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My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in 

America. You could become rich. You could become instantly 

famous. “Of course, you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told 

me when I was nine. “You can be best at anything.” America 

was where my mothers’ hopes lay. She moved to San Francisco 

from China after she lost everything. Things could get better in 

so many ways. 

     We proceeded with me becoming a prodigy. Now, we 

didn’t choose the right kind at first. My mother thought I could 

be a Chinese Shirley Temple, and with that came a horrible trip 

to a beauty school where a curling fiasco resulted in my new 

peter pan style haircut. I liked it, though. It made me look 

forward to my future fame.

In the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe 

even more so. I tried many different prodigy ideas on for size. 

I was once a dainty ballerina girl. My mother got all her ideas 

from magazines she got from people whose houses she 

cleaned.

    Every night her and I would sit down after dinner and 

she would give me tests form the magazines. She once read a 

story about a 3-year-old who knew the states and most of the 

European countries. After this she asked, “What’s the capital 

of Finland?” All I knew was the capital of California, because 

we lived on a street named Sacramento in Chinatown. I 

guessed the most foreign word I knew, and it, of course, was 

wrong. I hated these tests and they made my motivation 

inside start to die. 

    That night I looked in the mirror and cried at the ugly 

ordinary girl I saw. Then I saw the prodigy. The angry girl that 

was staring back at me, that WAS me! New thoughts filled my 

brain. My mother wasn’t going to change me; I wasn’t going to 

let her! Now, when she gave me the tests, I tried my hardest to 

look bored, and I was. I didn’t try on them anymore. After a 

while, she gave up after a few moments of trying to test me. 

    One day, my mother made me watch what was on the TV; a 

little Chinese girl with a peter pan haircut playing the piano. I 

wasn’t worried by these warning signs, though. The family didn’t 

have a piano and we couldn’t afford one. Then my mother started 

criticizing the girl, so I defended her even though I knew I would 

regret what I said. “Just like you,” my mother said. “Not the best, 

because you not trying.”

Three days after watching that little girl play my mother told me 

my piano lesson schedule. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived 

on the first floor and was a retired piano teacher. “Why don’t you 

like me the way I am?” I cried. 

    Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very 

strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an 

invisible orchestra. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired 

from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to 

me: We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to 

conduct his frantic silent sonatas.

    He would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as 

if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more 

notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was 

really something quite grand. I would play after him, 

the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some 

nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of 

garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say “Very 

good! But now you must learn to keep time!"

    He taught me all these things and that was how I also learned I 

could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit 

the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never 

corrected myself; I just kept playing in rhythm. Maybe I never gave 

myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I 

might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so 

determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to 

play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant 

hymns.

    Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. 

And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo 

Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, 

wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s 

daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down 

the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and 

shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons 

and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I 

thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount 

of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion."  

       "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented 

that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do 

nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at 

Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have 

this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.

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