Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part I
May 1952
June 1941
June 1952
September 1941
September 1952
December 1941
November 1952
Part II
December 9, 1941
December 15, 1941
December 26, 1941
January 4, 1942
January 21, 1942
Part III
May 2, 1953
May 5, 1953
May 7, 1953
May 8, 1953
May 12, 1953
May 13, 1953
May 20, 1953
May 20, 1953
April 10, 1943
May 2, 1943
May 27, 1953
1943
May 10, 1943
May 28, 1953
June 2, 1953
July 3, 1953
July 5, 1953
May 27, 1953
April 1942
May 27, 1953
July 5, 1953
July 12, 1953
1953
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
VIKING
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First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Janice Y. K. Lee, 2009
All rights reserved
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Lee, Janice Y. K.
The Piano Teacher / Janice Y. K. Lee
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-440-65630-9
1. Piano teachers—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction. 3. English—China—Hong Kong—
Fiction. 4. Hong Kong (China)—Fiction. 5. Nineteen fifties—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E34295P56 2009
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For my parents
Part I
May 1952
IT STARTED as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into Claire’s purse. It had been on the piano and she had been gathering up the sheet music at the end of the lesson when she knocked it off. It fell off the doily (a doily! on the Steinway!) and into her large leather bag. What had happened after that was perplexing, even to her. Locket had been staring down at the keyboard and hadn’t noticed. And then, Claire had just . . . left. It wasn’t until she was downstairs and waiting for the bus that she grasped what she had done. And then it had been too late. She went home and buried the expensive porcelain figurine under her sweaters.
Claire and her husband had moved to Hong Kong nine months ago, transferred by the government, which had posted Martin at the Department of Water Services. Churchill had ended rationing and things were starting to return to normal when they had received news of the posting. She had never dreamed of leaving England before.
Martin was an engineer, overseeing the building of the Tai Lam Cheung reservoir, so that there wouldn’t need to be so much rationing when the rains ebbed, as they did every several years. It was to hold four and a half billion gallons of water when full. Claire almost couldn’t imagine such a number, but Martin said it was barely enough for the people of Hong Kong, and he was sure that by the time they were finished, they’d have to build another. “More work for me,” he said cheerfully. He was analyzing the topography of the hills so that they could install catchwaters for when the rain came. The English government did so much for the colonies, Claire knew. They made the locals’ lives much better but they rarely appreciated it. Her mother had warned her about the Chinese before she left—an unscrupulous, conniving people who would surely try to take advantage of her innocence and goodwill.
Coming over, she had noticed it for days, the increasing wetness in the air, even more than usual. The sea breezes were stronger and the sunrays more powerful when they broke through cloud. When the P&O Canton finally pulled into Hong Kong harbor in August, she really felt she was in the tropics, hair frizzing up in curls, face always slightly damp and oily, the constant moisture under her arms and knees. When she stepped from her cabin outside, the heat assailed her like a physical blow, until she managed to find shade and fan herself.
There had been seven stops along the month-long journey, but after a few grimy hours spent in Algiers and Port Said, Claire had decided to stay onboard rather than encounter more frightening peoples and customs. She had never imagined such sights. In Algiers, she had seen a man kiss a donkey and she couldn’t discern whether the high odor was coming from one or the other, and in Egypt, the markets were the very definition of unhygienic—a fishmonger gutting a fish had licked the knife clean with his tongue. She had inquired as to whether the ship’s provisions were procured locally, at these markets, and the answer had been most unsatisfactory. An uncle had died from food poisoning in India, making her cautious. She kept to herself and sustained herself mostly on the beef tea they dispensed in the late morning on the sun deck. The menus that were distributed every day were mundane: turnips, potatoes, things that could be stored in the hold, with meat and salads the first few days after port. Martin promenaded on the deck every morning for exercise and tried to get her to join him, to no avail. She preferred to sit in a deck chair with a large brimmed hat and wrap herself in one of the scratchy wool ship blankets, face shaded from the omnipresent sun.
There had been a scandal on the ship. A woman, going to meet her fiancé in Hong Kong, had spent one too many moonlit nights on the deck with another gentleman and had disembarked in the Philippines with her new man, leaving only a letter for her intended. Liesel, the girlfriend to whom the woman had entrusted the letter, gr
ew visibly more nervous as the date of arrival drew near. Men joked that she could take Sarah’s place, but she wasn’t having any of that. Liesel was a serious young woman who was joining her sister and brother-in-law in Hong Kong, where she intended to educate Unfortunate Chinese Girls in Art: when she held forth on it, it was always with capital letters in Claire’s mind.
Before disembarking, Claire separated out all of her thin cotton dresses and skirts; she could tell that was all she would be wearing for a while. They had arrived to a big party on the dock, with paper streamers and loud, shouting vendors selling fresh fruit juice and soy milk drinks and garish flower arrangements to the people waiting. Groups of revelers had already broken out the champagne and were toasting the arrival of their friends and family.
“We pop them as soon as we see the boat on the horizon,” a man explained to his girl as he escorted her off the boat. “It’s a big party. We’ve been here for hours.” Claire watched Liesel go down the gangplank, looking very nervous, and then she disappeared into the throng. Claire and Martin went down next, treading on the soft, humid wood, luggage behind them carried by two scantily clad young Chinese boys who had materialized out of nowhere.
Martin had an old school friend, John, who worked at Dodwell’s, one of the trading firms, who had promised to greet the ship. He came with two friends and offered the new arrivals freshly squeezed guava drinks. Claire pretended to sip at hers, as her mother had warned her about the cholera that was rampant in these parts. The men were bachelors and very pleasant. John, Nigel, Leslie. They explained that they all lived together in a mess—there were many, known by their companies, Dodwell’s Mess, Jardine’s Mess, et cetera, and they assured Claire and Martin that Dodwell’s threw the best parties around.
They accompanied them to the government-approved hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, where a Chinese man with a long queue, dirty white tunic, and shockingly long fingernails showed them to their room. They made an arrangement to meet for tiffin the next day and the men departed, leaving Martin and Claire sitting on the bed, exhausted and staring at one another. They didn’t know each other that well. They had been married barely four months.
She had accepted Martin’s proposal to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother railing against everything, getting worse, it seemed, with her advancing age, and an uninspiring job as a filing girl at an insurance company. Martin was older, in his forties, and had never had luck with women. The first time he kissed her, she had to stifle the urge to wipe her mouth. He was like a cow, slow and steady. And kind. She knew this. She was grateful for it.
She had not had many chances with men. Her parents stayed home all the time, and so she had as well. When she had started seeing Martin—he was the older brother of one of the girls at work—she had eaten dinner at restaurants, drunk a cocktail at a hotel bar, and seen other young women and men talking, laughing with an assurance she could not fathom. They had opinions about politics; they had read books she had never heard of and seen foreign films and talked about them with such confidence. She was enthralled and not a little intimidated. And then Martin had come to her, serious, his job was taking him to the Orient, and would she come with him? She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be picky, she thought, hearing the voice of her mother. She let him kiss her and nodded yes.
Claire had started to draw a bath in their hotel room when another knock on the door revealed a small Chinese woman, an amah, she was called, who started to unpack their suitcases until Martin shooed her off.
And that was how they arrived in Hong Kong, which was like nothing Claire had imagined. Apart from the usual colonial haunts—all hush and genteel potted palms and polished wood in whitewashed buildings—it was loud and crowded and dirty and bustling. The buildings were right next to one another and often had clothing hung out to dry on bamboo poles. There were garish vertical signs hung on every one, and they advertised massage parlors and pubs and hair salons. Someone had told her that opium dens still existed in back-alley buildings. There was often refuse on the street, sometimes even human refuse, and there was a pungent, peppery odor in town that was oddly clingy, attaching itself to your very skin until you went home for a good scrub. There were all sorts of people. The local women carried their babies in a sort of back sling. Sikhs served as uniformed security guards—you saw them dozing off on wooden stools outside the banks, turbaned heads hanging heavily off their chests, rifles held loosely between their knees. The Indians had been brought over by the British, of course. Pakistanis ran carpet stores, Portuguese were doctors, and Jews ran the dairy farms and other large businesses. There were English businessmen and American bankers, White Russian aristocrats, and Peruvian entrepreneurs—all peculiarly well traveled and sophisticated—and, of course, there were the Chinese, quite different in Hong Kong from the ones in China, she was told.
To her surprise, she didn’t detest Hong Kong, as her mother had told her she would—she found the streets busy and distracting, so very different from Croydon, and filled with people and shops and goods she had never seen before. She liked to sample the local bakery goods, the pineapple buns and yellow egg tarts, and sometimes wandered outside Central, where she would quickly find herself in unfamiliar surroundings, where she might be the only non-Chinese around. The fruit stalls were heaped with not only oranges and bananas, still luxuries in postwar England, but spiky, strange-looking fruits she came to try and like: star fruit, durian, lychee. She would buy a dollar’s worth and be handed a small, waxy brown bag and she would eat the fruit slowly as she walked. There were small stalls made of crudely nailed wood and corrugated tin, which housed specialty shops: this one sold chops, the stone stamps the Chinese used in place of signatures; this one made only keys; this one had a chair that was rented for half-days by a street dentist and a barber. The locals ate on the street in tiny little restaurants called daipaidong, and she had seen three worker men in dirty singlets and trousers crouched over a plate containing a whole fish, spitting out the bones at their feet. One had seen her watching them, and deliberately picked up the fish’s eyeball with his chopsticks and raised it up to her, smiling, before he ate it.
Claire hadn’t met many Chinese people before, but the ones she had seen in the big towns in England were serving you in restaurants or ironing clothes. There were many of those types in Hong Kong, of course, but what had been eye-opening was the sight of the affluent Chinese, the ones who seemed English in all but their skin color. It had been quite something to see a Chinese step out of a Rolls-Royce, as she had one day when she was waiting on the steps of the Gloucester Hotel, or in business suits, eating lunch with other Englishmen who talked to them as if they were the same. She hadn’t known that such worlds existed. And then with Locket, she was thrust into their world.
After a few months settling in, finding a flat and setting it up, Claire had put the word out that she was looking for a job teaching the piano, somewhat as a lark, she put it—something to fill the day—but the truth was, they could really use the extra money. She had played the piano most of her life and was primarily self-taught. Amelia, an acquaintance she had met at a sewing circle, said she would ask around.
She rang a few days later.
“There’s a Chinese family, the Chens. They run everything in town. Apparently, they’re looking for a piano teacher for their daughter, and they’d prefer an Englishwoman. What do you think? ”
“A Chinese family? ” Claire said. “I hadn’t thought about that possibility. Aren’t there any English families looking? ”
“No,” Amelia said. “Not that I’ve been able to ascertain.”
“I just don’t know . . .” Claire demurred. “Wouldn’t it be odd? ” She couldn’t imagine teaching a Chinese girl. “Does she speak English? ”
“Probably better than you or me,” Amelia said impatiently. “They’re offering very adequate compensation.” She named a large sum.
“Well,” Claire said slowly, “I suppose it couldn’t do any
harm to meet them.”
Victor and Melody Chen lived in the Mid-Levels, in an enormous white two-story house on May Road. There was a driveway, with potted plants lining the sides. Inside, there was the quiet, efficient buzz of a household staffed with plentiful servants. Claire had taken a bus, and when she arrived, she was perspiring after the walk from the road to the house. The amah had led her to a sitting room, where she found a fan blowing blessedly cool air. A houseboy adjusted the drapes so that she was properly shaded. Her blue linen skirt, just delivered from the tailor, was wrinkled, and she had on a white voile blouse that was splotched with moisture. She hoped the Chens would allow her some time to compose herself. She shifted, feeling a drop of perspiration trickle down her thigh.
No such luck. Mrs. Chen swooped through the door, a vision in cool pink, holding a tray of drinks. A small, exquisite woman, with hair cut just so, so that it swung in precise, geometric movements. Her shoulders were fragile and exposed in her sleeveless shift, her face a tiny oval.
“Hello! ” Mrs. Chen trilled. “Lovely to meet you. I’m Melody. Locket’s just on her way.”
“Locket? ” Claire said, uncertain.
“My daughter. She’s just back from school and getting changed into something more comfortable. Isn’t the heat dreadful?” She set down the tray, which held long glasses of iced tea. “Have something cool, please.”
“Your English is remarkably good,” Claire said as she took a glass.
“Oh, is it? ” Melody said casually. “Four years at Wellesley will do that for you, I suppose.”
“You were at university in America?” Claire asked. She hadn’t known that Chinese went to university in America.
“Loved every minute,” she said. “Except for the horrible, horrible food. Americans think a grilled cheese sandwich is a meal! And as you know, we Chinese take food very seriously.”
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