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

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

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

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.

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.