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

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  We have reached a place of supreme wisdom.

  It is perhaps clear by now that, of all the great Chinese philosophers, it is with Laozi that I feel the closest affinity.

  To demonstrate the difference between Confucianists, Buddhists, and Taoists—who are disciples of Laozi—the Chinese like to invoke the allegory of the glass of water. The Confucianist says: “This glass of water must be shared. Give your parents the first sip.” For the followers of Confucius, the greatest virtue is the social order, how society is organized. The Buddhist says: “Must I drink?” because, for him, the most important thing is mastering emotion and desire. Finally, the Taoist looks at the glass and says: “Water does not exist.”

  30

  Return

  When the storms still raged,

  I was not so miserable.

  (Franz Schubert, Winterreise,

  set to poems by Wilhelm Müller)

  It is 2006. This January 27th marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart. Is there another great artist—musician, writer, painter—whose exact birthday we celebrate in such a manner? Leonardo da Vinci? Shakespeare? Dante? Who would do such a thing? “Happy Birthday” is what we wish to children, and Mozart is a child—but one who experienced everything, and thus was a child who possessed the wisdom of an elderly sage. Laozi prefigured Mozart when he wrote:

  He who is in harmony with the Tao

  is like a newborn child.

  Finally, I found the strength to seek out my old camp companions. For more than two decades I had stayed away: seeing them would have filled me with despair.

  I took advantage of several concerts in Tokyo to search for Cunzhi, my bassoonist classmate. It was Cunzhi who was beaten before the entire Conservatory on that summer night in 1966, the memory of which still haunts me. I knew that he had given up his career and moved to Japan, where he opened a Chinese restaurant. A white-haired man approached me—Cunzhi! We hadn’t seen each other in over thirty years. Although we didn’t shed tears, we were overwhelmed with emotion. He told me how, several times a year, he transforms his tiny restaurant into a musical salon. He invites artists to perform, and plays himself from time to time. In all, he has organized more than two hundred musical events.

  We talked over what had happened during that long-ago summer: the summary executions, the bodies stacked up in the Conservatory’s annex.

  “I was lucky,” Cunzhi simply remarked.

  The fate of this talented musician—who had everything he needed for a career as a great soloist—was intensely moving, but he did not speak about it. The moment came to say good-bye. I tried to find the right words:

  “You are the real hero of our class. You endured everything—ostracism, fear, violence, and solitude. But you have remained true to yourself, an idealist, just like I remembered you.”

  I received news of Huang Anlun. I knew—we all did—that after leaving China, he first went to Yale and then to Canada, and that he had become one of the greatest contemporary Chinese composers. I learned that he had converted to Christianity. But music inspired by Christianity was only permitted to be played in churches.

  Were Christian works banned from public performances simply because freedom of expression is limited in China? Or was the authorities’ decision also a defensive reaction against religious proselytism—a word that is not easily translatable into Chinese—which is viewed as a form of aggression? Since the West continues to adopt the same viewpoint for every culture other than its own, such proselytizing is not only religious, but also, in a more general sense, cultural in nature.

  Christianity—which means a great deal to me—suffers from this flaw of wanting to convert others, to extend its influence. The very concept is foreign to the Chinese. Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists all practice religions that are more akin to philosophies. China never experienced anything like religious warfare, and the idea that one single religion can encapsulate truth is incomprehensible.

  2006. Return to Beijing.

  My mother asked me to play the Piano Music Masterpieces from my childhood for her. The doll I purchased in Boston kept watch near the piano; through it, I remain close to my mother’s side. My mother remembered each piece in the collection, and hummed them along with me. One day, she asked:

  “Could you teach me how to play?”

  I helped her to sit at the keyboard, but she was unable to attempt anything. I played Schumann’s Reverie for her. She looked at me:

  “How is it that you play so well?”

  For once my father, who hardly says a word, had a favor to ask of me. He wanted to pay a visit to the grave of his friend Lao Xue, the president of the university where my father worked for so long; it was also thanks to Lao Xue that I was able to find employment after my return from Zhangjiakou. This man was so important to my father that, as the end of Lao Xue’s life approached, my father visited him every day.

  We called his son to ask about the exact location of his father’s grave. It was off in the countryside, not far from the Great Wall. We had trouble finding it, and only the presence of a large pine tree finally showed us the way.

  My father spoke to his friend:

  “Lao Xue, I have come to see you.” Then he turned to me: “Xiao-Mei, we have forgotten to bring wine for Lao Xue.”

  I went in search of some water.

  “It’s all right,” he told me. “Laozi preferred water to wine.”

  We each drank a mouthful and then, in accordance with Chinese tradition, my father poured out the rest onto his friend’s burial place.

  He stayed and talked to Lao Xue for two hours, while I waited at a distance. I owe you my thanks as well, Uncle Xue.

  It was time to leave. In the car that took us to Beijing, my father was lost in thought, not uttering a word. Then, suddenly, he told me:

  “I also want to be buried there, when the time comes.” After a moment, he added, “Lao Xue was the only person who trusted me during the Cultural Revolution.”

  It chilled me to hear him say this, but it was true. We, his family, did not stand by him during his ordeal. As children, my sisters and I thought he was harsh with us. Later, the regime taught us to mistrust him, to withhold our love.

  As we drove into Beijing, my father had something else to tell me. Ever since I moved to Paris, every afternoon at five thirty p.m., he listens to a daily program broadcast on Chinese radio devoted to France. If he has to go out, even to visit friends, he brings a transistor radio with him, so he doesn’t miss this daily appointment.

  “I have been by your side,” he concluded simply.

  I had another visit to make. I wanted to see Aizhen again, the friend who had, the day after my self-criticism session at the Beijing Conservatory, left something on my desk for me to eat. We hadn’t seen each other in thirty-two years.

  One night in Paris, she had appeared to me in a dream. I awoke with a start, unable to get back to sleep, tormented by the thought that I hadn’t sufficiently thanked her. I got up and found pen and paper; I had to write to her. But she had never written back, and since then I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  How the two of us had changed.

  “I’m ashamed that I abandoned my career,” she told me.

  And yet, Aizhen had been a very fine musician. After the Cultural Revolution, she had been sent to a job in Dalian, an intellectual and cultural wasteland. There, she had poured her heart out giving piano lessons to apathetic students, and had married a university professor. He was diagnosed with throat cancer the same year her daughter was born.

  “After something like that, you realize you can withstand anything,” she concluded.

  Her husband was there, by her side. He had been ill again when Aizhen got my letter, and this was why she hadn’t answered. I turned to him.

  “I have to tell you—you married a very fine woman.”

  He smiled.

  During our talk, I learned that her parents had always been Christians. Is that why she extended a h
elping hand when I was shunned by everyone else?

  As we took our leave of each other, I felt a great rush of well-being. I had finally been able to thank my friend.

  The time had come to return to Zhangjiakou.

  A friend of mine from Beijing had convinced me to travel there with her. After arriving at the station, we began talking with the person who had come to pick us up. We wanted to try and visit Dayu. But it had been thirty years since I had been there, and after driving for some time we couldn’t locate it. Finally we arrived at a large, modern prison with a high exterior wall—nothing like the damp, filthy buildings where I had been held. We were welcomed by the prison director, a pleasant man. I told him who I was, and he offered to give us a tour. We declined—the new prison had nothing to do with my experience. Nevertheless, as we were leaving, I asked him: were there political prisoners here? He smiled. No, not here, elsewhere. I decided that he could be trusted.

  After we left, we walked around the town, which had completely changed. All around the new prison, neat rows of two-story houses stood on either side of wide, well-maintained streets. What progress. No, clearly, all my points of reference had disappeared—except for the howling wind.

  My friend took my arm. She wanted to show me the churches that had been built in the area. The nearest one was a very large yellow and white building. Its steeple looked like a minaret, so much so that I had to ask if it wasn’t actually a mosque. But it clearly wasn’t, as a service was being held at that very moment. We slipped inside and took our place among the congregation. There were hundreds of worshipers, most of them peasants, praying and singing hymns. I reflected on the church’s interior, which was not completely successful. We had the same experience in Quijia-zhuang, near to my third place of imprisonment, where we secretly gave food to the starving peasants.

  To think that people were praying in the same place where, thirty-five years earlier, we had been prisoners…I thought about the success of Christianity in this far-flung region of China. No doubt the local clergy had worked hard to make this happen. But the Christian faith also provided a community, that of Christians, which one could join. This stood in contrast to the great Chinese philosophers, who extolled the virtue of solitude and distance, of withdrawing from the world. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that many Chinese people who had once lived in misery, deprived of a future, had discovered hope.

  As for me, I am more at home with Chinese philosophy—I prefer to be alone, face-to-face with myself, rather than in the company of others. Religion is too private a world to be shared. On the other hand, my life has been intimately bound up with a stalwart of the Christian faith—Bach. My days and my nights have been devoted to his music. And Bach did not live like a sage in retreat from the world; he was always surrounded, always in demand, and he worked hard to make his music something through which one might glimpse the meaning of life. This idea of service is an important part of the Christian faith. Each person possesses a part of the truth, for those who can glimpse it.

  As I left the last church, I once again thought about the project that had never been far from my thoughts: to create a school in China. Even though I left my country twenty years ago, I realized that I’d never given up the idea that I might someday return—despite my protestations to the contrary.

  Before then, the idea of giving concerts in China didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My generation—the lost generation—was mostly concerned with earning a comfortable living, which I can understand. For so long, they had been denied any sort of artistic education. But what about the new generation? Shouldn’t we try to pass on to them some of our knowledge?

  I began to have a dream.

  I saw all of us together, myself, my former classmates, and a few others, in a school that we had founded, a school in which all the different arts were paramount. We would live with the students, talking and discussing things together. Classes would be free of charge. The money that each teacher had earned—in whatever varying degree—would be used to provide scholarships for the students. In today’s China, only very rich parents can afford to send their children to the Conservatories in Beijing and Shanghai.

  The dream unfolds…I would do my best to share with my few students some of the truths I have glimpsed in my life as a pianist. I would try to convince them to serve only music, to turn a blind eye to materialism, to cultivate a spirit that is at once humble and passionate.

  My friends and I would not only be able to pass on some of our experience but also rectify what was most painful for our generation. Even worse than our loss of freedom and the misery of our living conditions was that we were denied an education. The absence of books, scores, and even dictionaries—this was a torture far worse than the physical deprivation we endured: it creates a void capable of extinguishing the future and rendering death preferable to life. What good is an existence without the hope of growth—an existence that can only imagine before it the darkness of ignorance—and submission, which is ignorance’s hand-maiden? Yes, my friends and I are in agreement. The world needs to reflect on this lesson of the Cultural Revolution: to ensure peace and the future of the world, the absolute first priority is education.

  In my dream, our school would be founded in Dayu, our former prison.

  Aria

  Alone, I walk through the streets of Zhangjiakou.

  Often in my life I have chosen to return to the past to find the energy to go forward. I believe Zhangjiakou will give me this courage. It’s true, life has brought me many things. But it has also broken me, left me unable to accept myself, forced me to subject myself to constant, unhealthy doubt.

  The longer I live, the more I feel the presence of Bach and Laozi beside me. They have helped me to overcome past trials, and they will help me to face those to come, because the hardest trial lies ahead: to finally find inner freedom. I have the impression that I have not yet done anything with my life, and that I no longer have the strength to give it a sense of meaning.

  The wind sweeps the streets of Zhangjiakou. The afternoon comes to an end. I look up at the sky. There are none of the red tonalities that led my grandmother to predict that my life would be a “resplendent tapestry,” and yet, it is still the same sky. A somber sky of blues and grays, that of a cloudy spring day. But it is also a sky full of the subtleties and nuances that my painter friend, Fu, once shared with me here, in Zhangjiakou. Yes, now I can identify them all: shifting colors and mixed emotions. At night I question myself, I am afraid of others, of myself. I have an acute awareness of my impotence, my inability to achieve perfection. But in the morning, I know that it is still there, in the next room, waiting for me. It always keeps its promise of fulfillment. My piano.

  I contemplate the sky over Zhangjiakou. I hear the voice of my grandmother:

  “The evening you were born, I looked out at the sky over Shanghai…”

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Dr. George Zhao of Skidmore College and Kristen Wanner of Harvard University Asia Center.

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