Why must Chinese parents make children dread piano?
- Music lessons are practically a rite of passage for Asian children but when forced, they can strip our kids of a lifelong enjoyment of music
When I was five, my parents bought me a piano. It was a very East Asian thing to do. East Asian parents tend to buy their children either a piano or violin and sign them up for lessons, and for me it was the piano. It was a dark mahogany Baldwin, and a novelty for me to sit on the bench and swing my legs, my feet just grazing the floor.
An ingrained memory: my piano teacher looking at me sternly as I started playing a tune I had heard. I could listen to songs such as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and then play the tune perfectly on the piano, but my teacher didn’t necessarily like that I didn’t play “by the book”, never mind that I might have been exhibiting signs of musical genius.
After a hiatus, I had a new piano teacher – an elderly woman who also led the church choir. My sister and I both took lessons from her and even performed at a concert held in her living room. But I disliked the metronome and found it somewhat scary (to me, it resembled an ancient device of torture). After I decided to disregard it and play instead to my own beat, my teacher suggested I find something else to my liking other than the piano. I was 11 – and I decided that I would play the piano in my own time and just the way I liked.
After my parents divorced, when I was 16, the piano disappeared (likely donated) and was never mentioned again. Yet, despite the litany of disapproving piano teachers who quit and the disappearance of my childhood piano, I never lost my love for the instrument.