Chapter 14: Sonata

Chapter 14: Sonata

During my childhood as I was learning to play the piano, my mom changed my piano teachers a couple of times. Some, she felt, were not pushing me hard enough. Some, she felt, were too harsh. Others, she felt, weren’t good enough musicians. The last one, Ms Lily, lived next door to Jade’s family.

She was the most strict of all my piano teachers, sometimes keeping me for hours at her house after my lesson, making me finish my music theory homework on her dining room table, crossing out or erasing the markings I made over music scores and not calling my mom to pick me up until I got it right. Despite this, she was also one of the kindest teachers I’ve known. I remember one day when I had a bad cough, Ms Lily stopped me in the middle of our lesson, taking me to her kitchen where she boiled monkfruit into a sweet, syrupy tea, telling me that it was soothing for sore throats. I cupped the warm drink in my hands as we returned to the piano and she pointed out my mistakes, continuing the lesson as if nothing happened. She often drove me home whenever my parents were too busy. Ms Lily taught me that learning music was more than discipline. It could be a source of love.

At eleven years old, I had never thought of playing the piano as anything other than a task given to me by my parents. I had started learning at such a young age that it seemed something as natural as walking or breathing. No one stops to think about the pleasures of breathing. Since I was four, my parents would hire a piano teacher and that teacher would assign me pieces to practice. My parents would make me practice an hour every day and if I played well during a lesson my parents were happy. It felt as inevitable as being given extra math problems to do or being told to complete Chinese learning workbooks. Routine showed me that virtue was cold because virtue was work. Those who did not work were not virtuous.

I found the piece by chance one day, flipping through an old, tattered book of varied selections. I was intrigued by the patterned, structured shape of the notes and as I began to sight read the Beethoven sonata, I recognized the melody from an episode of Case Closed that I watched the past summer in Nanjing with Faye. The melody was eerie and the two of us shuddered together, terrified and fascinated by the morbid murder mystery. As I heard myself slowly play the opening notes, I felt a shiver I couldn’t understand.

The year was 2002, the year I decided I wanted to be American. It was a year that the American flag appeared everywhere, on tshirts, backpacks, in grocery stores, brown paper bags printed with the slogan United We Stand. I loved wearing the flag shirts my mom bought me from Old Navy. At school I joined the hysteria of patriotism, finally feeling part of something, thinking that for once, I could understand the strange code that other people seemed to speak in, that I was finally given a peek at the script too. At a school rally on the anniversary of 9/11, the choir teacher gave a halting speech about how the terrorists wouldn’t stop us. Then she dramatically flung out her arms as a student behind her raised a giant flag. “Now SING, America! SING!” she cried. A shudder went through me. Something felt wrong. I thought of Phouang’s stories about the Hitler Youth. I thought of my grandparents’ stories about the Red Guard. The cheering went on. I smiled anyway.

Over the next few months, I joined a club my history teacher started to send care packages to American soldiers in the Middle East. My job was to find enough cardboard boxes. I searched the cafeteria, other classrooms, and local shops, asking anyone who might have one to spare. I worked hard. I wanted to be seen as a fellow citizen. I wanted to be seen as good.

At home, I continued working on the sonata I found. I learned slowly, with difficulty: the left hand part was all chords and the right hand part had a repeating arpeggio, played with the thumb, index, and middle fingers. I wasn’t used to playing a main melody only on my pinky finger. I struggled to play the correct rhythm at first, not having enough control or strength in my pinky, using my entire arm to press it down. It was a sad, mournful piece and for some reason I felt my heart ache. I felt hypnotized, having never experienced such feelings in front of the piano. My grandma was in the other room but she came in asking if this was one of my assigned pieces. Yes, I lied. Grandma said, this is beautiful, you should keep working at it. I played the sonata whenever my parents weren’t home, when it was just Grandma and I in the house. I played it to Grandma like it was a secret only the two of us knew.

I began to wish I wasn’t Chinese. It happened little by little. Somewhere in between listening carefully and copying the accents of other classmates and seeing the heroes on TV that didn’t look like me, wishing I looked like them instead. I began to go places with Patrick’s family, going to ball games, eating out in restaurants, hanging out at the mall watching movies; a white family with a Chinese boy along in tow. Whenever we were out, I would notice some strange looks. It was subtle. A gaze that lingers just a second too long. But it was worst in very young children. They would look away from their families, sitting in a high chair at a restaurant, gawking a second or third time at me with an expression that could almost look slightly annoyed as if asking, why do you even exist. Whenever I felt that stare I would try to pretend that I didn’t notice and that nothing was out of place. Except I was out of place.

My mom and I obtained our US citizenship that year. My mom had spent a year diligently studying for the citizenship test, finally passing by the skin of her teeth. We attended our Naturalization ceremony at the Staples Center, taking the Oath of Allegiance with a sea of others. Some people laughed. Some people cried. The air fluttered with the waving of little American flags, like a grassy plain of red, white, and blue. A video of George Bush came up on the jumbotron and he warmly welcomed us. The crowd went wild as God Bless the USA started playing.

One day when I was playing the Beethoven sonata again, my mom came in, asking when I had learned this piece. She noted that it wasn’t one of the pieces my teacher assigned, and I hurriedly flipped back to the Burgmuller arabesque that I was supposed to be practicing. “When did you learn this?”, she asked. I felt my cheeks become very warm. I was just trying it out, it’s no big deal, I said. My mom left without saying anything else.

During our next lesson near the end, Ms Lily suddenly said “So I’ve heard you’ve been teaching yourself other music.” I felt uneasy, and looked down at the keys. I pretended to rub some dust off the little gap between middle C and D. Yes, I finally admitted. “Play it for me.”

After I played the closing chords, one softly, the other barely audible, Ms Lily paused and looked at me. After a long time, she said “You made some mistakes. I’ll mark it up for you. Keep practicing this.” When my mom came to pick me up, Ms Lily told her, your son is very talented. Thinking I was in trouble, I looked up in surprise.

My mom and I were out shopping. It was spring of that year, some time after we had become Americans. I sat on the front passenger seat of mom’s minivan with the window down. As we waited at a stoplight, I heard someone yelling at us from the street. I didn’t hear all of what they were saying, just the words “go back to China”. My mom asked me if someone was yelling. She asked, what is happening? I looked away. “A classmate was trying to say hi”, I said.

I decided that Beethoven was my favorite composer. My dad told me about other pieces like the violin concerto, when I asked about Beethoven. He told me the “Hero” symphony always makes him feel extremely excited, a bombastic, masculine piece that lives up to its nickname. The next week Ms Lily bought me new sheet music as a gift. They were a book of Chopin’s Mazurkas and a book of Bach’s Two Part Inventions. I felt a little annoyed as any schoolboy would at the sight of more homework. Yet, later at home I looked at the two sheet music books next to my other tattered volumes that my parents had bought used.

I think it may have been Ms Lily who told me more about Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, a name that meant “hero”, telling me that he had originally dedicated it to Napoleon but ripped it to shreds when he learned Napoleon crowned himself emperor. I didn’t know much about Beethoven, other than that he was deaf and angry. But that day I learned he tore up his own music in sorrow when he realized even revolutions can turn into empires. Maybe that’s why the Moonlight Sonata made me sad. Everyone must have mistaken Beethoven’s anger for defiance when all he had was pain. I thought this to myself as I played the music of a man who long ago had learned what flags can never give you.

Every night after all the kids left, I practiced the piano for one hour. But that year, my grandma would often come into the piano room, asking “can you play the moonlight for me again?”. Grandma never got tired of it. Over the years I would go on to learn and forget many piano pieces, but I always played the Moonlight Sonata for her every night. Even in the later college years, when practice sessions became fewer, I would end every session with it because it was the music Grandma wanted to hear most.

Even a decade after Grandma passed away, every time I play this sonata, I play it for her.

(end of Book 1)