by Ann Hulbert
Meanwhile, the United States was primed for the opposite emphasis. Americans had mostly gotten over the “Mozart Effect” fad of the 1990s, which promised a cognitive boost for babies exposed early to classical music CDs—sweat-free enrichment. A more demanding formula for exceptional performance had lately become a cultural catchphrase, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s pitch for the research behind it in his best-selling Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). Starting with a study of elite violinists, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson had surveyed pianists, chess players, athletes, and others to come up with what Gladwell coined the “10,000 hour rule.” That was the quota of “deliberate practice”—effortful work, starting early and sustained assiduously—required for outstanding accomplishment by anyone in any field. Talent, Ericsson boldly concluded, was beside the point.
“The scientific formulation of the American dream,” another psychologist called the rule. Gladwell heralded the “magic number of greatness,” using the same adjective that Marc had reached for as he spoke up at Carnegie Hall. In his introduction to the youth edition of Lang Lang’s memoir, the conductor Daniel Barenboim also invoked enchantment. “Dear Children of the World,” he began, eager to celebrate musical uplift for all and to downplay the daunting reality of practice-filled hours. “Being a musician is important, and it is very serious,” Barenboim wrote, “but it is also a lot of fun.” The young Lang Lang, he promised, “most likely was very much like each and every one of you”—and still is, in spirit. He “has remained a child in the sense that he never ceases to wonder at the magic of music.”
But had he ever actually had a childhood? Prodigies had always prompted versions of that worry, and they still did. (What parent, surveying children’s ever more crowded extracurricular schedules, doesn’t share it?) In truth, Lang Lang’s pages told a darker story, and that night Marc could have done the same, not that anyone would have guessed, except his mother. The yearned-for musical pinnacle might be a habitat for fairies. A child’s path to it, both pianists knew, was anything but.
Two nonmusicians—both daughters of Chinese immigrants, as it happened—knew it, too, and set out to explore the duress children experience on the path to exceptional achievement. One was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Angela Duckworth. She gave the effort-vs.-talent debate a jolt with a cowritten article in 2007 that appropriated the term grit, which she defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”—a not-so-magical internal ingredient of success. The other was a parent, and a Yale Law School professor, named Amy Chua. She added a decidedly un-fun external element to the effort-over-talent paradigm: coercive pressure. In a tell-all account of pushing her two daughters toward virtuoso heights on the piano and violin, she hid none of the conflict that roiled their household. When Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out in early 2011, it caused a furor.
This was progress, perverse though that may sound. The uncensored adult insights, along with Lang Lang’s timely inside story (Norbert Wiener had been more than twice his age when he published Ex-Prodigy), finally put the biggest mystery of all front and center: What motivates a child to pursue off-the-charts mastery, which is guaranteed to be anything but easy, even for a prodigy? The age-old debate over whether talent is the product of nature or nurture was unlikely ever to end. (Juilliard’s Veda Kaplinsky had a comeback for both sides: talent is like sex in marriage—if it’s good, it’s 10 percent, and if it’s bad, it’s 90 percent.) But at last, more pressing questions were getting the explicit scrutiny they deserved.
So were the too-simple answers of the past, which had variously celebrated prodigies’ “reserve energy,” eager curiosity, imaginative spontaneity, spunky confidence, and undistracted focus as the special fuel that propelled them. Just as important, very young prodigies, Marc among them, were having their say—even when it wasn’t what their elders wanted to hear. How, when, and why do children—who could be socializing, playing video games, exploring this or that passing interest—muster the kind of solitary, strenuous, tedious, time-consuming effort that spurs them onward in a particular pursuit? And at what price, however fruitful their fervor may seem at first?
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“To me, the most shocking thing about grit,” Angela Duckworth said in a TED talk in 2013, “is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.” Her own Chinese father seemed to have hit on one tactic, not that she was about to endorse it. He repeatedly told her, she wrote in her book Grit three years later, “You know, you’re no genius!” Amy Chua’s father goaded rather differently. When she won a history prize but not the best-all-around-student award in the eighth grade, he warned her, “Never, never disgrace me like that again.” Lang Lang’s father made such paternal prodding look tame, yet when he spelled out the grit-based philosophy that guided him, he could have been speaking for them all—fathers and daughters, Marc Yu and his mother, and lots of other Americans, too, especially readers of Outliers. “You may face a competitor who has more talent than you,” Lang Lang recalled his father explaining. “You can’t control that, though I believe you have all the talent and creativity you need. But you can control how hard you work. You can make sure that you work harder than anyone.”
His father’s actions, though, conveyed a far less psychologically correct message, and did so more bluntly than even the most zealous prodigy promoters in early-twentieth-century America would have dared: “I can control how hard you work” was the presumption. “I can make sure that you work harder than anyone else.” Lang Guoren’s proprietary authority was a variation on the immigrant striver’s credo familiar to Boris Sidis and Leo Wiener: in effect, he and Zhou Xiulan, Lang Lang’s mother, had stumbled into a new country in 1976 when the Cultural Revolution ended.
The traumatic decade had shattered families and aspirations, his to be a musician (he played the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle) and hers to be a dancer or actress. Three years later, the one-child policy was in place. Lang Lang’s mother and father joined a generation of parents who, not surprisingly, focused on the futures of their “little emperors” with an intensity that pushed traditional Confucian tenets of “family education” to extremes. The race was on to dedicate every parental resource and self-sacrificial impulse to ensuring that a child’s progress was not thwarted as theirs had been. The utmost filial piety and tenacity, it went without saying, were due in return.
Filial autonomy was simply not part of a picture that, at least to an outside observer familiar with the latest Western expertise, looked all wrong. The approach violated just about everything psychologists were beginning to think might help motivate children to stick with the hard work of honing a talent—and, ideally, go on to become creative adults. Exposure to music came early for chubby Lang, born in 1982 in the northwestern industrial city of Shenyang. So did fearfully intense pressure to please, applied by his first teacher, who was his father. Lang Guoren had practiced doggedly to earn a short-lived job in the Air Force orchestra, and Zhou Xiulan, imaginative and beautiful, worked as a telephone operator. Together they had saved up enough money to buy a cheap piano in 1984 for a toddler whose ear for radio tunes they took as a sure sign of talent. They crammed the upright into their small room in the artists’ barracks. Now they, like just about every family there, had their child busy learning an instrument. Lang, a shy preschooler yet also a show-off, was thrilled—and on edge: playing under the judgmental eye of his stern-faced father, already fanatically determined that his son would excel, was anything but relaxing. What moments his adored mother could seize for snuggling with Lang—“a sensitive child,” she stressed to her husband—were brief. Lang Guoren would order their son back to the piano bench, scolding that “all this sentiment makes him weak.”
LANG LANG Credit 16
Plenty of would-be virtuosos move on, as Lang did, to “real” lessons around the age of four (nine at the latest), though few parents display Lang Guoren’s zeal to secure the highest-caliber teacher already at that
stage—and then to butt heads with her. In Zhu Yafen, he discovered a great teacher, only to adamantly resist her pedagogical wisdom. Her style was to emphasize “the importance of balance between mastering technique and musicality,” she explained later. She also advocated moving beyond China’s “competition-oriented attitude to one of comprehensive knowledge.” And especially with a young boy as emotionally connected to music as she felt Lang was by nature, she counseled against precisely what Lang Guoren urged: harsh pushing. Uncomprehending, he kept up his demands on his son to practice more hours, memorize more quickly, and enter every contest, where “winning, winning, winning” was all that counted and slipping up would be catastrophic. A pat on the back, which Lang Guoren always gave him before he stepped on stage, was the only demonstrative touch Lang knew from his father (until, at ten, he asked him to put his arm around him in the cold bed they shared).
No wonder the prospect of kindergarten had Lang feeling scared and off-balance. His confidence was tied up in external plaudits and a rigid practice regimen: a photo of him at the piano after his first competition victory at five (he played a very difficult Kabalevsky variation very well) shows a little boy already fond of big hand flourishes. With peers, though, he felt awkward. His parents, no surprise, let him stay home instead, practicing for hours—with a tape recorder (his idea) to prove that he was hard at it. Zhou Xiulan, who worked nearby, checked in on him. Lang Guoren, who had since become a police officer, bore down on him with the “unchallenged power” that was a Chinese father’s prerogative. When a setback came, Lang, now seven, was distraught, tearfully screaming at the judges who had ranked him seventh in a competition, “It’s not fair! You cheated me.” Back home at the piano, he was increasingly in the grip of a two-word obsession: Number One, Number One.
“Achievement motivation,” the experts call such success-driven striving, noting that a relentless focus on extrinsic rewards can lead to a blinkered fear of failure and then to burnout—dangers beyond the ken of Lang Guoren, reared on traumatizing turmoil himself. He was ready for any sacrifice, which he felt gave him the right to presume that his son was, too. As Lang turned nine, his teacher agreed the time had come to move on to Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music, the next step on the arduous path to international renown. The external obstacles were staggering. Only twelve out of two thousand young applicants to the conservatory would make it through an ostensibly meritocratic contest, which in fact was a bribe-greased system opaque to outsiders. The emotional upheaval was devastating, intensified by Lang Guoren’s brutal denial of family distress. Zhou Xiulan, now the sole breadwinner, had to stay behind in Shenyang. She couldn’t reveal her grief at the rupture, and Lang’s anguish met with dismissal and fury. Lang Guoren flung his distraught son’s favorite toys out the window.
A newly desperate energy possessed Lang, now alone with his taskmaster in huge and alien Beijing. “When I played the piano, I was happy, my father was satisfied, and I felt my mother’s presence nearby. When I wasn’t playing the piano, I felt that everything was lost.” In their unheated apartment, he practiced manically, his hands almost numb, but on the bench he was warmer than he was in bed. And then Lang’s new teacher, whom Lang Guoren was counting on to be their stringent ally, proved irrationally sadistic beyond even the harshest Chinese pedagogical standards. Professor Angry, as Lang called her, set contradictory goals in every lesson and berated him for his failure to fulfill them. Lang Guoren, panicked, insisted on compliance. Overwhelmed by senseless dictates, Lang felt betrayed as well as bereft.
He was right to. One day his teacher dismissed him for reasons neither father nor son could possibly have guessed. Lang Lang, she said, was “a lost cause.” Actually, as they found out only later, some backstabbing conservatory applicants (also from Shenyang) had fed her rumors that Lang Guoren was involved with criminals. Lang’s father snapped. “Die now rather than live in shame!” he shrieked at his son when Lang returned from school the next day. Lang Guoren commanded him to swallow a bottle of pills, and was ready to throw him off the eleventh-floor apartment balcony and then die himself. The mania subsided only when Lang began pounding his hands into the wall—desperate to destroy what his father had always told him to protect. “I hate my hands, I hate you, I hate the piano,” he sobbed, while his father implored him to stop. “…I’ll never practice again. I’ll never touch the piano for as long as I live.”
Lang’s beloved teacher in Shenyang had warned against sabotaging his pleasure in music. American psychologists newly curious in the 1990s about the motivational mysteries of talent development also might have said I told you so. A father blind to parent-child boundaries and obsessed with grueling exertion; a deep family schism over emotional nurturing; a skewed focus on narrow competition at the expense of early exploration; an impossible teacher, backed by an implacable parent, at a key turning point in training—any, never mind all, of these difficulties could derail even a child impelled by an inner “rage to master,” the psychologist Ellen Winner’s phrase for the inborn zeal that she felt distinguished a true prodigy.
Intensity was essential to developing a gift, but undiluted pressure could destroy sustained commitment. For talented teenagers, particularly in the arts, fruitful drive thrived on enjoyment, not just challenge; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading figure in positive psychology, probed that balance in research with colleagues. For adult artists and innovators, the psychologist Howard Gardner observed, the ability to “make some kind of a raid upon their childhood” helped fuel creativity. If incessant goal-focused demands for precocious mastery had quashed playful curiosity and risk-taking, imaginative resources might well not be there to draw on. Lang, not even a teenager yet, seemed depleted already by his ordeals. “I was ten years old,” he announced in his memoir, “but I had never had a childhood that was anything but a miserable effort at trying to be an adult.”
Except Lang hadn’t flamed out. After four months “stuck in hell,” neither touching the piano nor uttering a word to his now abject father, he was back at work. Ambushed by hate and plunged into depression, he had been saved by his own deep love of music: that is the official message of a memoir designed to transcend a daddy-dearest screed and spread the “magic of music” spirit. But the facile uplift misses the more distinctive drama that emerges from Lang Lang’s account, with its child’s-eye view. In taking readers inside the big, fuzzy head and the lonely heart of the boy he had been, his pages evoke a hidden struggle for filial autonomy, under way from the start. They reveal unexpectedly fraught internal forces propelling his zeal to improve his skills. You couldn’t call it typical childish fun. At the same time, well before the Beijing blow-up, Lang had been finding freedom—to defy his father and begin to define himself—through his endless labors at the piano.
Given the ebulliently extroverted Lang Lang brand, it comes as a jolt to learn how solitary his days were, and how essential that was to his progress and to the need to forge his own sense of purpose. The Chinese context is crucial. That competitive mantra (Number One, Number One) was a culturally approved challenge, not just some crazy paternal imperative. The command to grind away had the aura of a summons to glory for Lang Lang, who prided himself on the drive to win that “was in my blood…is in my blood.” And Western classical music, because it wasn’t, exerted special allure. Mozart (number one, his father told him) beckoned to Lang as “a golden boy who danced from one birthday party to another.” At seven, Lang could picture the bright keys on the new piano that was first prize in a contest he entered, and he wouldn’t let up. That same year he began talking with his mother about her struggles during the Cultural Revolution, when she was given no chance to shine because she was the daughter of despised landlords. Excelling for her sake clearly counted immensely for Lang. So did her, and his teacher’s, tributes to his sensitivity.
Clarity of expectations and feedback, and a sense of emotional commitment to a larger cause: a child pursuing music in China didn’t lack for either of those spu
rs to advancement. But Lang’s own imagination—a world Lang Guoren knew nothing about—held the more immediate, intimate secret to sustaining his concentration as he practiced for hours, doggedly toiling over hard passages. The catalyst had come very early, and later on Lang Lang loved to evoke it in his musical missionary work with children. It’s obvious why. As a toddler, just when the piano arrived in the apartment, Lang watched “The Cat Concerto” episode of the Tom and Jerry cartoon on the family’s little black-and-white TV. He sat riveted by the tuxedoed cat whose performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 becomes a manic duet/fight with a mouse.
Tom’s playing awakens Jerry, asleep inside the grand piano. The mouse gets right to work on revenge. Snatching away piano keys, setting a mousetrap for a stretchy finger, Jerry ratchets up his attempts at sabotage. Fabulous acrobatics follow as the music goes on, not missing a beat—though a few jazzy ones get added. “I understood at a very early age that not only was making music great fun,” Lang Lang reported in the didactic mode of Playing with Flying Keys. “…It told me secret stories, and they were mine alone to hold in my imagination.” For a boy whose prize toy was his collection of Transformers—robotic action figures that can change shape—cascading pranks were an ideal counterpoint to that relentless mantra roll in his head. The same theme of protean adventure was at the heart of Lang’s other favorite cartoon, about a Chinese mythological hero called the Monkey King, a protector of monks and children whose virtuous work left plenty of room for mischievous metamorphoses.