The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (3 page)

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 could 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.

It was even more difficult for me than for the others. I was well aware that my parents were different from those of my schoolmates. My father and mother did not resemble the good revolutionaries found in books and on posters, or the ones our teachers endlessly described. I wanted to be proud of my father, but something held me back. He wasn’t like other fathers. And yet, he had finally found a stable job as a university administrator. It was a good position, and the president of the university, Lao Xue, trusted him entirely. He even made it possible for my father to exercise his original profession by allowing him to oversee the university medical service.

Nevertheless, a doubt remained in my mind. He had to be guilty of something if my teachers distrusted him. Moreover, he said it himself: my mother and he were ashamed of what they had been before the Liberation. They knew that they were
Chushen bu hao
—of “bad family background”—and that they should make amends.

Of course, if my parents were guilty, then I was as well. And then there was the piano. It also had a bad family background.

And yet, this same piano, which singled me out as guilty, allowed me to be admired. I was only eight years old, and I was being asked to give concerts. One day for the radio, another day on television, which had recently been invented. It was fun: spotlights shone on the piano, warming my hands. Technicians bustled around everywhere. They were nervous while I, entirely innocent, felt unafraid; I wanted only one thing: to please the public by playing “Red May” for them.

One time I was asked to play at the Imperial Palace in Beijing. I wasn’t scared, but a single question obsessed me. What was I going to wear? This time I wasn’t going to be playing for machines, microphones, and cameras but in front of an audience, more than a thousand people. I couldn’t show up in my patched clothes. The knees and elbows of my clothing were mended with pieces of fabric cut from my mother’s dresses.