by Jessie Tu
26
My grandpapa was a famous child prodigy. He began playing the piano when he was five years old. He burned out before his twelfth birthday and then became like any other child in China at that time. Once he grew up and moved away from home, he tried his best to resume his music, but he didn’t have enough money to travel and perform.
My grandpapa had perfect pitch and knew how to play the violin, so he became my first violin teacher. Before he arrived in Australia, my mother asked him to bring a 1/32-size violin. It was too big for me but my grandpapa insisted that violins didn’t come any smaller.
From the beginning, I played without a shoulder rest. With my arm stretched out, my fingertips only just scraped the bottom of the scroll. For the first three months, I played open strings. Grandpapa said the foundations took the longest to get right. I know all this because over the years my mother would tell me stories about those early days. The stories lodged in my mind and became indistinguishable from my own memories.
Before the start of each lesson my grandpapa would say, ‘When I’m teaching you, I am not your grandpapa, understood?’
At the time, my mother was working at an accounting firm in the city. Sometimes, she’d come home and see red marks on my face. She asked me what happened.
‘Grandpapa wasn’t happy with the way I played the scales.’
I heard them whispering in the kitchen later, but all I remember is the way the low tone of my grandpapa dominated the sounds of the house. He lived with us after my grandmama died.
As I played, he would push me into position. If my body didn’t move the way he wanted, he had ways to change that. To fix my sometimes-wavering bow arm, he tied a thin wire to my wrist and attached the other end to a doorknob. Then he opened and closed the door slowly, so I’d get used to the motion of the moving bow arm, steady and still and always at precisely the right angle. Sometimes, he’d move the door so fast that by the time we finished my wrist was encircled with a bright red ring. When that happened, my mother would ask me to cover my wrists, so she didn’t have to see what my grandpapa was doing to me.
By the time I turned six I was playing Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Brahms. Grandpapa told my mother I needed a new teacher. He had heard of a Russian woman who was reputed to be the best violin teacher in the world. At the time, she’d just moved to Shanghai for a two-year teaching residency at the Conservatory.
My mother got in touch. The woman’s reply was frank—‘I don’t take children.’
But Grandpapa told my mother to buy the plane tickets anyway. ‘Just go and have Jena play for her. See what she says then.’
My mother and I flew to Shanghai. I played for the Russian woman. I played the first page of the Brahms Concerto.
‘Your daughter needs to come and study with me,’ she said.
So, I was taken on by Nadia. Nadia, who had long silvery hair tied in a ponytail; a tail that reached her lower back. Nadia, who said tears were the hallmark of progress, so I cried every lesson. Nadia, who never laid a hand on me but used the tip of her bow when I played a wrong note. She’d place the pointed end against the small of my back and when my intonation slipped—which it did only rarely—she’d jab me and yell, ‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’ and then, ‘Again!’
Sometimes even when I thought I’d played flawlessly she would whip her bow across my back. For two years, my mother and I flew to Shanghai every fortnight, leaving on Friday night and returning on Sunday evening. We could afford it because my father fixed a lot of people’s teeth. All his money went into those tickets and lessons. I never saw much of my sister, Rebecca, during that time. I rarely saw my father either. He was a shadow at the edge of my life. And perhaps my mother’s as well.
Two days before my eighth birthday, Nadia died of a brain aneurysm in her apartment. The cleaning lady had found her. She’d died alone.
We did not go to her funeral and it would be another year before we returned to Shanghai. That time I debuted with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. My mother became my agent and started booking concerts during my school holidays when managers began hearing about me. And then we heard that Professor Niall Banks, an old friend of Nadia’s from Moscow, would be teaching in Sydney. He was an emeritus professor from the UK, married to an Australian flautist half his age. When she fell pregnant, they moved back to her home in Sydney. He was offered a teaching position at the Conservatorium and took on local and international students. They lost the baby, I later found out, and soon after that, the marriage broke down. But Banks stayed in Sydney. It was another case of stars aligning. My mother said, ‘It was meant to be. He could manage Jena’s touring too.’
Grandpapa died a month later, and soon after Banks told my mother I needed to compete overseas. ‘There’s nothing here in Australia worthy of your daughter,’ he said to her.
Within a year, I’d won seven international violin competitions and played with several orchestras across four continents.
During the year of my breakdown, I asked my mother why she gave up so much for me.
‘Your urge was uncontainable,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stop you.’
‘But you used to say you didn’t want me to be a circus performer.’
‘No. That was your father.’
What frightens me now is what had frightened me as a child. Nadia, dying alone in her apartment. How long had she been lying there? How long had she waited for someone to come to save her? How long before she realised that no one was going to save her? But then I realise if she hadn’t died, I’d never have met Banks. I might never have become famous.
The recital is held on a Saturday night. When I asked Bryce for the evening off, he’d agreed, but seemed displeased. Why couldn’t I have scheduled it for Monday or Tuesday? I told him my mother had organised the event and he gave me a look. I was embarrassed. I decided I hated him for making me feel like that.
The church is in a suburb heavily populated by immigrant families. Korean. Chinese. Vietnamese. Taiwanese. Malaysian. Filipino. Indian. Sri Lankan. I tell Mark about it; casually mention he is welcome. He laughs. He thinks I am joking.
Parents bring their young daughters and sons. The girls are dressed in pink frocks that reach their small calves. Frilled sleeves. Hair in pigtails, centre parts. Perfect little Asian kids. Me, fifteen years ago.
Val, Mike and Jacob are wedged side by side in the back row. My father is sitting in the corner on a single chair, alone, slumped with his eyes closed and arms folded. Banks is seated at the front next to my mother. He is looking at his phone. She is twisting the handles of her handbag.
In a small room behind the church hall, I roll my shoulders and take slow, deep breaths. I close my eyes, focusing on the inhalation. Exhalation. I pace around. I go to my case and reach for Monkey.
‘You ready?’ Sandra asks.
‘Yeah.’
I pull my sleeves up. Roll my shoulders again. Inside my head, I’m running visuals of passages, chromatic leaps. The audience are murmuring quietly. A low purr.
Sandra and I walk onto the stage. I smile into the sea of faces. The lights are dimmed. For a moment, I think I catch a glimpse of Olivia in the back row.
Sandra is waiting for me. I blink. Raise my violin and tuck it under my chin.
We begin.
When I’m playing, everything is suspended. It’s as though I’ve entered some other dimension. Somewhere nobody else knows. It feels good to play onstage, without the expectation of sixty other musicians behind me. I am the centre of everyone’s attention, and that old thrill sluices me. Like glory. Heat. Entirely mine.
27
At fourteen, I won the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. The prize was a solo with the New York Philharmonic.
I would play the Beethoven, a mature piece, one not many teenagers perform because of its emotional austerity. But I was going to do it. I would play the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. An impressive
feat. Sarah Chang had debuted with the Philharmonic when she was eight, but she’d played the Mendelssohn; no one under twenty really touches the Beethoven. At least, not in public. It’s serious repertoire.
I am waiting in the wings, breathing, counting each slow inhalation and exhalation. I sip water from the bottle my mother carries in her handbag, which makes me want to pee. Three minutes. I have time—just. I hurry through a corridor. As I open the door to my room, I see the back of my mother’s head, and then a man’s arms enfolding her. They lean their foreheads together. It’s brief, but I see it. They are standing in a corner of the players’ lounge. Banks and my mother. There is an intimacy between them I don’t understand. An intimacy they have been hiding from me.
I become, in that moment, a child left out of a game. I feel hot with betrayal.
I want to tear at my skin. Rip my hair from my skull. That I could be related to the woman who is now having a private moment with the most important man in my life. Five minutes ago, I could not have fathomed a world where I was not at the centre of their lives. Something monumental must be happening. Or must be done.
Did I know what I was about to do?
A narrative enters my consciousness: it’s effortless; I don’t try to fight it. I am tired of this life; the touring and the late nights. I am tired of Banks’s voice. Tired of the pressure, the restraints; tired of not being allowed to do anything that might damage my hands, which is just about everything. I’d thought we were a three-headed monster, but we are not; there is them and there is me. I want a way out—and they have given it to me. All at once I feel powerful, exhilarated. A roaring strength rises inside me.
The stage crew are rushing around. I hear the sound of applause. A woman with a clipboard and a headset gives me a nod. I stride onto the stage. Confident.
Onstage, I bow.
I make it through the first movement. The second.
And then. And then.
I slip the bow across the bridge. The audience stop breathing. I execute the wrong notes. I do not look at the conductor; he will try to help me recover. Instead, I look to the wings. My mother is standing beside Banks, her hands over her mouth. I’ll never forget the look on her face.
I have never felt so powerful in my life.
It was a very public meltdown. That’s what the newspapers called it. Performances were cancelled. Banks refused to speak to the press.
I’m not sure if either of them has ever forgiven me for what I did that night. I lied, of course. Blamed it on nerves. They knew me better than that. It was inevitable I would destroy everything. I’d been touring without substantial breaks since I was eight, and the older I grew the more aware I was that offstage I was nothing. I’d stare at myself in the mirror in the bathroom and wonder if one day I’d look and there would be no one staring back at me.
I don’t remember much of the immediate aftermath. When I told my mother and Banks I could never play in public again, neither of them resisted. I’d thought they would counter, convince me to stay, to finish the tour. Play one more concert. I had engagements booked for the next two years. But they didn’t. I wanted them to beg, to show me how important I was. But they didn’t. Maybe they knew that on some level I’d been right to do what I did. So it was decided we would return home. That I’d put the violin aside and go to school, pretend to be a normal person. On our flight home, I took Monkey out of my case and held him in my lap the entire trip back.
Back home, my parents’ marriage fell apart. My father had a cousin in New Jersey whom he’d once been close to. They reconnected and my father decided he was going to move to another country. Within a few weeks, it was settled. We’d go together, my father and me. I applied for an Extraordinary Alien Visa and my father accompanied me as my guardian. I was eager to detach myself from my mother and to put as much distance as possible between me and Banks.
For two years I hid out in Wayne. I’d taken my violin with me but didn’t pick it up. My mother did not visit. I threw myself at boys. And they were my salvation.
28
I am lying in Mark’s bed, which is Mark-less. He’d left early for work. Last night, I’d gone home around midnight after a two-hour rehearsal with the ‘Trout’ ensemble, tired and needing sleep, but then I caught a taxi to Mark’s because he texted me during rehearsal.
Banks calls. It’s been two weeks since the recital. We talk about non-specifics. The weather. Books. The news. We skate along a thin surface, until it cracks.
‘I’d like to hear you one more time before your audition,’ he says finally.
He wants to know how I am getting on. If my phrasing in the Brahms has improved since the recital. If my bow arm is strong. If my sensibilities are attuned to what I am playing.
I agree. He’d been my surrogate parent for nearly half of my life. When I picked up the violin again at the start of university, I had wanted to forge a musical career without him, but there was part of me that still craved his approval.
I arrive shortly after lunchtime, clutching a half-eaten bacon sandwich. The sky is a cool shade of pink and the air is wet with the prospect of thunderstorms. In his studio, Banks is wearing a cardigan the colour of bird shit.
He motions for me to enter. ‘Okay, let’s hear the Brahms.’
I play the entire first movement. He does not move. He keeps his eye on Monkey, whose body is leaning against the bows inside my case.
I play the second movement.
Then, two bars into the third movement, he rises off his chair.
‘I didn’t say to stop,’ he scolds. ‘Keep going.’
I place my bow back on the string and begin again. After a while, I realise I’m the only one in the room. He returns minutes later.
‘Why’d you leave?’
He walks to his desk and shuffles a few books around. ‘Tell me, Jena,’ he says without looking up, ‘what are the three components of musical prodigiousness?’
A dull weight falls over my shoulders. I have heard this too many times, but to him I can never repeat it enough.
I wonder what would happen if I refused to answer? If I pretend not to know the answer. Would he step out from behind the desk and hit me?
I can’t pretend, though, because he knows I know.
I draw out each word slowly. ‘The athletic. The mimetic. And the interpretive.’
‘Good.’
‘I have the first two, not the last,’ I say wearily.
‘Correct.’
‘Why am I here if you’re just going to be cruel?’
‘Cruel? Is that what you think? Jena, why are you even doing this? Do you really want to be a violinist?’
‘What kind of question is that? You’re the one who put my name forward for this exchange!’
He crosses his arms and rocks on his feet.
‘Do you know what happened to you at fifteen? You had nothing left. You failed because you had nothing new to say. But it’s not your fault. Those things, they can’t be forced. You had nothing left to say because you had no life experiences to draw on—and I contributed to that, I can see that now. You didn’t … what you had was no life.’
He speaks with the air of a hospital chaplain, reflective and calm.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘I never wanted to see you fail at such a young age. I wanted to give you a full and long career. But you were a child. You are still a child. You have no idea how much you still have to learn.’
The sound of a piano threads into the room, answering for me. I stay silent.
‘Deciding not to develop a life in music after a prodigious beginning takes will.’
I turn my violin around, cradling its belly.
‘What are you saying? That I will never reach my potential?’
‘You were world famous. Wasn’t that enough?’
I stare at him, unsure where the strength to do so comes from.
I want to tell him about the darkness that opened up inside me that night in Carnegie Hall. How it had always been there,
lurking—a lack I never knew how to repel. There was a hole in me that was ultimately unfillable. An insatiable hunger I was born with. Like my talent.
‘Of course it wasn’t enough.’
That night, I lie awake, my head on the edge of the pillow, looking out at the neon skyline of Sydney from Mark’s bed. He is on his laptop, fingers tapping the keys with metronomic discipline.
I think about Banks. Do I need to run away from this city to get away from that old self? Why can’t people move on? I was fifteen. Most fifteen-year-olds do far worse than what I did. What do I need to do to get away so I can determine the kind of life I want, set my own terms?
I am stirred out of bed in the morning by a call.
‘Jena, it’s Bryce. You’ve missed two rehearsals. Is everything alright?’
I make a quick excuse. ‘My mother was in hospital. I couldn’t get signal there.’
It’s a weak excuse, but he buys it and lets me off with a warning. I am afraid how easily lies come out of my mouth these days. I feel bad that I’ve stolen the legitimate excuse that Olivia had when she told them she needed to cut back on concerts. Maybe they knew they could no longer rely on her. And there is always someone else ready and willing to take our place. Our mothers. Our mothers.
29
When my father announced he was leaving after my return from New York—from that evening I cracked my world apart—my mother asked me what I wanted to do. We were sitting in the kitchen eating KFC from a huge bucket. She’d never asked me what I wanted. It was the first time I’d had fast food. I remember feeling pressured to give an answer immediately. And because I didn’t want to upset them both, I picked the person I was least angry with that day.
That memory functions like a chokehold on me. The guilt is suffocating. I was so callous with my newfound freedom.
I call my mother after rehearsals and ask her to lunch. I text her my address. It’s been three weeks since the recital. A thin chasm has widened into something invisible. She texts a single word. OK.