A BETTER LIFE
by Lisa Wang
As a child, my mother always dreamt of being a classical pianist. Her head was filled with the lush melodies of timeless Austrian composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Strauss. But these hopes (and others) were shattered when China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution purged her country of all forms of “elitism” including art, culture, education and music. Over the course of a decade, teachers, professionals and intellectuals were brutally persecuted while books, instruments and paintings burned in effigy. In short — to play the piano was punishable by death.
During this time China’s urban youth, which included my mother and her three sisters, were sent to the countryside for “re-education” where my mother’s eager fingers never met a single piano key. Instead they played a harsh staccato over grain and rice crops scattered across the endless acres of her farming commune.
By the time she escaped the constraints of communist China, she was already well into her 30’s and had her fingers full with the needy demands of her two small children. She never did fulfill her dreams of playing classical piano (well, yet) but her surviving cross-continental hopes were eventually distilled through to my brother and I when she scraped together enough money to buy a third-hand upright Baldwin and secure a teacher who accepted the $20/hour fee she proposed.
And at first, for the excitable 4- and 6 year-olds that we were, the piano was an amazing and novel thing; we marveled at how it could express the cacophonous energy that was inside us. We bounced our spry fingers up and down, left and right, over and under the aged wooden teeth to fill the house with our music.