by Vivian Yang
The young musicians’ fate changed for the better yet again in 1969 when their father was appointed cultural attaché to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw. It was there, in the more liberal Poland, that Mikhail listened to the jammed shortwave broadcast of the U.S. Armed Forces Radio relayed from its military base in West Germany. As he would later tell his attractive Chinese colleague Teacher Mo, he had heard The Rolling Stones for the first time. Something within him stirred. Before long, Mikhail was calling himself Mick, after Jagger.
His transistor usually sounded like somebody pointing a hairdryer into a microphone while talking. However, Mick was a captivated listener and his antenna-ed device became as endearing to him as his instrument. His heart jumped like a bow hitting all four strings on one day in 1970 when he made out from the static the name of a compatriot: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The Swedish Academy had awarded a Nobel Prize to the dissident author. As inexplicable as it appeared even to himself, Mick secured an English phrase book in immediate response to hearing the news. He hid it inside his violin case in the middle of the music scorebooks and began to memorize words and phrases with the same enthusiasm he reserved for learning numerous etudes by heart.
On one gray Warsaw winter morning, Mick was sitting outside his father’s office when he overheard a conversation about a Volga being dispatched to the U.S. Embassy in fifteen minutes. A surge of excitement ran through him as he experienced a moment of epiphany. The choice of his life was made on the spot: he would crawl into the trunk of that sedan and sneak into the U.S. territory in Warsaw. There was no time to fetch his violin, no time even to say “Dasvedania” to his father.
Not having any I.D. on him, Mick breathed out “My name eez Meek Popov.” to the American who saw the trunk popping up. Realizing that “Meek” wanted to seek political asylum, the American whisked him into the building proper, where the youth gesticulated that a violin was needed to present his case. A junior’s version of the apparatus borrowed from the daughter of the U.S. cultural attaché was brought in. The diplomat knew of his Soviet counterpart from cocktail functions but the two had rarely communicated during those Cold War days.
Mick Popov played Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major from memory. The instrument’s limitations notwithstanding, his performance all but put the Embassy staff into a trance. One blurted out: “This kid could one day make it to Carnegie Hall!”
As the Americans applauded and cheered, Mick felt tears rolling down his cheeks. He could not speak. He would not speak. With the bow sticking out in the middle of the air, he took the longest and deepest bow of his life, holding back emotions, insisting, persuading, pleading, and waiting for the sentence of his life to be pronounced.
After a moment of eerie buzzing and phone calls with subdued “O.K.”, “Fine.” and “That’s it.”, Popov’s wish was granted. A short while later, as the daughter looked on, the U.S. cultural attaché presented him with that junior’s violin. “How I wish you could stay in Warsaw and be my violin teacher,” the girl said, shaking his hand. “But I’m sure you’d rather go to America right away.”
“Da! Da! Yy-es! I go New York!”
“Work hard there and make good use of the violin,” a career visa-stamping officer urged. Other embassy staff had their host country-trained housemaids cum petty spies raid their drawers for some clothes for the teenager. Mick wore a pair of denim bell-bottom trousers the day he boarded a plane to New York, carrying nothing else but the violin.
Popov Sr. was recalled by Moscow, expelled from the Party and stripped of his “Comrade” and “Professor” prefixes. The three remaining Popovs were sent packing back to Kiev where Olga was debarred from the Communist Youth League and declared unfit for the cello. Although regarded as “an enemy of the people,” Popov Sr. considered himself lucky that Secretary-General Brezhnev had spared him the fate of being exiled to a Siberian gulag on a cattle wagon wearing a soiled, sable trapper’s hat inherited from some deceased prisoner.
In time, Mick Popov graduated from The Julliard School although he did not quite make it to Carnegie Hall. It was again the music of the Stones that gave him perspective:
And you can't always get what you want,
Honey, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime, yeah,
You just might find you get what you need!
Mick found what he needed in becoming “the Russian sub” – not a submarine but a substitute teacher at the Special Music School of America across from Lincoln Center, where musically-talented New York kids received a free education. This was the least he could do to repay the girl who had given him her violin. One young talent was an immigrant from Shanghai. “Did you happen to catch From Mao to Mozart on the PBS the other night?” she had asked her teacher one day.
“No. Was it any good?”
“It sure was. I’ll loan you the tape my parents recorded. My parents told me that Shanghai used to have lots of Russians like you.”
The fascinating Asian city and her music scene portrayed in the 1979 film greatly impressed Mick. After From Mao To Mozart: Isaac Stern in China won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Mick became interested in the history of the White Russians’ contributions to the Conservatory in the 1920s and the 1930s. He began sending out his CV for teaching opportunities in Shanghai. By August 1983, he was in the Affiliated Middle School on a 12-month work visa under the category of Foreign Expert.
Mick Popov was instantly smitten with his co-teacher who looked not a day over thirty and oh, so Chinese in the most complimentary sense. Knowing little English or Russian did not stop Mother from writing down everything Popov said in Chinese phonetics for later self-study. Wanting a common language should present no barrier, Expert Popov explained to Teacher Mo. We share the same universal language of music. He gesticulated this by mimicking the movements of a violinist and a pianist.
“Nadia!” Mother announced, her shapely index finger resting in between her cleavage, visible from her pink silk blouse. Not too long ago, this part of her anatomy would have been concealed under an army green tunic buttoned up to the throat.
“Nadia?” Mick repeated mechanically, his eyebrows arching.
Her finger flew away from her bosom to dance in front of his straight nose, fleetingly touching it like a dragonfly skimming through the surface of a pond. “You, Mee-ker, I, Nadia. You Papa Luosong! I Papa Luosong!”
“Luosong?” he repeated, gaping at her lips. “Do you mean that our fathers are both Luosong? You mean … ah, do you mean Russian?!”
“Yes! Yes! I Papa Luosong. I Mama Shanghai. I haafu Luosong!”
Mick would never have dreamed of meeting a half kin in China, but he did and in what flesh and blood! Soon, Teacher Mo was his “Nadia, my dear” who played Liszt’s Dream of Love No. 3 and Chopin’s The Revolutionary Étude just for him. Her dexterous fingers were in heated competition with his. Her expert hands – sensual, skilled, and strong – matched the equally well-trained pair of the foreign expert’s own. Their fingers competed on piano keys and on violin strings, and off; they played with each other, unlocking and locking themselves tight, bringing their own music to crescendo after crescendo.
No other language was needed.
Mick knew the power of such non-verbal communication well. At the makeshift chamber music hall of the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw a decade earlier, he succeeded by playing a solo violin concerto, with not a word spoken. He just let his limbs and semi-closed eyes do the talking, his desire for freedom manifested through notes floating in the air.
Few could appreciate the efficacy of the School’s Piano Building as much as Mother and Mick did. Rooms were situated row after row and stacked up on each floor, their size no larger than a king bed, the furniture nothing more than an upright piano, its seat which doubled as storage for scores, and a stand for solfeggio. The carpeting first laid by the White Russians may not have been cleaned in decades, yet it provided a cu
shion for the sinking floor. Once the bilingual “Private Lesson in Progress. Do Not Disturb.” sign was up and the door locked from within, few tended to seek them out. Chances are, whatever music or love being made inside would be drowned out by the reprimands and interrupted etudes from adjoining rooms.
At the end of one passionate session, his still trembling hands helped her fasten her bra hooks from behind. Nadia, both hands free, pointed to the ears on the Beethoven bust sitting atop the piano and giggled like a bell. Another rush of excitement hit him and her brassier was unbuckled again.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Beethoven’s deaf.” He hugged her from the back, polar bear-style. Mother and Mick resumed their intercepted composition under the watchful eyes of the hearing- but not sight-impaired Maestro, entering into and exiting from largo, presto or allegro, until it reached its final movement. Now one limp egg roll against a wall, they were oblivious that the metronome Nadia had set in the beginning was still ticking.
The tempo must go on.
In her broken English, Mother told Mick: “Your idol Yehudi Menuhin. My idol Van Cliburn. I dream U.S.A. from one-nine-five-eight. That year U.S.A. piano man win top prize in Moscow. Tchaikovsky Competition. I give myself eight year to one-nine-six-six. I want go Moscow, make Mo Na-di name next Van Cliburn. But you know what happen China one-nine-six-six -- Cultural Revolution. Moscow dream to Yin world. My hope, my music all die! I not allow touch piano. They not trust I only haafoo Chinese. Now, you come inside me, inside my dream grow. I want live U.S.A. all people white like you. Oh, Mee-ker, my dear Mee-ker, take me, go U.S.A.!”
Caressing her head on his chest, he kissed her smoky brown hair. Mick understood Nadia’s psychology. Shanghai to Nadia today was like Warsaw had been to him in his late teens. She must long to breathe the free air in the West. Yet she was naïve to assume that he couldn’t see that she saw him nothing more than a ticket to the U.S., and unbeknownst to her, he wasn’t leaving Asia anytime soon now that he had experienced this most fascinating part of the world.
“Nadia, my dear, in the West it’s very hard to make a living as a musician, and race has little to do with it. In fact there’re quite a few successful Asian-American classical musicians. The thing is that just about any form of support for the artistic community is difficult to come by.”
“I know I know, I no want your support! I support me all my life! All self! I teach piano to Chinese childs. No need Yin-gou-li-chee (belonging to the sewers) in Flushing.”
“Flushing in Queens?” he asked, surprised that she had heard of that New York City borough.
“Yes, Flushing like toilet. Many big moneys Taiwan peoples love to Flushing! I read Chinese article in school library.”
Mother had done her research to map out her future. A magazine article had stated that many affluent new immigrants had populated the place, set up oriental grocery stores and weekend Mandarin schools. The nouveau riche’s demand for quality Chinese-language instruction in ballet, piano, violin, or Western painting far exceeded the supply.
“‘Flushing like toilet’ – you are hilarious! And seriously, I can’t be more impressed by your spirit of independence, but …” Mick stopped short as if trying to swallow a well-contemplated thought, his neck turning scarlet.
Without speaking, Mother sat on the piano bench and swung her thin legs over to its other side. She reached to pull Mick over, pushing him down to the carpet at the same time. She let his head rest on her upper thighs, on top of her gray, ankle-length polyester pencil skirt; she ran her hands over his soft, flowing hair. She thought of her father, Kirill Molotov and the texture of the type of hair he must have dealt with at the Figaro Coiffure.
Tick tock. Tick tock. The metronome beat on.
Mother waited for him to continue; she waited the way he had waited in the Warsaw U.S. Embassy years earlier. She waited for the question that could change her life again – this time for the better:
“Will you marry me, Nadia Na-di Molotova?”
To which she would reply Yes! and Da!
Beethoven wouldn’t hear this, but his knotted brows and intense gazes would have been there to bear witness to a holy moment orchestrated by Mother and matched to the very last bar of a romantic serenade.
But this was not to be. Mick Popov rose from the floor and combed his hair back with his fingers. “Let us focus first on making the concert a success, my dear.”
“You say no go U.S.A., Mee-ker?”
“I’m saying nothing of the sort. Our priority at the moment is to ensure the success of the concert, don’t you agree?”
“I do, Mee-ker, I do.”
“Very well then. So long.”
Mother would sit on the bench for a few more minutes, motionless. Have I misread him the whole time, she asked herself, or do I still have a chance? Either way, she would have to find out after the concert, and that was what she should go all out for right now. She had promised Secretary-General Zhao, and Mick, this much.
She closed the door to this piano room and went into another one on the ground floor. This used to be exclusively hers, twenty years ago, assigned to her by the School as a special reward for being its top student. It was there, not long before she got her spot on the delegation to perform in Hong Kong, that she had been deflowered. She sat down and played from memory The Revolutionary Étude that she had been practicing when her visitor interrupted the session.
She then went to the top floor corner room that once served as a temporary prison cell for the disgraced Municipal Cultural Bureau Chief Chen, and said Good-bye to all that.
I didn’t remember ever seeing Mother in a floral dress but there she was, looking pretty and radiant. “This is the Russian platye I wore on stage in Hong Kong and it still fits perfectly.”
“Hong Kong!” I repeated, completely missing her point.
“You see, Secretary-General Zhao has put me in charge of the American expert Mick Popov’s farewell performance of the violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers, so I need to look my best.”
“A concerto adapted from that legend about Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai? What’s the plot again?”
“Yes. It was composed in 1959 by two of my alums but has only recently been released from censorship. Liang was the male protagonist and Zhu was the daughter of a wealthy family sent to school disguised as a boy, as girls were not allowed to be educated during the Jin Dynasty.”
“That was the third to fifth century, right?”
“Approximately, yes, anyway, Zhu secretly fell in love with her schoolmate Liang but was summoned home to marry another man. Realizing Zhu was female, Liang eventually died from lovesickness. Broken-hearted, Zhu ran away to mourn at Liang’s grave which opened at the flashes of lightening whereupon she threw herself into it before it closed back shut. Liang and Zhu had since been turned into butterflies, flying happily ever after.”
“How romantic!”
“Yes, but remember it’s merely a fairytale. Here’s something to keep in mind if you care: don’t be blinded by the so-called ‘Love conquers all’ theory. In life, there is only pragmatism and self-interest.”
Given that she rarely gave me advice, Mother’s words struck me as reflective of her own state of mind at the moment. “Thanks for that. But I’m still interested in the concert. Do you have a pair of complimentary tickets that I can have?”
“So that you can come with the Renaissance Shanghainese?”
“How do you know I was going to …?”
She glanced at me. “Ours is a small but meddlesome community. I suppose I can get you the tickets. Come to think of it, you’ve never seen me in action, putting together a major event like this, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. Nor have I met the American expert violinist. Can you introduce us to him in the green room afterwards?”
“I gave you an inch and you’d take a mile. He doesn’t even know you exist.”
“If I meet him, he will. He’ll be the first American I ever meet and I can try a little
English I’ve learned with him. Come on, Mother.”
She considered and said, “Fine, then. But just come by yourself, and be brief and sensible.”
“Thanks so much, Mother.” Taking a deep breath, I asked, “By the way, do you have another platye that I can borrow?”
“I think it’s best that you ask your date what to wear. We all know that his taste is beyond reproach.”
My date. I hadn’t exactly thought of Uncle Fly that way although I had been captivated by him ever since he was a street sweeper in the Pushkin graveyard.
“What do you say we go to the Shanghai Concert Hall?” I asked casually the following day while visiting him.
“You got tickets to the violin concerto?”
“What a know-it-all you are!”
“I’ll be happy to go. Thank you. I hear that they’ve fixed up the place quite nicely. The last time I was there was 1978 when Herbert von Karajan conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker.”
“Oh yes, that was another first in Shanghai in that era. Compliments of your Conservatoire friend as well?”
“Indeed it was.”
Mustering up my courage, I suggested, “Can I borrow one of these qipao dresses you have hanging in the closet for the concerto?”
There was a twitch in his eyebrows. “I don’t suppose you have a cheongsam somewhere yourself?”
“I don’t even have a dress or I wouldn’t ask you. And by the way, after Liberation, those are no longer called cheongsam but qipao, my Renaissance Shanghainese,” I corrected him but cringed immediately at my disrespect. “I’m sorry, you were saying …”