Mom's theory went like this: every kid is talented at something. You just have to find it. And mine, she was certain, would bloom somewhere in the arts.
Ballet came first. Picture this: a girl with a bird's nest bun wobbling on her head, squeezed into an unforgiving leotard, pirouetting her way through a performance that left her teacher doubled over with laughter. My ballet career died before it came alive, chaotically, and to an audience.
Then came drawing. I started with colored pencils, my lines wandering across the page like lost travelers with no map. Two years later, I still couldn't master basic proportions. My circles looked like potatoes; my potatoes looked like nothing at all. Theater gave me a fighting chance. I played a guard in The Wizard of Oz and a pirate in Peter Pan, and honestly? I still think I nailed it. But then Mom got ambitious. Model classes. She envisioned me gliding down runways; I kicked off my heels and bolted for the exit.
Dad had different dreams. He wanted an athletic daughter, a girl who could conquer mountains and courts alike. So came the parade: horseback riding, skiing and snowboarding (we escaped to Vancouver every winter), golf, tennis, swimming, table tennis, badminton, baseball, basketball, soccer, taekwondo. I tried them all and failed at them all. My left leg tripped over my right leg in taekwondo. Dad folded up his dreams and put them away.
Music became Mom's last stand: piano, guitar, singing, cello. Why she chose singing and piano, I'll never know, I showed no signs of promise. She let go of most everything else, the ballet, the painting, though I still kept up with a few things here and there. But music she clung to with both hands. And so my Saturdays became choir rehearsals, music theory, literacy courses. Fridays meant piano lessons, and there on the stand, like a crimson omen, sat that red Czerny Etudes book, the shared nightmare of every Chinese kid who's ever touched ivory keys.
My piano teacher was a girl freshly minted from the Central Conservatory of Music—the best music school in China, the kind of place that churns out prodigies and perfectionism in equal measure. She was every inch the conservatory graduate: precise, disciplined, armed with metaphors passed down through generations of stern pedagogues. "Your hand should cup the keys like you're holding an egg," she'd say, her own fingers demonstrating the sacred shape. "Not too tight, or it cracks. Not too loose, or it slips." She made me hunt down every middle C on the keyboard, drilling scales until my fingers moved on autopsy. Books accumulated on top of the piano—a rainbow of workbooks and etude collections, their cheerful covers betraying the tedium within. She was methodical to the point of ritual. Scales, arpeggios, chords played with fingers curved like I was gripping an apple. She'd pace back and forth across the room, her movements stiff and measured, demonstrating how each finger should strike the keys like a little soldier: up, down, staccato, mechanical. Tap-tap-tap. March, march, march. Repetition until muscle becomes memory. I, on the other hand, was a master of strategic laziness. Maybe I did have some scrap of musical intuition, just enough to get by, because I almost never practiced properly. I'd skim through pieces, guess at rhythms, fake my way through scales with just enough accuracy to avoid suspicion. In the piano store, among rows of gleaming black instruments stood one white piano, elegant and pristine, like something out of a dream. Mom fell in love immediately. I did too, though probably for the wrong reasons—it was pretty, and pretty things have a way of making obligations feel less like obligations. We brought it home, and it sat in our living room like a beautiful, ivory-keyed witness to my mediocrity. Every day after school, under Mom's watchful eye, I'd sit at that white piano and practice. Or rather, I'd appear to practice. Here's the thing about my mother: she's tone-deaf. Gloriously, blissfully tone-deaf. She couldn't tell a C from a G, couldn't distinguish a scale played correctly from one butchered beyond recognition. So I exploited this mercilessly. I'd bang through my pieces with half the notes wrong, skip entire sections, loop the easy parts and avoid the hard ones. As long as my fingers were moving and sounds were emerging, she was satisfied. And so, for years, I coasted. I showed up to lessons just prepared enough not to get scolded. I performed in recitals with the bare minimum competence. That red Czerny book glared at me from the music stand, but I'd mastered the art of looking busy while accomplishing nothing.
The same performance theater played out within choir. Mom enrolled me in a prestigious vocal ensemble, a place that boasted award-winning conductors and students who could sight-read Bach like it was a grocery list. Somehow, miraculously, I auditioned and got in. This only solidified Mom's delusion that I was a hidden genius, a diamond waiting to be polished. I knew better. I'd stumbled through that audition on luck and whatever scraps of natural pitch I'd been born with.
But choir, I quickly learned, was a different beast than piano lessons. Piano was a private crime, just me, my teacher, and my shortcuts. Choir was public execution.
Every rehearsal followed the same terrifying ritual: the conductor would select one student from each of the four voice parts—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—and call them to the front. There, beneath the fluorescent lights and the collective gaze of sixty judgmental peers, they'd sing their harmony together, exposed and vulnerable. Sight-reading, I should mention, is not something you can fake. It's not like piano, where you can practice a piece at home until your fingers remember it and your brain can take a nap. Sight-reading means standing there with a page of fresh music you've never seen before and singing it correctly, immediately, while everyone listens. It's a skill you either develop through practice and training, or you don't. I chose "don't." Those moments when students were called up front haunted my childhood. My heart would hammer against my ribs as the conductor's eyes swept across the room. Please not me, please not me, please not me. I'd shrink into my chair, avoid eye contact, pray to whatever gods protected mediocre children from exposure.
Fortunately, the choir was divided into skill levels, and I wasn't in Class 1, the top tier, where the prodigies lived. I was safely nestled in a middle section where expectations were lower and mistakes were more forgivable. It was the academic equivalent of hiding in the middle of the pack, camouflaged by competence just slightly better and slightly worse than mine. Here, I could pass. Passing was all I ever aimed for. Rehearsals became a rhythm: warm-ups, scales, part sectionals, then full ensemble. We'd drill harmonies until they locked into place, the four voices weaving together like colored threads in a tapestry I couldn't see the pattern of. But honestly? I felt nothing. No spark, no passion, no moment of transcendence where the music swept me away. I showed up because Mom made me. I sang because that's what you did in choir. Between rehearsals, my friend and I would escape, slipping out of the building to the little shop next door, where we'd pool our pocket money for gummy bears, sweet enough to make the afternoon feel less like an obligation. Those stolen moments, sticky-fingered and giggling, were worth more to me than any four-part harmony.
But peace, as it turns out, is a temporary condition. The fragile ecosystem I'd built collapsed the day I was promoted to Class 1.
Class 1 was another world entirely. The students were sharper, more polished, their voices cutting through the air with a precision that made my own sound like a rusty gate. And presiding over this domain of excellence was the conductor: a strict, iron-spined woman who seemed to have been carved from marble and disappointment. She was old in that timeless, authoritative way that made you believe she'd been born wearing reading glasses and a scowl. Every rehearsal was a military operation. Every mistake was a personal failure. She scolded everyone, the talented, the mediocre, the struggling, with an equal-opportunity fury that somehow made it worse. The octets returned, more terrifying than ever. Eight students, one from each vocal subsection, called to the front to sing exposed and raw while everyone else watched. In Class 2, I'd been mediocre among the mediocre. In Class 1, I was a glaring weak link, a crack in an otherwise pristine formation. Every single time, I received a C. The letter itself felt like a scarlet mark, a public branding of inadequacy. And one afternoon, after yet another C was announced in front of sixty pairs of eyes, I cried. Not the dignified, silent kind of crying where a single tear rolls down your cheek. The messy kind, face crumpling, shoulders shaking, the kind of crying that announces to everyone that you are, in fact, completely falling apart. My classmates pretended not to notice, which was somehow worse than if they'd stared.
Piano wasn't faring any better. As the months progressed, those simple Czerny etudes, the ones I'd half-assed my way through with strategic laziness, gave way to Mozart and Beethoven. Real compositions. Pieces with soul and structure, with dynamics that mattered and phrasing that couldn't be faked. There was no skimming through a Mozart sonata. There was no guessing your way through Beethoven. I still hated practicing. Every afternoon, I'd sit at that beautiful white piano, staring at pages dense with notes that swam before my eyes like angry black ants. My fingers stumbled. My timing faltered. I'd play the same measure fifteen times and somehow make it worse each repetition.
Until that lesson, my teacher had finally had enough.
I don't even remember what I'd done wrong—played something egregiously off-tempo, maybe, or butchered a passage I'd been assigned to master weeks ago. But she snapped. Her voice, usually measured and instructional, rose into a sharp, cutting yell that sliced through the room. I slammed my hands down on the keys, a discordant, violent crash that rattled the strings inside the piano. The sound hung in the air, ugly and defiant. Then I stood up, chair scraping against the floor, and ran. Out of the practice room, down the hallway, past startled students and confused parents, out into the open air where no one could grade me or yell at me or expect me to be something I wasn't. Behind me, the white piano sat silent, its keys still vibrating from the blow.
My mother noticed the unraveling fairly late, or perhaps she noticed and chose to ignore it, hoping it would resolve itself like a fever that breaks in the night. After I ran from that piano lesson, after I slammed those keys and fled into the street with my teacher's yelling still ringing in my ears, I assumed it was over. Finished. The piano chapter of my life had closed with a discordant crash, and I'd never have to touch those keys again.
I was wrong.
Two days later, I came home from school and collapsed in front of the TV, letting the flickering images wash over me like a sedative. The apartment was quiet except for the muffled sounds of my mother moving around in the kitchen—the clink of dishes, the rush of water, the rhythmic chop of a knife against a cutting board. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
Then her voice cut through: "Six o'clock."
She said it casually, matter-of-factly, as if it were any other day. As if I hadn't shattered something fundamental two days ago.
I froze, my body going rigid on the couch. She couldn't be serious. She couldn't possibly expect me to go back to that piano, to sit through another lesson, to endure more criticism and failure and shame. And Saturday was coming too, another choir rehearsal, another afternoon of sight-reading terror and that stone-faced conductor with her Cs and her disapproving glares. It would be like asking me to walk back into a double torture chamber, piano on Fridays and choir on Sundays, an endless cycle of humiliation.
I wedged myself more tightly into the cushions, my eyes fixed on the TV screen though I wasn't seeing anything anymore.
Five minutes passed. Then her voice again, sharper this time, calling from the kitchen: "Turn off TV."
I didn't move. Didn't respond. My fingers gripped the remote but made no move toward the power button.
And in that moment of stubborn silence, something shifted inside me. A decision crystallized, hard and clear as ice: I didn't have to do what my mother said anymore. I had listened to her before, I had tried ballet and painting and piano and choir and everything else she'd thrown at me, and look what it had gotten me. Failure. Embarrassment. A parade of half-developed talents and abandoned dreams. Crying in front of my classmates because I'd earned another C. Running from piano lessons with my teacher's anger chasing me out the door.
She was wrong about me. She'd been wrong all along. The stupid one wasn't me—it was her, for believing I could be something I wasn't. She emerged from the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room, backlit by the overhead light, her silhouette dark and imposing. "Six o'clock," she said again, louder now, her voice carrying an edge I recognized as warning.
"I'm not going to play anymore," I said, and I was surprised by how calm I sounded, how nonchalant, as if I were commenting on the weather. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." I paused, then added, "And I'm not going to choir either. No more music."
The words hung in the air between us, sharp and defiant.
She walked over and stood directly in front of the TV, blocking my view. I looked up at her and saw her chest rising and falling rapidly, heaving with an anger barely contained. Her hands were clenched at her sides. Her jaw was tight.
"You think you can just quit?" she said, her voice low and dangerous. "After everything? After all the money, all the time—"
"No!" I interrupted, and suddenly I felt it, a surge of strength, hot and fierce, rising from somewhere deep inside me. "No! I won't!" I screamed, my voice breaking with the force of it. "I don't care about music! I'm done!"
I jumped up from the couch and ran. Past her, past the white piano sitting silent and accusatory in the corner, past the stack of choir music on the table, those pages of notes I could never sight-read properly, out the front door and into the hallway. I didn't have a plan. I just knew I couldn't stay there, couldn't face her expectations or her disappointment or the crushing weight of all those unfulfilled dreams she'd pinned on me. Couldn't face another Friday of angry piano teachers or another Saturday of standing terrified in front of forty judging faces.
I ran to my friend's house three blocks away, breathless and wild-eyed, and begged to stay the night. Her mother, Auntie Song, a kind woman with gentle eyes who never pushed her own kid into piano lessons or choir rehearsals or any of the things my mother believed were essential, took one look at me and agreed without asking too many questions. She made up the guest bed, brought me tea, let me curl up under the covers and pretend, just for one night, that I could escape. But escape is temporary. The next morning, Auntie Song called my mother. I heard her voice through the bedroom door, low and diplomatic, explaining where I was. Within an hour, my mother arrived to pick me up.
We drove home in silence, the space between us vast and unbridgeable, two people who'd stopped understanding each other somewhere along the way.
"Okay then," she said, her voice flat and resigned as we pulled into the driveway. "I told them you will not be going to lessons from now on."
I froze, my hand halfway to the car door handle. The words seemed too simple, too easy, like a trick question on a test. I had braced myself for battle, had spent the entire silent car ride rehearsing arguments in my head, building walls of defense for the inevitable fight. I'd expected yelling, tears, ultimatums. The full weight of her disappointment crashing down on me like a wave.
But there was nothing. No fight. No resistance. She was just... letting me go.
"What?" I managed, my voice small and uncertain.
"No more piano. No more choir," she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield. "You don't want to do it, so we're done."
She said it like she was canceling a magazine subscription, something mundane and unimportant. Like all those years, the white piano, the rainbow of workbooks, the Saturday rehearsals, the music theory classes, the tearful octets, the angry lessons, had simply evaporated into nothing.
I should have felt triumphant. Victorious. Free.
But I didn't.
We walked into the apartment, and I drifted to my room like a ghost. I sat on my bed, staring at the wall, waiting for the relief to come. Waiting for that surge of liberation I'd felt when I screamed "No!" at her two days ago. But it didn't arrive. Instead, there was just... emptiness. A strange, hollow feeling that settled in my chest like cold water. The white piano sat in the living room, silent now. No more six o'clock reminders. No more Beethoven glaring at me from the music stand. No more Fridays spent stumbling through passages I hadn't practiced. And Saturday would come and go without me pulling on my choir clothes, without me standing nervous and small among those sixty voices, without the conductor's sharp eyes picking me apart.
I was free.
So why did I feel like I'd lost something?
Days passed, then weeks. The piano gathered a thin layer of dust. My music books disappeared from the table, packed away into some closet or drawer where failed dreams go to be forgotten. I filled my afternoons with TV and homework and nothing in particular. My friend and I went out for candy more often now, since I had so much free time.
But sometimes, late at night when the apartment was quiet, I'd think about it. The feel of the keys under my fingers, smooth, cool, responsive. The way a melody would emerge from beneath my hands almost effortlessly when I wasn't thinking too hard about it, when I let my fingers find their own way. The moment in choir when all four parts would suddenly lock together, when the harmony would bloom in the air around us and I could feel it vibrating in my chest, that perfect alignment of sound that made you forget, just for a second, that you were separate people at all. Maybe I had actually liked music. Maybe somewhere beneath all the pressure and the expectations and the constant sense of inadequacy, there had been something genuine, a spark, a connection, a small flame of passion that had never been given room to breathe.
Years without formal lessons, music came back to me in fragments, scattered across ordinary moments like light through broken glass.
I sang in the car with the windows down, wind whipping my hair into tangles, belting out lyrics to pop songs without caring if I hit every note perfectly. I hummed while doing homework, my pencil keeping time against the desk. I played piano at parties, not recital pieces, but songs everyone knew, where people would gather around and sing along, off-key and joyful and completely unselfconscious. I learned to play guitar sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, fingers fumbling over chord changes until the calluses formed and the transitions smoothed out. I taught myself songs from movies and TV shows, the ones that had gotten stuck in my head and refused to leave. I recorded myself on my phone, layering harmonies in a way I'd once been too terrified to attempt in front of the choir conductor. And somewhere in all of this, in the messy, imperfect, joyful chaos of making music on my own terms, I realized something that shifted everything into focus.
It wasn't that I had zero talent for music. What I'd lacked wasn't ability, but freedom. The space to explore, to fail, to discover what music meant to me rather than what it was supposed to mean. All those years of piano lessons and choir rehearsals, I'd been trying to fit myself into a shape someone else had carved out: the obedient student with perfect hand position, the disciplined performer who could sight-read on command, the prodigy my mother so desperately wanted me to be.
I'd been trying to speak a language using only someone else's words, following a script that left no room for my own voice. No wonder I'd run. No wonder I'd slammed those keys and fled into the street. It wasn't music I'd been rejecting, it was the cage.
This time, when I pressed the keys, they didn't press back. They yielded, responsive and waiting, ready to become whatever I needed them to be. The white piano had finally stopped being a symbol of my failures and become what it was always meant to be: an instrument. A tool. A companion.
And I, after all these years, had finally stopped trying to be what someone else wanted and started becoming who I actually was.