Chapter 3: Playing the Piano

1995 was the year my mom began teaching me to play the piano. I was four years old. One day my parents heard music coming across the courtyard and saw Liwei starting his piano lessons and realized it was perhaps time for me too, to learn. My dad bought a very old piano that took up almost a fifth of our living room space in that small apartment. The piano was an old upright, covered in scratches and some of the veneer was peeling off in places. It had shutters on the left and right sides that I would run my fingers across, making a tacking sound across the wood. The notes sounded wobbly in the way pianos on their last legs do. My dad occasionally had to open it up and fix the hammers with string or duct tape.

My mom spent the first lessons teaching me the C major scale, singing do re mi as she played and I followed. After the first week or so, she had me play a melody that went up in alternating thirds from an old, used red covered copy of Johnny Thompson’s First Grade Piano Book. The melody was comforting, feeling like a slow dance up the staircase illustration shown on the corner of the page. I liked how the book had little pictures to accompany every song. Mom taught me to keep my hands relaxed and soft. Like steam buns, she said. Keep your hands like soft white mantou and you will always play gracefully. This went on for a few weeks until my parents found me a piano teacher, and elderly lady named Ms Kuo who lived in Monterey Park near the corner of Newmark and Atlantic. During the lesson she taught me a new piece that had chords in it, next to an illustration of church bells. I wanted to use the pedals but my feet couldn’t reach them.

It was also the year I started kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in Baldwin Elementary, which shared a fence with the Alhambra Golf Course we would often take nightly walks at, being next door. My first day was a bit of a rough start. At lunchtime there were paper cartons of chocolate milk and juice on the table and, remembering preschool breakfasts, I assumed they were for us children. However, when I reached for one, the teacher pulled me away, explaining that I haven’t “paid”. At that point no one had explained to me what money was or what was in those little envelopes I saw other parents hand the teacher at the beginning of the day. The little white envelopes seemed almost magical, containing little pieces of paper that inexplicably separated the haves from the have-nots. At first I thought the teacher was scolding me when I heard the word “pay” because to my Chinese ears, the hard P sounding almost vulgar like an insult.

Thinking back, I don’t think my kindergarten teacher realized until too late that I couldn’t speak English. By the time I started kindergarten I knew simple English words like hello and bye bye, but other than that I really just parroted the words and sounds I heard from other children. I still do not know to this day if it was the undiagnosed ADHD or if it was problems listening or if I was just a bad kid. But I do know now, back then if someone had told me what to do or what not to do, I wouldn’t have actually understood.

At four years old that year I also began to notice that there were differences in how people treated each other based on who they were. As I began to learn to say more English words, I learned that it was more than the language. Being out and about with my parents, watching adults, I learned that in America there was a very specific way you needed to talk or else white people treated you differently. I noticed people such as cashiers, bank tellers, and even my own teacher smiled and spoke warmly to others, but immediately changed their expression when they spoke to my mom. It was like an invisible wall came up. And I noticed my mom and dad tense up slightly whenever they spoke to Americans too. I also noticed that as I mimicked the words and behaviors of my American classmates, if it was something I wasn’t supposed to do, I was punished a bit more harshly for the same things. My kindergarten teacher had blue eyes that frightened me at that age because I had never seen eyes of that color before. When she spoke, the words in English felt flat and monotone, as I was still only accustomed to the tonal dips and shifts of Chinese. There was a day for show and tell, that grandmother handmade steamed bao for the entire class, and the teacher seemed fascinated and ate with gusto, but was really the only warmth I recall from her. There was an “otherness” that I felt marked with and even very young, I knew I didn’t like it.

Perhaps that’s where the problems began. There was an incident where during lunchtime I was jumping up and down on the playset and it made an echoing noise. An administrator came out of the nearby office and started yelling at me for making noise and probably asked me to stop, but I thought he was encouraging me and happily continued. The next week my teacher asked my mom to come to our class and sit with me the whole day. I spent the entire class talking to her because I didn’t really know who else to talk to. My mom later had to explain to me that she was there because I was in trouble. I think that was the year I became a little bit of an angry child.

It was around that time my parents met another family that also lived in our apartment complex. Our family and the Hus live across each other in this figure-eight shaped cluster of apartments, in the front loop. The Liangs lived upstairs in the back loop, near the laundry rooms. The dad was a tall, thin man with a huge smile. He had just started out as a pediatrician, and the mom was a sweet looking lady with soft features and a very thick, booming northern accent. They often made pastries and steamed goods that they shared with my parents. Their son, Andrew, had a wide charming face and we played together splashing water from a leaking hose outside. We played together well, just as I played well with Liwei. Sometimes the three of us played well together. I think it might have been the first time Liwei had made a friend his own age, and perhaps he didn’t feel as burdened by the responsibility of being a big brother to me. Most times Liwei and Andrew played without me. I remember crying as I watched a VHS tape Liwei had lent me of Disney’s The Fox and the Hound because I felt like I was the little fox. Weren’t we supposed to be friends? Why did he have to put on a different face when someone else came along? I was sad, but I slowly learned to make other friends too.

There was a girl from our class on the playground I would often see. She was a very tall Chinese American girl with large brown eyes and would often loudly roleplay Power Rangers with her friends. I may have tried to talk to her once or twice before but she only spoke English. We became friends when she shoved a larger boy away for belittling me. One time we sat on a rug inside and played together with little plastic soldier toys. She pointed one of hers at one of mine and said bang. I knocked him down and made a gasping sound like I saw the characters on TV do when they get shot. “Bang”, I said. “He….” but I didn’t have a word for it. Leah looked at me with a sudden sadness and said, “he died.” “Died”, I repeated. The word felt heavy in my mouth the way you had to exhale a breath of air. Leah picked up the little soldier and placed it warmly back in my hands and smiled. 

Around spring, by then it was 1996, there was a performance at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. A group of young all girl acrobats had traveled from China and my parents received free tickets, wanting to take me to see other talented children. For almost an hour I saw a show of young contortionists, gymnasts, and acrobats spinning 8 plates at once. My parents handed me a bouquet of flowers to bring up to the stage at the end of the show. As I walked up to the stage while they were taking their bow. My cheeks felt hotter and redder with every step I took. I ended up giving it to the announcer girl, holding my head down, running away while she loudly said thank you in one of those posh made for tv Beijing accents you hear on CCTV news. I think that was the first time I blushed. By then I wondered, or maybe my parents wondered if I might simply get along better with girls than boys, as they watched me play with Donna that weekend or picked me up from kindergarten as I waved goodbye to Leah. One morning my mom took me aside and told me, “boys have a peepee, girls do not. And if you are not nice to girls, a girl will take a pair of scissors and cut off your peepee and steal it for herself!” Another time as she got me ready for school, she told me, “girls' bodies naturally have an electric current, and if you touch them you will get shocked badly!”

It was around that same time period I met Ms Kuo’s husband, Mr Mao. Mr Mao was also a piano teacher, though most of his students were much older. That day, Ms Kuo was out of town visiting relatives and Mr Mao taught my lesson instead. He was a very grumpy old man who spoke mostly broken English. Spoke is the wrong word. More like, barked, like an angry dog. He showed a page of handwritten music notes onto the stand and asked me to sight read. “I know you can read! Lets try something new are you ready, a-ok?” I nodded and played. But it sounded wrong. It looked like the scales that Ms Kuo had me warm up with every lesson but the third note sounded flat. I stopped at the raised seventh and stared at the page. “Whats wrong?!”, he barked. “Something wrong with your eye? Can’t you read?” At five years old I had never heard sad music before. This was also the first time I heard or played the harmonic minor scale, as I learned that day. It felt wrong, and foreign. But I also felt an emotional tug and the feeling made me stop. My mom complained after the lesson. She said I wasn’t ready to play the minor scale because I was barely used to playing the major scale everyday. It would be awhile before I hear a minor key again. It was the first time I learned that music could be sad. And maybe, that life could be too.