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

The search for a proper tempo is not confined to the world of music - one must seek it in life as well

Montesquieu wrote: "I have never known any distress that an hour of reading did not relieve." If one substituted the word music for reading, the exact same dictum applied to me.

Everything was burning. Today it was the bodies; tomorrow it would be the spirit.

Acknowledge diversity and you will achieve unity. (Rabindranath Tagore)

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

The best man is like water. Water is good, it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it is so near to Tao.

time can bring about eventually supplants human justice. Chinese philosophers have an expression for this: bu de liao—knowing when to leave the past behind, instead of endlessly seeking revenge. On

The Chinese are well acquainted with this way of seeing things; they often use the image of water to illustrate it. To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind—the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb.

When you think you are descending, you are climbing, but you do not know it. When you think you are climbing, in reality you are descending. Keep working and one day, without expecting it, you will achieve your desire.

but I couldn’t wait. I wanted to leave immediately, to flee. Forever.

You can feel it, Zhu Xiao-Mei. The listener can hear it.

No. It comes from the breath, the place from which life and the spirit originate. Try to breathe correctly, and take care that your feet are placed solidly on the ground and that your diaphragm is steady. You’ll see that you are much less tense. If you are more flexible, in reality you will be stronger.

The point is not to take a middle path that is a type of compromise resulting from a refusal to choose extremes. Rather, it is about finding a point of equilibrium that allows one to bring out every dimension of the work.

As a young revolutionary, this was a painful lesson for me: if you wanted to survive in this country, you’d best not be honest.

I didn’t know how to read. Mother was my library. I read mother One day The world will be at peace Man will be able to fly Wheat will sprout in the snow Money will have no purpose (…) But in the meantime Mother says We have to work a lot. (Lu Yuan, Fairy Tales) A

I have witnessed many men Silently weeping In the night (Tang Qi, “The Solemn Hour”) There

You are cheating Beethoven,” he said to a student who had altered a difficult passage to make it easier to play. “But you are also cheating yourself—and God!

But what better proof of music’s universality that a Chinese woman was able to win over a South American man while performing a European composer?

The Cultural Revolution scarred me for life. Each morning when I get up, I wonder how I can go on living, how I can find peace after what I have experienced. The legacy of that period has left me with a severe psychological handicap. The sessions of