Chapter 15: Fugue

(Book 2)

Chapter 15: Fugue

In middle school, I began to take “Certificate of Merit” exams every year for piano. The first test I took was for level 5 in the sixth grade. Level 5 was chosen for me, as if the number had been waiting all along. It was the level Lars and Alfred tested at that year. Level 8 would follow, then 10. The numbers advanced on their own, decided by either my parents or their friends, competing vicariously through their children. I didn’t enjoy suddenly having to take a test for piano. As a child, I had no concept of what the playing exams even measured. I followed because the adults said so. It wasn’t about music anymore. It was about keeping up.

I was 12 years old in the eighth grade when I took the exam for level 10, the last level. The year was 2003. For my playing exam that year, I spent months learning Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C minor, a piece chosen for me that I practiced because the test was coming. And the test was coming because I practiced. The prelude was a dense, textured piece played quickly consisting of a repeating pattern that felt like anxiety twisted into a rush of notes coiled tight. The fugue was a sprawling landscape that felt like no other, a complex labyrinth of melodies layered on top of one another overlapping and colliding, a conversation between three simultaneous voices struggling for hierarchy.

Up until that point, playing the piano had existed as a concept outside of school. Even though I was to practice for an hour everyday, to play the piano felt like occupying my own space, untethered from others. Competition only made me think of the mean playground children at school and the confrontations I would have with them. Suddenly, the piano no longer seemed like a space where I could be left alone. It felt like another test I could fail.

Outside of the piano, I also played the trumpet in school band class, starting in the sixth grade with a cheap, heavily dented trumpet my dad bought for me in China. The band teacher often looked disapprovingly at my instrument, telling me “you know, Chinese don’t make good trumpets”. I quickly began to enjoy playing my second instrument, practicing hard even on the defective trumpet whose valves never did seem to work right. By seventh grade, my band teacher assigned me to one of the “first” trumpet positions. I found the term strange, since I’ve never been first at anything. And I found that here, I never would.

My dad was quite proud of me, buying for me a brand new silver Yamaha trumpet. In class I played with two other “firsts”, two boys named Steve and Martin. I recognized Steve from back to school nights where I would often see his parents making conversation with teachers. Our band teacher seemed to know them well, often asking about his family and speaking with Steve on a familiar basis. The other boy, Martin, I had never spoken to in the sixth grade but began to dislike me almost immediately by the next year, often glaring at me from across the room or pinching me during class when I wasn’t looking.

Steve had been given the role in our class as the student whose job it is to pass out sheet music, a busy task that involved giving the right instrument parts to all of the students in the band. Every new piece we learned, the sheet music passed through Steve’s hands and he would spend all class session making sure every fellow musician received their part. However I began to notice that often it was when we learned the more popular pieces, such as the Lord of the Rings score, I did not receive my copy of the first trumpet part. At first I tried to talk to Steve during class asking him why I didn’t receive my copy, to which he would simply ignore me, looking ahead at his music stand, warming up or adjusting his mouthpiece. Soon I began to directly confront him asking if he had noticed he skipped me. After weeks of pestering, he finally said, I didn’t skip you, I just didn’t want to give it to you.

In the eighth grade, I decided I wanted to work hard and be a good student. I started the year in a math class called Algebra AB. I studied hard, spending extra time every day with my homework, reading ahead into the next chapters and doing those problems too, eager to prove that I could still be a son my parents would be proud of. For the first two months, I brought home straight A’s.

Then my parents learned I was in the wrong class. My teacher explained that each class was bound to the next. Algebra AB meant that in ninth grade I would take Algebra BC, then Geometry in tenth, Algebra 2 in eleventh, and Pre-Calculus (really Trigonometry) in twelfth. The sequence was complete and could not be altered. But students took their SATs in eleventh grade, and I would be a year behind on the math section. Algebra 1 in eighth grade was also a prerequisite for freshman Biology, the standard class most students started high school with. I was in Algebra AB because my math grades from the previous two years weren’t high enough.

At twelve years old, it was already too late for me to be a good student.

My parents pushed back, sending an email to my math teacher, Mr Norman, asking him to transfer me. Mr Norman led me into the classroom one day after school, chuckling, remarking that he didn’t see what the fuss was all about, rules are rules, but go ahead, take this entry test and let’s see what you’re made of.

I stared at the page. The problems were from chapters we hadn’t covered and concepts I had never learned. Naturally, I failed. That proved the rules worked. Still, my parents insisted, and Mr. Norman relented.

In Algebra 1, I could barely stay afloat, both having to keep up in class and teach myself the already-covered topics I had missed. Mr Norman had made an impression on me at the beginning of the year, being the first American person who could pronounce my last name when he jokingly called me “Mr. Xiao” in mock formality. But as the year went on, he started calling me “Ex-Ay-Oh” instead, saying it with a smirk that always made the class laugh. My math scores became my parents’ obsession, and mine too. I was already behind for college before high school even began.

I told my band teacher I didn’t have the music. He told me to ask Steve. I asked Steve again. He didn’t answer, so I told the teacher again. He nodded and said Steve had already given it to me. I looked at my empty folder. He nodded again, as if to confirm what I had just shown him. By the time Steve did give me the correct parts, months later, shruggingly adding “you could’ve asked nicely”, I had already learned the part by ear. It seemed pointless to talk to my teacher about it then, since I could already play it, it didn’t count. It was never written down.

That year I was excited about joining jazz band, wanting to try playing other genres on the piano. But there was this other boy, Kevin, who normally played saxophone, standing behind the keyboards on the first day. When I walked up to try and play some of the sheet music laid out over the keys, Kevin shoved and kicked me away insisting “you suck too much, stay away” and I sulked back to the trumpet section without touching a single note.

Playing trumpet in jazz band wasn’t any better. I raised my horn to play one of the solos the first week until I felt a pinch and then an elbow from Martin, who wanted to play it instead. When there was a new piece with a better solo, he told me I could have the old one. It bothered me that he missed three notes every time, but he’d punch me whenever I tried to tell him. After multiple incidents, I decided to quit jazz band altogether.

It took several conversations to convince the teacher, who pleaded, we have a performance at Knott’s Berry Farm next month, can’t you just hold out until then? By then I couldn’t hear the music anymore.

We learned about American history in Social Studies that year. One week, we were to memorize the preamble to the Constitution, an assignment I tried to do my best on. I memorized it, reciting in the shower, reciting as I jogged during PE, reciting before I went to bed. The students in the class took turns reciting, going up in front of the class one after another. When a student walked up to the front of the class, everyone clapped, sometimes students would add words of encouragement. When it was my turn, I, like the others, walked up to the front of the room. As I reached the whiteboard, I turned around and there was silence, no sounds except for the hum of the lights and the creaking and shuffling of students in desks. The entire class just stared at me coldly, and I felt the backs of their blank eyes tugging at me drowning me below a sea of their unkind thoughts. I stared at the clock in the back of the room as I repeated the words, trying not to think of the glares. There was no applause when I finished.

I started back to my seat. “Brian”, the teacher said, “you missed a part.” I stopped. “You forgot ‘of the United States’. We practiced this all week. You should have paid more attention.” She reminded me it would count as an exam grade. I nodded. The teacher wrote something in her gradebook. It was probably a letter. The next student stood up. The class clapped again.

In math class, during the second half of the year, passing Algebra became a struggle and a fixation. The prerequisites for high school classes the following year was a B, but I kept getting Cs. One day as Mr Norman returned our tests graded from the previous week I noticed, after redoing several times in the margins, that one of the math problems marked wrong was actually correct. After school, I showed it to him, pointing out the math and he laughed a little, casually saying, what do you know, you’re actually right, I’ll update your grade. I nearly jumped for joy, happily changing the score written on the test paper so that I could show my parents.

A week later, since all of our grades were ranked and posted on the door, I found out that Mr Norman never recorded the grade change. When I confronted him about it, asking him to change the grade, he said he did not remember the previous encounter and that he would do no such thing. I held out the test paper and asked him to look at the math problem on the sheet of paper, but he refused, keeping his gaze somewhere on my forehead, saying to me, look, the world doesn’t revolve around you. Finally he looked down, but instead of the math problem, he looked at the score on the corner of the page and asked why I had the audacity to write a new grade myself. I scribbled over it, crossing it out saying, forget that, please just look at the math problem, and he shook his head and told me I was in eighth grade now, please stop acting like a child.

I stormed out of the room, mumbling to myself that I was going to get the grade, I was going to get it. After the principal spoke to me for an hour, she asked me to wait. Mr Norman must have been in the other room as I waited for quite a while, since the principal came back in and accused me of threatening a teacher. She asked me why I walked out the door yelling “you’re going to get it”, to which I told her it was not what I said. She gave me a skeptical look and asked me to leave. Back in class the next day, Mr Norman squatted down next to my desk, gave me a kind, patient look and slowly said, no matter what happens, no matter how angry we are, we do not threaten our teachers and we do not lie about it, that’s just not okay.

I didn’t say anything. He never did change that grade.

At CalPoly Pomona, like the previous years, my dad and I waited nervously outside the piano room for my level 10 playing exam. This is the last time you will have to do this, he told me. I was anxious because, despite hating being graded on my piano playing, over the months I had come to enjoy playing the Bach fugue very much. When my time came, I was called into a quiet, cavernous looking room with three elderly proctors sitting side by side behind several sheets of documents and manila folders, along a skinny table. Half of the lights in the room were turned off, desks and chairs normally used for class were pushed along the walls. I only heard the sounds of my footsteps and the light coughing of one of the test proctors as I timidly approached the baby grand piano in the middle of the room. I was about to play when one of the proctors cleared her throat and spoke and I had to stand up to see over the lid of the piano which felt like a giant insect waiting to spread its wings. She told me the piece I was to play was Bach’s Prelude AND Fugue. She felt there was no reason for me to play the fugue, just the prelude will do, you may begin. I obeyed, accepting perhaps this way was easier to a better score. The music felt incomplete as I finished and the proctor pointed me toward the door with her pencil.

At home, I played the fugue for my grandma. It began with a single line, timid, almost whispering before its companion entered and they began to dance. Another enters, chasing them through corridors that twist and return. In the parts where the main theme disappeared, I felt my left hand wandering alone, tracing strange steps through halfway harmonies as if lost in a large castle. I sat in silence for a long time after I finished playing.

“Wonderful”, whispered my grandma.