One late November night, I was scrolling through the New York Times app on my iPad, part of my evening routine. A black-and-white photo of Anderson Cooper caught my eye. The article was about Mr. Cooper going over his mother’s belongings in her apartment more than one year after her passing, in search of closure. There was an undeniable vulnerability of grief in his gaze. Something of a parallel similarity flickered inside of me – I was in my attic earlier that day, rummaging through my mom’s boxes in search of an old ID.
Except my mom is still alive, living alone in California.
I spent the next two days listening to all 9 episodes of the “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” podcast. I decided to go through Mom’s boxes again. This time, I was searching for the pieces of her life stories.
Below is Part 1.
To read Part 2, click here.
♪ ♪ ♪ Prelude ♪ ♪ ♪
Mom grew up in a modest Christian family in pre-WWII Shanghai. A family portrait from 1930s Shanghai was glued to the thick black paper of a photo album. Everyone in the photo – her parents and her younger sister – was dressed in what would be their Sunday best, wearing a rigid smile coaxed by the photographer. Mom attended Sunday School at an early age. The hymnal singing accompanied by an old organ on Sundays was what led her to the love of her life – music. When she climbed onto the organ bench, her foot barely touched the pedals. She learned to read music notations and discovered a talent for improvising and modulation – a talent I desperately wished I had inherited after I followed her steps to become a pianist.
Mom did not have access to a real piano until she was 13 – an age that would be deemed too late by today’s standard – when a local piano dealer lent an upright piano to her father as a form of interest payment for a personal loan. The moment she put her hands on the keys, piano became her life-long companion. At school where her father was the headmaster, Mom was always the youngest child in her class. School was a form of childcare when there were three children below age five in the family and another baby on the way. She was often lost in class, partly intimidated by the older kids, and partly confused by the teachers’ thick dialects. To that shy and quiet girl, the piano was a friend she did not have and a friend she could talk to without using words. It became her voice for expressing joy and sadness. And music was a place she could escape to without being lost. It became her world of love and dreams. This has remained true throughout her life, even now at age 89.
That world, however, was abruptly turned upside down with the change of governing regime in 1949. Mom had just turned 17 when her father was pronounced “anti-revolutionary” and sentenced to 15 years in jail by the new government. With that, the family lost their only income. The older kids made numerous trips to the local pawn shops, until Grandma’s jewelry and winter coats turned into a pile of pawn tickets. Mom, together with her sister who was one year younger, became the providers for the family of seven.
***
I sat cross-legged on my attic floor, looking through the aged photo album, and I could only find one photo from that period, one with my solemn grandma surrounded by her children. I imagined my teenage mom wandering the dark and cold streets of Shanghai, too afraid to return home to her mother’s expecting gaze because she was not able to collect the payment for the piano lessons she gave. That payment was what Grandma needed to put dinner on the table. The piano had become the family’s main source of income.
♪ ♪ ♪ Ballad ♪ ♪ ♪
Soon, Mom’s hopes and dreams of becoming a concert pianist – evident in a photo where she posed next to a proud Russian professor as a young budding pianist among the future Chinese musicians – were whisked away. She had an “anti-revolutionary” father and was not worthy of such opportunities.
But Mom still went on to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music after she graduated at 21. She married my dad, a law school graduate turned middle school teacher, when she was 27. In a black and white photo of that era, Mom, dressed in a sleeveless dress, stood right by Dad in the garden of the house, with an unmistakable joy in her smile. The shy teenage girl had turned into a mature young woman, content with life. She had music as her companion and motherhood on the horizon.
I was born in 1965 when Mom was 31, a year before Grandpa was released from prison and the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
The Cultural Revolution disrupted Mom’s world of music once again. The “Red Guards of the Revolution” – young students who either came from the “red” families or who had severed their ties with their wealthy families and pledged allegiance to the Revolution – stormed our home and took possession of anything they deemed to have Western or traditional influences, including Mom’s music scores and her vinyl records. Ironically, around the same time, the families of these Red Guards started to move into the garden houses in our neighborhood once known as the French Concession, in the most affluent part of Shanghai. Suddenly people of all trades with very different backgrounds and behaviors became our new neighbors.
Yet we were lucky. Our Mozart, an old upright piano built by the Canadians in the early 20th century, survived.
One hot and humid summer night, the air was stale, and all the windows and doors were popped open. I must have been just about four or five, perched on the windowsill, restless because of the heat. Dad was grading papers. Mom sat at the piano. Tentatively, she started the opening recitative of Chopin’s G minor Ballade Op.23. Chopin was said to have been influenced by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem “Konrad Wallenrod” when he composed the Ballade. The poem was set against the backdrop story of a Lithuanian pagan raised by his people’s enemies. Awakened to his heritage when he heard a beautiful and mysterious song, he sought vengeance and died a tragic death. Chopin’s Ballade was as dramatic as Mickiewicz’s poem, and Mom’s rendition was as emotional as the story. The ballad was finished with a triumphant closing depicting the hero’s laugh in the face of death. There was a brief silence. Then, from the darkness of the stifling summer evening, loud applause erupted outside the house – neighbors had gathered in our garden unbeknownst to us. Mom was shocked. She had just communicated such a complicated and passionate story through her music, to people with whom she could never imagine being able to reach using words.
***
Life continued to deliver disruption to Mom’s world. When the Cultural Revolution was nearing its end, Dad was diagnosed with acute leukemia, and succumbed to the disease two years later. He left behind a 44-year-old wife and two young daughters, ages 13 and 11. To supplement her salary from the conservatory which was barely enough to feed and clothe the 3 of us, Mom started to give private lessons, and piano once again became her means to support the family. Every Sunday morning, I would wake to the sound of her teaching in the room next to our shared bedroom. The lessons would last past dinner time. Several days a week, she would also go directly from the teaching bench at home to the piano bench at the Conservatory’s concert hall, accompanying her college students for the evening recitals. In those days monetary commercial activities were not allowed outside of state-run institutions. So her students paid for private lessons with commodities of all kinds, from newly harvested rice to fish rationed from companies the parents worked for, to free car services, to offering to fix our 601 reel-to-reel tape player. During holidays, painted tin cans of cookies and mooncakes, and bamboo baskets of fresh fruits – gifts of well wishes and gratitude – would pile up high on our dining table. Now, some 40 years later, as I sit in the attic and read through the letters and cards from her students, which Mom meticulously kept throughout the years, I can still associate some of their names with a particular tin can of European-style cookies, or an entire leg of Jin-Hua ham (think of it as a Chinese version of Jamón). Despite being a single-parent family, living in a time when most daily necessities were rationed, Mom made sure my sister and I never lacked anything from having a comfortable life.
(Click here for Part 2 and here for Part 3.)
Extra
Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, one of my favorite concert pianists, performs the Chopin Ballad Op.23 No.1.
What an amazing story of resilience, thank you for sharing it. I can close my eyes and imagine the Chopin music drifting out into street and gardens in the French Concession.
Your mom is a remarkable and resilient woman, thanks for sharing her story with us and we learn the history of revolution and people’s life in that era. You portrait the scene really well through your writing!👍