The first classical piece I heard as a child was Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” It was on TV, in a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon. I was 3, and my family lived in Shenyang, China. Tom, the cat, was wearing a tuxedo and playing the piece at a concert hall while Jerry, the mouse, was fooling around inside the piano. It was so funny.
I remember looking at my upright piano and thinking, “Wow.” The cartoon awakened my imagination and love for classical music.
The year before, my parents had used half a year’s salary and borrowed from their parents to raise $300 to buy the piano for me.
China’s Cultural Revolution had been hard on my parents in the 1960s, when they were young. My father, Lang Guoren, worked in a bicycle-parts factory and my mother, Zhou Xiulan, was a telephone operator.
To seek a better life, my father learned the erhu, a two-string traditional Chinese instrument that’s bowed. He dreamed of playing in Carnegie Hall one day. He’d practice in the morning and at night.
During the day at the factory, he wore heavy gloves to keep from injuring his fingers, but he often had to take them off to make small parts.
My father excelled as a musician and was admitted to the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, where he was a principal player in the orchestra. This is why music was such an important part of my parents’ life and to so many people in China. At that time, music enriched people’s daily life.
I was born in a huge brick dormitory for artists on my father’s air force base in Shenyang. When you entered, there were long halls to the left and right with many different apartments. It sounds like a barren, crowded place, but it was quite loving. We shared a common kitchen and bathroom, and spent our days enjoying music. I loved performing for friends and my parents’ friends. All of my father’s friends were musicians and Chinese opera singers. For the longest time, I thought everyone in the world was a musician.
Most of my time was spent talking with my mother. She told me the best stories, mostly about how to become a good boy. With my father, we talked about how to improve my playing.
By the time I was 5, my teachers began to notice my talent. That only stirred my father’s hopes and encouraged him to insist that my teachers push me as hard as possible so I would be “the world’s No. 1 pianist.” He was obsessed.
When I was 9, I moved to Beijing to study piano. By then, my father had quit a job as a policeman to live with me and to oversee my practicing. My mother remained at home in her job to support us.
All we could afford was a small, unheated studio. My father was strict, and it was very hard being without my mother. I wasn’t with her regularly for the next 10 years, and the separation was terrible.
In Beijing, I had a teacher who was impatient and angry. When I was 11, she dropped me as a student, saying I didn’t have the talent.
For a few months I didn’t play. My father was hysterical at the prospect of me giving up. But one day, my public-school classmates begged me to play for them. As I played, it sounded so beautiful, I thought, “Why should I stop?” In my heart, I wanted to play.
I was lucky. My former teacher from Shenyang believed in me and helped me find a teacher at the conservatory in Beijing, where I was accepted. In 1997, at 15, I came to America to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Today I have homes in New York and Beijing. My New York apartment is close to Carnegie Hall and on a high floor, so I have a partial view of Central Park. In Beijing, my apartment is in a new district.
Many of my friends still live there.
My mother travels with me today, and I love her homemade dumplings with vegetables, shrimp and egg. I suppose we’re making up for lost time.
One of the most emotional moments of my career came in 2003, when I was 21. After I performed a solo recital at Carnegie Hall, my father accompanied me on his erhu during an encore. All of my childhood memories came flooding back. I had made my father’s dream come true. He was really proud of me.
Source: Wall Street Journal by Marc Myers
