So many stories… where to start? First, please let me tell you how old I am, well, indirectly: my second (and the most eccentric) babysitter used to accuse me of being a little counter-revolutionary: that is how long ago I was born!
Revolution had always been a theme in my life before I moved to the U.S. My father, who worked as a composer for the People’s Liberation Army, wrote numerous ballets extolling the great achievements of our socialist country. It was after watching a performance of the Red Detachment of Women, one of the “model” ballets from the Mao period, that I decided to become a musician. I was only four years old, yet the scene in which the evil landlord was arrested and condemned made an indelible impression on me.
The meeting with my first piano teacher a year later, however, did not involve piano at all. I danced and sang as if I was one of the women from the famous ballet. The teacher liked me right away, but offered me piano lessons instead of dance. I used to sit by the piano for about an hour a day, staring at the score, wondering where I was. As most kids, I loved Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven. I was never a Bach person. And I absolutely hated Czerny etudes. How boring they are! Yet my father forced me to practice one etude after another. I wanted to start a revolution in order to overthrow the repressive Czerny Etude Class!
I was not able to launch that revolution since my only weapons were tears. When I was twelve, my parents sent me to the Middle School of Shanghai Conservatory of Music. On my first day, I met with seven roommates, set up my own mosquito tent, and ate in the cafeteria where they served rice as hard as rocks. At 6 am every day (except Sunday), a young lady would bang on our door and send us to practice rooms before breakfast. After six years of doing that almost every day, I decided to leave China for the U.S. I arrived in Oberlin, Ohio one day in August, and made friends immediately with the squirrels which I had never seen in China. My Russian teacher was as nice as it gets. Yet I soon discovered the secret of Ohio: it is to the United States of America what Czerny etudes are to piano music. I fled after two years and landed at Juilliard, my dream place.
My years at Juilliard could be turned into an opera. You cannot imagine how much drama was engendered just fighting over the practice rooms on the fourth floor (with no window, back then). It was commonplace for me to practice a Mozart Concerto with free accompaniment by the drums from the next room. But I loved my teacher, not only because of what he taught me, but also because of what he ordered from a Chinese restaurant everyday, Thursday evenings after studio class. I soon triumphed against all odds, and won several major international piano competitions simply because none of them required Czerny etudes.
I earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 2012, the year of the dragon. But what to do next? I decided to start a new revolution, a different sort that revolutionizes the way piano music is taught and disseminated in the country of the dragon, where I am from. So no one, absolutely no one, would ever dare to accuse me of being a counter-revolutionary again.
好多故事，从哪里开始讲起呢？首先，让我告诉你我的年龄，
在我到美国之前，革命永远是我生命中的一个重要话题。
与我的第一位钢琴老师见面是在一年以后，然而，跟钢琴无关。
我没能够发起那场革命，因为我惟一的武器是眼泪。
我在茱莉亚这几年的经历可以写成一场歌剧。你想象不出，
2012年，我拿到了音乐艺术学的博士学位，这年是龙年。