Though we each played that aging piano for eight years until high school, for my brother and I who never had to long for artistic freedom, it was easy for us to take this luxury for granted. Looking back now, I now wish I had fostered the drive and discipline to bring my mother’s own musical dreams to life.
By contrast, Vienna represented everything China wasn’t during the backward era my mother grew up in. Known as the “City of Music” and the “City of Dreams”, Vienna is a world capital for music, culture, innovation. And during our three day stay in this cultural oasis, I heard those same melodies my mother dreamt of playing as a child and was reminded of how fortunate my brother and I were to have had the political luxuries we grew up with. At the age when my parents carried my infant brother to a foreign country to escape brutal persecution, I was comfortably vacationing through Europe — just because I could.
To this day, I’ll never forget the way her eyes danced (and still do) regrettably across the opalescent black and white keys of our piano, playing out the lost chords of her ghost generation. How an instrument we took for granted represents the childhood my mother never had. The image will always be a reminder of how the piano is more than just a wooden instrument. The sound of music that has been the loudest and most triumphant is the movement she created and allowed us to play out, through giving us freedom and a better life.