HotmailPaying the price for performance
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My father may have been a great debater, but he was a lousy cook. He overcooked vegetables and even had a hard time making rice. Eating his tasteless meals made me miss my mother even more. Back home, she had made delicious dumplings or pork or fresh fish every evening. With my father, there was no joy in cooking or eating. We saved money by buying cheap food, and my mother did the same in Shenyang, spending less than ten dollars a month on food for herself.
At that time, the neighborhood of Feng Tai was on the city line of Beijing, out in the middle of nowhere. I missed my friend Mark Ma and my schoolmates from Miss Feng’s class. There were other music students from Shenyang who had also moved to Beijing and had won admission to the conservatory — older children who were living with their mothers — but they were strangely distant and cold to me and my father.
“Why aren’t they being nice?” I asked my father.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they are jealous of you. Maybe they think you will make them look bad.”
“But they were so friendly back in Shenyang.”
“Beijing is not Shenyang. Beijing changes people. Don’t worry about them. Just worry about practicing. You aren’t practicing enough.”
So I practiced even more.
And at elementary school, kids who themselves were from the sticks — we lived so far from the center of Beijing that the neighborhood could hardly be called sophisticated — made fun of my accent, calling me “Little Farmer from the North.” “Oh, the farmer plays piano,” they would taunt me. “What kind of sound do you think he can make?”
Professor Angry had given me one of the difficult Beethoven variations to play. “Phrase it delicately,” she told me. “Don’t play it heavy-handedly.” I welcomed her direction. I took up the challenge. I tackled the piece enthusiastically. I practiced it until my fingers ached, until I thought I had mastered it. As I rode to my lesson on the back of my dad’s rickety bike through the pouring rain, I heard the piece inside my head. The notes rang out. My fingers motionlessly danced over an invisible keyboard. I didn’t see the bicycles, cars, and buses; I didn’t see the traffic lights and the throngs of pedestrians. I saw Beethoven’s story about finding one’s way through a complex maze. When we arrived at Professor Angry’s studio, she hardly looked at me. She seemed nervous and, as always, impatient.
“Begin,” she said.
After a few minutes she stopped me, saying, “You’re playing this piece like you’re afraid of it. You’re playing too lightly.”
“You said to play it delicately,” I reminded her.
“No, I didn’t.”
She had, and I wanted to remind her again, but I was a little boy and she was a distinguished teacher. I held my tongue.
I continued playing.
“Too light,” she said. “Too tentative. You must approach this with a heavier hand.”
“But, Professor —” I began to say.
She cut me off. “No ‘buts’ about it. You must pay attention to my directions or I can no longer teach you.”
Her threat frightened me.
“If this piece is too challenging, I can give you something easier.”
My father broke in and said, “Lang Lang doesn’t want anything easier. He wants something harder.”
“You,” said the teacher, “how can I give him something harder if he comes here unprepared?”
“He will never again come here unprepared,” my father promised.
But I’m not unprepared, I thought. I know this piece. I can play this piece. I know every note. Professor Angry gave me one set of instructions, and then changed her mind when I followed them. Now she is not telling the truth. She is a liar.
“She is your teacher, and she is the only way you’re getting into the conservatory!” my father screamed at me as we approached the stand where he had locked his bicycle.
“But she’s crazy!” I said. “She tells me how to play a piece, and I learn it that way. Then, when I follow her instructions, she scolds me and says play it another way.”
I got on the back of the bike, and my father, still enraged, headed out into traffic. Only this time he was not in the bicycle lane but in the car lane. His anger was causing him to lose his good sense. Cars sped past on either side of us, their drivers shouting and honking.
“You’re so stupid!” my father yelled, ignoring the cars that were practically sideswiping us. “You’re so lazy! You aren’t listening to the teacher, and you aren’t playing what she wants to hear!”
My father steered the bike erratically. I had my arms around his waist, but it was difficult to hold on.
“You are ruining your chance for success! You are being stubborn by playing the way you want to play — and defying the teacher!”
“I’m not!” I screamed back, tears streaming down my face, the wind biting my eyes. “I’m trying!”
“You’re not trying hard enough!”
“I can’t try any harder!”
“Then you are a fool and an idiot!”
With that, he jerked the handlebars of the bike to the right to avoid a truck. The move was so sudden that I lost my grip and started falling to the street. Just when I felt myself slipping off completely, my dad managed to catch me. While still pedaling, he brought me back up with his right hand and held on until I was able to steady myself, but he continued to ride in the car lane and, under his breath, still spoke of how poorly I had performed for the exalted professor.
That night I practiced the piece according to my new directions. I knew I had no choice, but I also knew that I was dealing with a teacher who wouldn’t be happy with me no matter what I did. When I returned to her studio a week later and played the Beethoven with more force, she shook her head.
“Something is still missing,” she said.
“What?” I wanted to know.
She didn’t have an answer for me.
“You’re not listening to me!” she shouted.
“I’m trying,” I said helplessly.
“Don’t talk back to the professor!” my father screamed.
I fought back tears, and because I was so upset, I made several mistakes when I played the piece again.
My father was furious. That night he threw a hard leather shoe at me. The anger behind his action hurt even more than the blow.
“You are letting us all down,” he said. “You are letting down your mother, you are letting me down, you are letting down yourself! You are bringing shame on your family!”
His accusations against me got wilder. He had never talked to me this way before. He’d had no need to. I was a star pupil in Shenyang, but in Beijing I had lost my shine, and the more Professor Angry criticized me, the crazier my father became. Deep down, he may have detected the inconsistency of her critiques, but because he was a man who respected authority implicitly, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her. I felt hopeless and filled with despair.
Things have to get better, I thought to myself. But they only got worse.
Excerpted from "Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story" by Lang Lang © 2008 by Lang Lang with David Ritz. Reprinted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of The Doubleday Publishing Group.
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