Review: The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

by Zhu Xiao-Mei

2012

ISBN-10: 1455875163

ISBN-13: 978-1455875160

Born of bourgeois grandparents in China in the same year that Mao took control, Zhu Xiao-Mei was not likely to find life easy. Not only had both her grandfathers been businessmen before losing everything in  civil war, but both were also Westernized, one fluent in English, the other a former resident of an elegant home in the French Concession of Shanghai. Zhu’s mother grew up with a taste for French perfume and the paintings in the Louvre, which she loved and knew well from books. To such disadvantages was added an uncle who fled to Taiwan.

Before The Great Leap Forward, Xiao-Mei lived as a poor piano student, normal except for some Western artistic tastes. While she was bored by the Peking Opera, the day her mother brought home a piano and played for her a brief piece by Schumann, she felt on the brink of a thrilling new world. Piano lessons from her mother followed, at age six she was enrolled in a preparatory school for the conservatory, and by age eight she was giving concerts on radio and television, once even in the Imperial Palace.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his sweeping, misguided plan for China to catch up to the West, started dangerous new developments in China. It demanded complete ideological purity from every citizen. At the conservatory, purifying sessions of self-criticism and denunciations of others began, and Xiao-Mei sensed that her bad family background hung over her head like an axe. When she was thirteen, on the very day that she was to give her first conservatory recital, the axe fell. A simple joke she’d made among friends was overheard and misconstrued as a challenge to the government, her bourgeois background was revealed, and Zhu was cut off from friends, teachers, and music lessons. Then began the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s attempt to make himself through The Little Red Book the focus of all truth and loyalty, and repression ratcheted up more. First, Western music was banned at the conservatory, then the director was denounced for running a bourgeois institution. Soon afterward, teachers were forced to kneel on the running track, cruelly and hysterically denounced and beaten by Red Guards. Several committed suicide. It was the beginning of Xiao-Mei’s and China’s descent into the abyss.

The Secret Piano does not offer many new revelations about the Cultural Revoution, but it is effective in putting flesh on the bones of history. The details of Zhu’s ordeal—the five years in labour camps, the brutal deprivation, the narrowing of all thought and experience to a rigid orthodoxy, the unrelenting assaults on personality—show the abstract forces of history descending like a hammer on a single individual. Such a close-up view of Mao’s ruthless programme leaves one unable to stomach the view now current in China that “Mao was seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong.”

Zhu’s harrowing years in China take up the first half of the book. As China slowly began to open up after the death of Mao, she was able to get permission to study abroad and continue her studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Yet, coming from a society where money was unimportant,  America not to her taste. “In both the US and China,” she writes, “people had an unhealthy relationship to money.” After a few years she moved to France, which appealed to her for what she believes it has in common with China: a sense of humor, depth of feeling, and a genuinely artistic way of approaching life. Eventually, at the age of forty, after many difficulties, she managed to begin a performing career in Paris and became a teacher at the Paris Conservatory.

But even now Zhu has not escaped completely from Mao: in a final chapter entitled “A Wounded Life” she adumbrates the scars his Cultural Revolution left on her, from an inability to fully trust others to self-loathing over her own sometime complicity as a child, denouncing others, hardening against her family, losing her humanity, turning into what the philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt calls a “living corpse.” Of her feelings now about Mao she is clear: while acknowledging that he freed China from terrible injustices, she goes on, “Mao was a criminal. He was responsible for killing tens of millions of people, and for the moral deaths of hundreds of millions more. Therefore, yes, I hate him.” And she regrets that China has not yet absorbed its historical lessons to reach a common resolve of “Never again!”

The Secret Piano has more to offer than just the description of China’s years of darkness and the heartening story of an immigrant’s triumph over adversity. There is a great deal about music, about the sustaining power of music in difficult times, about the growth of a concert pianist, there are memorable portraits of great music teachers and insightful comments on the works of great composers. We also watch the fascinating process of Zhu first hearing from a foreigner about one of China’s greatest philosophers, Lao Tzu, and how his thought gradually became an important part of her own thinking. And one can enjoy the book as a work of art, divided as it is into chapters modeled on Bach’s Goldberg Variations and sprinkled throughout with quotations from great thinkers and writers from all over the world.

Zhu Xiao-Mei can be found on Youtube playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.