Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Yet there was also a subtext. Tom and Jerry’s silly game is frenetic and violent, the way cartoons often can be: the pair plays through pain, plenty of it. And they share the most daunting of goals—no slipups. Though at the end Jerry takes a bow in a trim tuxedo, Tom has emerged a tattered, exhausted wreck. Looking back, his relationship with his father very much in mind, Lang Lang recognized the grimmer implications in the antic partnership. The duet/fight had the potential to “turn a child’s play into an obsession.” Extreme immersion in the piano could verge on an escapist addiction for a child desperately missing his mother, and wishing that time and space could contract, which is just what fervent focus can make them do.

  But he mostly grasped at the theme of resilience. A boy who spent a lot of time alone was always making up stories to keep himself company. For Lang at the piano, faced with musical challenges, the storytelling helped keep him practicing, hour after hour. Lang was ready to chase, fall down, chase again, seeing how fast he could go, “even if my hands grew tired and my fingers began to ache”—and even as his father hounded him to do more, always reminding him of some imminent performance. The higher the pianistic hurdles, the more of a heroic battler Lang became in his stories, and he knew he could count on his cast of companions. Monkey King was an imaginary friend who would never desert him.

  Lang didn’t put it this way, of course, but he had carved out space for a version of the “autotelic experience”—absorption in an activity purely for its own sake, a specialty of childhood—that Csikszentmihalyi discovered was essential to “flow.” The deeply satisfying experiences of flow, the psychologist wrote in his best-selling 1990 book by that title, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” The prize always beckoned, but Lang was finding ways to get lost in the process. It was more about intensity than serenity. And then came the times when the straining gave way to a sense of surrender, which brought with it a flawless rendition of a troublesome passage.

  Lang’s internal script was ideal for the kind of productive, not merely repetitive, practice that can spur real progress. For a tense, competitive child who was cut next to no slack, his stories also helped him to rebound from criticism, to make use of a teacher’s suggestions. He was devastated when he lost the competition that was supposed to deliver the new piano with its shiny keys. But before long the stuffed yellow dog, a despised consolation prize that Lang kicked when he was struggling with a piece, joined his loyal, private corps of supporters.

  That “voluntary” in Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation is important, and becomes more so the older a child gets and the harder the performance challenges prove to be. A teacher out to crush him, a father ready to kill him: for Lang in Beijing, to say that coercion—inner and outer—overwhelmed volition is an understatement. But strange though this may sound, the crisis that led Lang, the year he turned ten, to do battle with a chastened father was a very lucky break, literally. Before the turmoil of puberty, he viscerally experienced—and defiantly expressed—an independent identity. It helped that one day early in his bitter boycott of the piano, he stumbled on an ally from the outside world. In their Beijing neighborhood, Lang made friends with a fruit vendor, younger than his father, who became a champion—a living recruit to his imaginary cohort at just the right moment. It was also crucial that Lang’s classmates at his regular Beijing school coaxed him to resume accompanying their choir. Lang kept that a secret from his father. He was still punishing Lang Guoren, newly aware of how much power he wielded and how much the piano mattered to him, never mind his father.

  When they reconciled, the terms were different. Too young for potentially self-sabotaging adolescent rebellion, Lang was old enough for a very healthy assertion of ego. He could see then, not just in retrospect, that “my father and I shared an obsession. His drive was great, but so was mine, and I knew that I needed him.” They were never going to be a mellow pair, but they had each faced fears of utter disaster—the end of their quest, and the loss of control and of trust. The prospect terrified them both, which redoubled their zeal, now seasoned with some realism about the politics of the competitive system. A new teacher’s counsel that Lang should calm down and stop “chasing the music” proved helpful. So was the arrival of Lang’s slacker cousin, a gifted clarinetist whom Lang Guoren could more accurately berate for laziness—and who made Lang feel more proudly industrious.

  What one researcher has termed a “midlife crisis” common to prodigious young musicians—when intuitive imitation leads on to, or doesn’t, a more reflective sense of direction—wasn’t yet over by any means. But Lang had made cognitive and emotional leaps, even as his father refused to let up. Lang placed number one among the twelve chosen for the conservatory. Still small and pudgy at twelve, he triumphed at his first international competition, feeling a confident lightness, especially in Liszt’s “Tarantella,” and outshining government-favored rivals.

  There was reassurance in the stark rigor, in the knowledge that “the path to success in China was unambiguous: you had to beat out everyone else in every contest you entered.” And, though Lang Lang the memoirist never said this, surely he’d had in mind the reward beyond all rewards if he succeeded: reunion with his mother. At the same time, he described getting worked up into a “feverish state” as the competitive hurdles intensified with the arrival of his adolescence. Now Lang faced Westerners, too, steeped in the classical tradition as he worried he wasn’t. He was unable to relax, desperate for prizes to validate his talent, convinced that he had “to practice ten hours a day to stay sane.” An epiphany on hearing a fellow competitor, a blind Japanese pianist several years older, helped him find a new release of feeling as he performed. “He wasn’t trying to capture the emotions,” Lang realized as they played for each other, sharing not competing; “he became the emotions.” To grasp at inner poetry while meeting the most exacting of external demands: Lang struggled with the tensions. His perfectionist compulsion could feel like a trap—and yet it had taken him so far.

  Without those competition victories, his path to the United States would have been unimaginable. Lang arrived as a scholarship student, now fifteen, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1997. If his Beijing breakdown had proved to be well timed, so was his breakout—a bout of un-Chinese youthful turmoil—in the United States. Lang Lang’s rebellion was tame compared with Yo-Yo Ma’s more than two decades earlier, when the cello prodigy battled the Asian family discipline that felt so at odds with the American push for self-discovery.

  “I was meshuga,” Ma said of his teenage self in a New Yorker profile, buffeted—and broadened—by “conflicting messages coming from within, from parents, from school, from career.” Lang’s dose of clashing values was sudden and concentrated. In Philadelphia, he was juggling an utterly new world, a new language, a local high school and rowdy classmates. He faced a new childish freedom and a new mature autonomy, and a new concept for a “practice-crazed” young pianist—balance. At Curtis, he encountered a very alien conservatory ethos as he got down to work with his teacher, Gary Graffman (a former prodigy himself), who weaned Lang Lang off competitions and eased him out of Lang Guoren’s fierce grasp. To make real progress at this point, “it can’t be about the prize,” Graffman told him, aware of what a radical conversion this was for a Chinese-trained teenager. “Simply concentrate on the music, not where the music will take you.”

  Graffman was also helping him to “think culturally,” Lang Lang said in conversation years later, his eyebrows rising as he thought back to the personal and musical excitement he had felt. Where Yo-Yo Ma portrayed his “meshuga” phase as a prolonged revolt against discipline and a floundering quest for self-direction, Lang Lang evoked an efficiently facilitated crisis. In America’s upstart energy and individualism, he found thrilling alternatives to conformity. He cursed his father out publicly, dramatizing who called the shots now. At the same time, Lang fa
ced a scary question as he awaited his moment in the performance spotlight: “If I were not preparing for some contest, where would I find motivation?”

  Filling in for André Watts at seventeen, playing with the Chicago Symphony at the summer Ravinia Festival, launched his career, which brought with it the real if enviable problem of overdrive. When a hand injury forced a monthlong hiatus soon after his Carnegie debut, he had to push through his panic at not practicing. Lang Lang the memoirist made the psychological turning point sound all but effortless. In a matter of weeks, with the help of teachers and other Americans now in his life, he found relief from his compulsive grind and discovered rewards in friends, books, girls, Frank Sinatra. The quest for East-West synergy surely wasn’t quite that smooth, but Lang had journeyed in the easier direction, from rigor to vigor.

  “Was I ever really a normal teenager?” Lang Lang wondered, a doubt that young fans of the coolest piano superstar in the world might not have guessed he had ever entertained. As his memoir wound down, he wasn’t about to dwell on that question. “Maybe not, but I also wasn’t crazy. The piano is a beautiful thing, but during that month I learned that it isn’t the only beautiful thing.” Lang Lang—now a twentysomething star with an inspirational brand to promote—was eager to share a convivial, companionable vision of talent development utterly different from his childhood regimen. He preached what his small self hadn’t practiced: “You don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician.” The pianist who had labored under the fiercest of fathers stepped forth as the high-fiving and fun-loving young mentor whom children—like Marc Yu—dreamed of. Such a relationship answered Lang Lang’s needs, too, the writer Andrew Solomon sensed when he met up with him and Marc in the summer of 2008 after they had played Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor for four hands at the Proms, in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Solomon was struck by “Lang Lang’s avuncular gentleness with his protégé; I had never seen him so vulnerable.”

  Lang Lang institutionalized the role through his global music foundation, launching a Young Scholars program that celebrated stellar mastery as the antithesis of a lonely, grueling, narrowly competitive quest. To judge by their bios, the inaugural scholars onstage with him that night in 2009 at Carnegie Hall had been winnowed with that in mind. Musical virtuosity was their focus—and as at conservatories, students of Asian background disproportionately made the cut year after year—but they also checked the versatility box: along with hours of piano practice, they squeezed in hockey, novel-writing, and swim team, too.

  The new honor (no money attached) was a summons to become even busier—in a socially engaged spirit, like their mentor’s. During their two-year tenure, they would do more than expand their peer and professional networks through intermittent chamber music and orchestral experiences and master classes. Lang Lang anointed them ambassadors of classical music. Enlisted to “play it forward,” his variation on the pay-it-forward theme, they would showcase their talents at, among other places, strapped U.S. public schools selected to participate in one of the foundation’s other initiatives: an effort to develop a keyboard-based music curriculum for low-income kids unlikely ever to have lessons otherwise.

  What naturally didn’t get said at the school ribbon-cutting events was that for pianists at Marc’s level, sustaining musical progress presented daunting financial challenges of its own—among many other pressures. Balancing the demands of performance and practice with the life of an ordinary student could seem logistically impossible. As a model and mentor, Lang Lang offered musical opportunities, credentials, and camaraderie—and a darker caution than he perhaps realized. Passion and perseverance had the power to fuel brilliant performance, but were also bound up with pain and sacrifice. (The Chinese have a term for such arduous discipline, “eating bitterness.”) For parent and prodigy alike, as for Tom and Jerry, who was pushing whom blurred and changed in bewildering ways. But adults could take note: the grit that ultimately counted was beyond their grasp.

  · 3 ·

  Shortly before stepping on stage in 2009 for his Carnegie Hall debut with Lang Lang, Marc sat down with a CBS interviewer. He didn’t talk about gods, or fairies, or magical places—that was the comment he had ready for his postperformance moment at the microphone. Marc picked up instead on the earthbound theme he had made his refrain for several years, as he shared up-to-date talent development insights along with his musical feats. “All you have to do is practice every day, and when you grow up you are a virtuoso,” he had said with a snaggle-toothed grin at age seven in a documentary. How many hours a day? someone was always asking him. “As much time as an average kid would spend in front of the TV,” he had cheekily explained, his accented English a giveaway that he was steeped in his mother’s Cantonese, not cartoons, at home.

  Now Marc sounded more subdued. “My technique is much better than one year ago,” he quietly observed. His interviewer, rather than pausing for details, hurried on to the predictable can-you-believe-you’ve-made-it-to-Carnegie-Hall question. The response wasn’t quite the undaunted message the old, or rather younger, Marc would have delivered. “It’s like looking at the moon and how am I going to get there?” he said with typical expressive flair. He then half-sighed, “And the answer is always what my mother said, ‘Practice.’ ”

  For her part, Chloe Hui’s refrain so far, to all who asked, had been that “practice!” was precisely what she never needed to urge her son to do. At five, Marc was already clamoring to devote himself to pieces he knew Lang Lang had mastered as a boy. He pushed to take up the cello, too, inspired by his other idol, Yo-Yo Ma. Chloe, a soft-spoken beauty who had yearned for music lessons growing up in Macau, felt she had been playing catch-up almost from the start. She had joined relatives in San Francisco at seventeen in 1989 and studied film in college. During a postgraduation job as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, she met Marc’s father, a Chinese-American foreign securities investor. They soon married, and Marc (to whom Chloe gave a thorough in utero exposure to classical music) was born in January 1999. Three years later his parents divorced, and his father left the country. Awed to discover that Marc had perfect pitch, Chloe had by then sought out piano lessons for him.

  In an interview, Marc quaintly summed up the situation like this: “When I was three, I asked my mom, may I become a concert pianist? She said yes.” (Whether accurate or semi-apocryphal, such an exchange would have been unimaginable between either of the other single-mother-and-son pairs in these pages: Clarissa Cowell didn’t believe Henry needed her permission, and Bobby Fischer bridled at asking Regina’s consent for anything.) Marc was enchanted by music and memorized all the pieces in his piano book after his first lesson. In no time, he had acquired enough finger technique to reveal the kind of expressive gift that, Gary Graffman has noted of early talent spotting, a teacher can pick up on even in a simple lyrical phrase. Chloe reported that soon Marc was at the piano for four to five hours every day—often more, if he was absorbed in learning a piece: an off-the-charts level of practice for anyone at his age. She sat in on his lessons and supervised his practicing (a standard approach with young students of his caliber). She also told of waking up early to go over new music and her notes on what his teacher had said. Marc described getting out of bed in the middle of the night to work on a new passage, playing softly so he wouldn’t wake up his mother. By day, he wriggled on the piano bench, of course, and joked with his teacher at his lessons—until he got serious. If a passage needed rephrasing, Marc picked up on the suggestion immediately, then explored and nailed the improvement. As notable as his ear and fledgling musical insight, in short, was his exuberant tenacity—whether he was entranced by riddles or by Rachmaninoff. “I don’t know where he begins and she ends,” his kindergarten teacher observed of Marc and Chloe. “But he’s definitely a driven little boy.”

  Irrepressible Marc perfectly embodied a temperamental asset that purists on both sides of the talent-effort debate, newly attentive to motivation, were by now ready to emphasize. Ellen
Winner had endorsed the notion of an innate “rage to master” in her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities in the mid-1990s. Adults couldn’t match that kind of focus and phenomenally compressed pace, she had concluded, nor could they force it in a child. Two decades later Winner’s appearance in 2007 with Marc in a National Geographic documentary called My Brilliant Brain coincided with the debut of the less romantic term grit, for stick-to-itiveness that seemed to be only partly genetic and far more widely distributed. In her article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that year, Angela Duckworth played up its importance to long-term success rather than to precocious accomplishment. But it was never too soon, she suggested, to “encourage children to work not only with intensity but also with stamina”—whatever their gifts, since her data indicated that grit and talent were unrelated, or even perhaps inversely related. Duckworth knew she was getting ahead of the science, but she couldn’t resist a prescriptive leap: grit, the key to putting in hours of deliberate practice, could itself grow with practice.

  MARC YU Credit 17

  Research wasn’t likely to clinch it, and as a supremely cooperative duo, Marc and Chloe blurred the grit/innate rage-to-master difference in any case. They defied images of dogged Asian competitiveness in the process. If Winner was right that Marc needed no prodding, she also hastened to emphasize how much guidance and support self-driven young dynamos like him nonetheless did require (as Matt Savage’s parents would testify). Chloe and Marc gave every sign of a deep synchrony that eluded prodigious savants and their parents, as well as Lang Lang and his father—and, as it happened, Amy Chua and her two daughters. The grit-focused music training well under way in that family generated lots of yelling and other signs of tension. Chua’s husband and fellow Yale Law School professor, Jed Rubenfeld, a bemused bystander, noted tooth marks on the piano in their big New Haven house. Sophia, their superconscientious pianist, vented stress more quietly than did her younger sister, a natural on the violin. Lulu shredded music and shrieked in protest against her mother’s tyrannical enforcement of “the diligent, disciplined, confidence-expanding Chinese way,” which Chua promised would produce bold strivers—not “soft, entitled” American-style dilettantes (and definitely not “weird Asian automatons”).