Harvard Summer Review: When the Symphony Is the Self

1999 Harvard Summer School Writing Program

When the Symphony Is the Self

Jodi Yang

I

On the fourth floor of San Francisco General, in the west wing, a man sits up in bed, waiting for me. My grandfather is 82, and he is sick. It has been two months since my aunt called and told us that he had been hospitalized. I walk down the corridor, but I do not go straight into his room. Instead, I pause in the doorway. He is not yet aware of my presence, but gazes down at his shriveled feet. He is totally absorbed, like a soldier appraising the details of his body. What is he thinking, I wonder. I watch my grandfather, who is leaning heavily into the inclined back of the broken hospital bed, his wizened claws lying awkwardly in his lap, palms upward, slightly tilted toward one another as though one hand is asking the other, "What are we to do now?" It is a kind of spying, I know.

Save for a gray fringe, my grandfather's hair is white. It stands at attention, a contrast to his feeble body. He wears his crew cut as a badge, the only evidence remaining of his military glory. The rest of him is wrinkled, folds of brown skin enveloping his six-foot-two-inch frame.

I have seen enough. I step into the room, and he notices that I am there. He blinks, forcefully propping open his blank and hazy eyes. My chest falls. Then, I see the twinkle that I missed--the glimmer of recognition and love. I run my hands through his hair and avert my eyes to wipe a tear. I wish I were sitting in his lap again, his strong hands embracing me, while my own sifted through his hair. Chinese people consider touching the heads of elders to be disrespectful; he never seemed to mind. I reach over and he calls my name. He grasps my left hand in his lap and my right, by habit, returns to his head. Returns not to the warmth of sifting sand, but to the coldness of snow. I sit down beside him and lower my head to his jutting hip. I stare at his fingers, black and flaky beyond their first joints, gorilla's hands. To centralize his circulation and to save his vital organs, the doctors sacrificed his hands and his feet--outer extremities, they said. But I know better. My grandfather looks longingly at my perfect golden hands, searching for the strong trigger finger that he had lost.

II

On the fifth floor of an apartment building in downtown San Francisco, I squirm eagerly on my grandfather's lap. It is sum-mer, 1987. I am six years old. He is telling me about his wartime adventures. I pretend to be Gao Ye-ting, his most trusted right-hand man. He reaches for my hand so that he can mold it into the shape of a gun. The two of us level Commies left and right. Pow, pow, pow.

It was summer, 1947. My grandfather was 32. He was guarding a large city in the Shandong province. Communist soldiers had surrounded the city for 40 days and 40 nights, slowly weakening the Kuomingtang officers' defenses. My grandfather, nicknamed Double Tiger by the officers he led, was caged within the city walls. He knew that the Communists were slowly infiltrating, tunneling into the city by digging underground passageways. He worried. Just as he had predicted, a sea of olive men foamed up from the bottom of the wall. They seemed to ooze from the cracks and issue forth with gunfire and destruction. After many hours he was exhausted. His troops were falling left and right, his comrades dying in heaps. Fighting valiantly, he prepared himself to die an honorable death, yet there was no need. Led by Gao Ye-ting, a group of his men surrounded him and urged him to get out, to get word to the general. With a gun in each hand and his uniform drenched in sweat and blood, my grandfather fled the city walls.

He discovered a skirted offering table in a temple with a straw-thatched roof. For two days, he hid beneath snuffed-out incense and a jade Buddha, hearing the fragmented conversations of passing Communist soldiers. On the second day, Double Tiger emptied the offering bowls of their fruit contents. At nightfall on the third day, he left the temple, famished. He searched for village smells--the drifting scents of sweet rice, sticky buns in bamboo steamers, and roasted fowl. But the villages that lined the dirt road were burned to the ground. His lungs filled with the thick stench of burnt wood and burnt flesh. His stomach clenched with the pain of lost lives and unsatisfied hunger--the hunger to win the war and free China from its centuries-old oppression. If his men did not win, the deaths of his ancestors and his brothers--from the dynasties to the Japanese to the Communists--would have been for nothing. When he reached the army base, my grandfather briefed the general on the enemy's westward movements. His whole troop was later awarded medals. For years to come, the surrounding villages remembered their bravery.

III

It is Christmas Eve, 1984. I am dressed in a plum-colored velvet dress with scalloped-hem (sent to me by my adoring aunt in Taiwan for this occasion). I am three-and-a-half years old, and I have just begun playing the violin. When I rise to play my piece, I do so on a great wave of applause. People in the church stop rustling. They seem to sit on the edges of their seats and whisper to each other, pleased. I have been asked to play Paganini's Witches Dance for my Chinese Alliance Church--a showpiece in the truest sense. When I finish, I spin around and curtsy in unison with the last chord of the piano. I cross my ankles and raise my dress at the corners to achieve the full effect. My smile can only be dwarfed by the smiles on my parents' faces and the faces of all of my aunties and uncles, the aiyis and susus clapping frantically while trying not to jar loose the dentures in their open mouths. In the front row, below my patent leather Mary Janes, I see my statuesque grandfather--his proud body covered in a silk robe, his broad shoulders opening his arms to embrace me.

IV

I am 15 years old. My mind is crowded with impish melodies and harmonies. Under the blanket of night, after my parents have gone to bed, the world cannot interfere. In a dim glow, I pick up my violin. I transmute these four metal strings not to gold, but to emotion. For an hour, I am free.

Melodies consume me. They turn into D-minor and F-major. They turn into hungers and desires. I long for the satisfaction of that first Christmas Eve. It wasn't good enough just to perform for my friends in the school auditorium. I wanted more; I wanted Carnegie Hall. I wanted to stand in front of those stuffy ladies and gentlemen and pour melodies onto their laps. I wanted the New York Times to review me as the next Asian prodigy, the "cute" fresh-faced musician. I was already winning concerto competitions and had been awarded the opportunity to solo with major orchestras. I had become accustomed to working closely with the best musicians from the Detroit Symphony, the American String Quartet, and the Juliard School of Music. Next stop, New York, I told myself.

V

That was when my hands began to hurt. I had flown too high. I was among the lights. The yellow rays stung my eyes; I shielded them with my hands. I look down at my perfect little hands; they are smooth and golden. Swirling tears fill my eyes. My melted wax wings can no longer sustain me, and I fall to the ground. Some days the pain is acute, unbearable. Some days I drown in a sea of numbness; only then can I ignore the pain and continue to practice. I learned that I had tendonitis, then carpal tunnel. The pain traveled back and forth--first my left hand, then my right. A devilish melodic dance enters my room. Many nights I lay crumpled on the floor in my room, crying.

I was 15 years old. Even though I was young, I knew my ability to play the violin was a gift. It was effortless, so easy. I could phrase melodies in a way that others could not. I could analyze and interpret an entire piece of music in ways that were invisible to my competitors. And this gift gave me supreme confidence. I knew what my challengers would do, note for note. I knew at exactly what point their faces would fall when my seemingly simple and childlike strategy would reveal itself to the conductor, and I would be rewarded with first chair.

My doctor forced me to sacrifice the Orchestra Hall audition--not of great importance, he assured. But one forfeit allowed my rival to take away my position as concertmaster. In the plush center box on the balcony level, I sit. My rival's lone violin sings out the seductive voice of Scherazade. Through a window of marble and beyond a magnificent chandelier, I watch. I place my aching hands on the overhang. Tears splash on my fingers. I ache to tell those 1,001 stories.

VI

Throughout my recovery, I thought it strange that the orchestra could still perform without me. Major orches-tras still featured other soloists. I promised myself that when my hands recovered, I would show them what they missed. I thought I only had to return to where I was, to recapture my spot in the limelight. But after I got well, I discovered that things really had changed. I was horrified. I spent many hours every day going over in my mind what I had lost. I knew it was not just the last chair audition. I examined every note, every inflection, every phrase. And I could no longer see the power of each, the magic within the angle or reach of my fingers. I could only see my mistakes, my weaknesses.

In the weeks after I recovered and later months and years, I continued to play, but never with that same feeling of supreme confidence. I fought hard, with fear and desperation. When I won, I was grateful, relieved. And when I lost, I was filled with growing dread, and then terror that I was no longer a prodigy, that I had lost the fight and had turned into someone quite ordinary.

VII

After the war, my grandfather retreated from China with President Chang Kai-Shek and the Kuomingtang army--defeated, ashamed. Being a soldier was all he had known, all that he had been since he was 20 years old. My grandfather settled in Taiwan and made arrangements for my grandmother and infant mother to escape. Reunited, they began a meager existence on the Li Mountains--my grandfather planting fruit trees for a living. Then in the '70s, my grandparents moved to San Francisco to retire.

VIII

My family visited San Francisco every other sum-mer while I was growing up. One year we stopped going. My summers became occupied with music camp and summer school and internships. Although my grandfather occupied my heart, I am ashamed to admit that I hadn't expected to be back this year.

This evening I leave San Francisco. For two weeks I have fastened myself to all the splendor that was my grandfather. They are memories that break my heart. In my final hours, I walk to Union Square with my Discman. The cold wind pierces my wool sweater, forcing me to take air in short, quick breaths. I sit on a cold bench and breathe in deeply, leaning against a concrete wall for support, hiding from the wind. Here are all the familiar scenes of my childhood in such an overwhelming exuberance of color, as though all the vitality of my past has been turned to paint and brushed upon these walls. Here, in front of me, a mural of my grandfather and me--feeding bread crumbs to pigeons, listening to street musicians. How do I explain the existence of such beautiful and poignant scenes at a time when my beloved grandfather is dead and gone? How do I explain that from the rank decay of corpses rises the sprout of new life? How do some of the molecules of the dead become molecules of the living?

As I sit on that bench in Union Square and listen to Mahler's Symphony #2, The Resurrection, I begin to understand why under such a burden of grief and loss, there burns the smallest of lights. It is at the center of my being, embedded in layers of pain. Call it hope, even joy--it exists.

At the very beginning of the symphony, against scrubbing violins and violas, low strings hurl turns and rounded chords. These first-movement cello and bass melodies are glorious, kingly, and as Mahler intended, herald the tragic death of a great hero. This requiem movement is called Todtenfeier, or Funeral Rites. I see myself in the graveyard. We are burying my hero, watching the casket being lowered and entering the ground. I bend down to throw in my handful of dirt. The wind whips half of it into the air. The icy cold barely suppresses my riot of emotions. On my hands and face, traces of soil mix with liquid salt. I blink to shield my eyes from the wind. One by one, all the members of my family become shades, dissolving into the wall.

The second movement is nostalgic, like some lingering resonance of bygone days from the life of the hero whom we bore to the grave in the first movement--something from the days when the sun still smiled upon him. This beautiful interruption from the grim and severe march of events consists of memories--scenes of walking hand in hand with my grandfather at Fisherman's Wharf or performing violin concertos for him in his downtown apartment.

The third movement contains an element of the grotesque--the ugly events surrounding my grandfather's death and the death of my dreams. I look away from the wall, burying my head in my knees.

Soon, the agony is swept away by the fourth and fifth movements. They are the resolution, and they deal with the last judgement, and redemption, and resurrection. The lyrics from the resurrection loom before me. It is the first time I am able to grasp the precise meaning and flow of the words.

"O Pain, piercer of all things,
From you I have been wrested!
O Death, conqueror of all things,
Now you are conquered!
With wings I won for myself.
In love's ardent struggle,
I shall fly upwards
To that light which no eye has penetrated!
I shall die so as to live."

The living shall rise from the dead. From the grave rotation of this kaleidoscope bloom new patterns of color, of light, of hope. Death fiddles in my ear the song of life. Parts of our lives will die, my life as a concert musician, my grandfather--so that other parts can feed off them and grow stronger. I see the changing of themes, not the snuffing out of melodies. I see a strain of melody transformed into different colors and textures, weights and balances, degrees of light and shade, shifting from moment to moment. Yet its composition is never altered. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. I shall fly upwards with wings I won for myself.

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