds of earth, we climb into a resplendently colored sky, piercing the banks of clouds that encircle the planet. We are elsewhere. The fifth variation summons both the piano’s highest and lowest notes, the ones I loved to hear when I was first learning to play. Here, Beethoven throws open the instrument to the whole world, both the yin and the yang. The original theme then reappears, like a hymn to the glory of the world, before disintegrating and sinking into a sort of nothingness, which, in itself, is a sort of deliverance.