Read Online The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations by Zhu Xiao-Mei - Free Book Online Page B

the teaching staff. We wrote one Dazibao after another, each day searching for something new to say, whether it was based on fact or not: “It is our professors’ fault that we have had a bad education!” “The father of our Russian professor translated Chiang Kai-shek!”
    Professor Pan was no longer spared. A number of Dazibaos found fault with him. “Pan Yiming has given us a bourgeois education. He invited us to his home. We ate bourgeois food there. He took us traveling.” “Pan Yiming had us work on Chopin’s Ballade No. 2. He told us, without criticizing it, that the piece was inspired by a poem composed by the Polish bourgeois intellectual Adam Mickiewicz.” We wrote so many Dazibaos that there was not enough room on the walls for them to remain posted for more than a day.
    Our professors were paraded all day long in the school’s courtyard or made to clean the toilets. The most senior among them were suspected of collaboration with the old order; they suffered the worst abuse. Our teachers no longer dared speak to us, and fled when they caught sight of a student. We no longer addressed them, either. When I met Professor Pan, I didn’t say anything and pretended I didn’t know him. Now I understood that what he had given me was nothing compared with the damage he had inflicted by educating me to be an intellectual.

    Some didn’t survive. Like a number of other major Chinese intellectuals, two piano teachers from the Shanghai Conservatory—Gu Shengying and Li Cuizhen—decided to take their own lives.
    After having been beaten and humiliated in public, Gu Shengying killed herself, along with her mother and brother. It was rumored that she had turned on the gas, sat down at her piano, and played Chopin’s Funeral March. The news of her death came as a terrible shock. She was a very beautiful, delicate woman who had performed at the very first concert I ever attended. That evening, she had interpreted Chopin’s Scherzos with simplicity, fluidity, and lightness of touch. As I listened, I had made a wish: one day I hoped to be able to play like her.
    She was followed by another legendary musician: Li Cuizhen. When I was very young, people often asked: “Do you know who is the only Chinese pianist to have all of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in her repertoire?” She had dedicated her life to music, and was a role model for us all. She had put on her loveliest concert attire—in which she had given so many magnificent concerts—and ended her days.
    Why would such a great artist refuse to take the path that was leading us to socialism? Why hadn’t she trusted in Chairman Mao? Her choice was a sign of cowardice. Every day, at each meeting and in each self-criticism session, we were told: the Revolution is in grave danger, the class struggle must continue. If not, the traitors of the proletariat will reestablish the old order. At sixteen years old, the only thing I could do was to believe this. It was a question of survival, but also one of ideals: at that age one yearns to give oneself, body and soul, to a great cause. And wasn’t the well-being of the proletariat a worthy cause?

    The Conservatory had drifted into such a state of anarchy that the Central Committee decided to step in. I was on the front lines, standing at the school’s entrance, when twenty soldiers arrived to reestablish order. We cheered them on, calling out our encouragement. The army had now become my role model. I admired them—the Chushen hao , those with “good family backgrounds”—they were courageous, dedicated, and selfless. I was impressed by their uniforms. For me, like many others who were followers rather than leaders, the fact that the military had taken charge of the Conservatory was more than just reassuring: it was an honor.
    We were immediately told to assemble in the auditorium for a meeting. A soldier urged us to see reason:
    “Order must be restored here! Students, you are