The Prodigy

Only I knew the real reason why I did not attend the award ceremony. It was a special event organized by the municipal education commission for my teacher and me. I had come in second place in a national amateur piano competition, in the youth division. When the organizers of the award ceremony informed my parents, they said every media organization in the city would be there and that the deputy mayor, who was in charge of education and the arts, would give a speech and present me and my teacher each with prize money and a certificate.

But twenty minutes before the start of the ceremony, the organizers received a call from my parents. They told them I had a high fever and could not make it. They said I had gotten sick two days before. The doctor had done all he could, but my temperature just would not come down. They offered their apologies and said they could attend and accept the prize and certificate on my behalf. But they would not have the time or the inclination to be interviewed by the media. They hoped that the commission would understand.

The truth was that my parents had no idea where I had gone. At dawn they had discovered I was no longer in my room. They looked everywhere for almost eight hours without success. They had to make that call. They had to lie. They assumed I’d run away from home for the second time. The first time was when they refused to find me another piano teacher. That episode ended when they got a call from the Guangzhou Railway Police Office telling them to come get me. This time, though, they were wrong: I had not run away. I’d been hiding in the power room in the basement of our building since dawn. I decided to remain there until the ceremony had gotten under way.

By the time they were hurrying home from the ceremony, I was already sitting in my room. They were much relieved to find me there. They didn’t ask me anything. They should’ve known that if they hadn’t refused another of my requests, I would not have responded in such a way.

Two days earlier I had asked them to let me stay home from the ceremony. If they had just been more patient in letting me finish my explanation (which I’d even prepared beforehand), the situation would never have gotten that out of hand. But they simply refused, no buts. They said that even if I were so feverish that I couldn’t walk, they would take me to the ceremony on a stretcher.

My parents approached the side of my bed together. They did not reprimand me or ask any questions. They just said it was a pity I had not gone. The deputy mayor had given a rousing speech. My teacher’s account of my rapid progress in the past year or two fascinated all the parents and child pianists in the room. It was the climax of the evening.

I kept looking down, patiently waiting for my parents to finish saying everything they had to say. And when they were finally about to unroll the certificate and give it to me, I looked up and said what I would have told the whole audience if I had gone to the ceremony, “I will never touch the piano again. Not even if you beat me to death.”

Thirteen years have passed, and it’s as if it happened yesterday.

At the time I was only half as old as I am now. At the time I was a prodigy the whole city had taken note of. I was the apple of my parents’ eye and the centre of public and media attention. I was a role model, an example other parents held up when assessing their own children, a pair of exceptional coordinates on the grid of achievement. Everyone knew that on the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday the mayor had called to congratulate me, that I had won a first-class at the provincial mathematics competition and another at the provincial composition competition. Everyone knew that I was reading Harry Potter in the original English. That nobody in town under twenty years of age could beat me at chess. That at twelve I’d not only memorized the surnames, given names, monikers, and places in the seating protocol for all the merry men of Liangshan in The Water Margin, but also read War and Peace and All Quiet On the Western Front.

At eleven, I’d memorized traditional Chinese essays like the “Ode to the Pavillion of Prince Teng” and the “Crimes of Qin.” At ten, I’d discovered a mistake in the language test for the university entrance exam. At nine, I’d been able to extemporaneously report the surface area of Jerusalem and the population of the Republic of Sierra Leone, among other such trivia. And of course, everyone knew a lot more about my piano playing. Like at what age I’d started to play, when I’d gotten my first award, at what age I’d passed which examination.

All of these factoids had been reported over and over again in the newspapers. So parents who wanted to force their children to study the piano used my progress to measure their own children and make demands on them. I was a famous local wunderkind, and the most amazing thing about me was that I didn’t appear to have any of the weird afflictions that tend to plague other prodigies: paranoia, depression or isolation, eccentricity. Everyone thought I was a healthy kid, mentally and physically. I took part in student government. I was a volunteer at the bookstore and the library. I was very polite to my neighbours. And I was modest in front of my classmates. In a word, I was a well-rounded wunderkind, a healthy, happy prodigy. Or so everyone thought.

Only I knew how ignorant all of these people were about me, including my parents. They did not see, nor could they see, the darkness behind the brilliant façade of my life. And they could not know that for a half a year around my thirteenth birthday I’d had a series of very strange experiences, in which I’d met first an angel and then a devil, and suffered mental and physical tumult and torment.

Nobody knew about this. And nobody would have wanted to know. The award ceremony was an opportunity to let everyone know how little they all knew about me. But I suddenly withdrew. I begged my parents to let me stay home. I was all of a sudden unwilling to reveal my trauma to others.

But my parents did not have the patience to let me finish my explanation. They said it was an award ceremony held for me. I had to go. They would be humiliated if I did not go.

They did not know that true humiliation would await them if I went.

Had I gone to the award ceremony, I would have told everyone how I’d met an angel fifteen years older than me. She was my cousin. She arrived in a hurry one evening from Shilong, about a three-hour train ride north of our city. There was no light in her face and no life in her eyes. She looked worn out.

I had not seen my cousin in two years. I had not thought that she could change so drastically in such a short time. She was no longer just my cousin, an innocent girl. She had become a woman, a source of temptation. Even though she looked exhausted, I could still smell a particular aroma on her. It was a kind of message she was sending from deep in her womanly being.

The gentle touch of her hand on my head sent a thrilling and embarrassing palpitation through my body.

At night my mother told me to turn off the light and go to sleep. She also said that my cousin was going to stay with us for a while.

When I asked her why, she said that she couldn’t go on living in her own house anymore.

I again asked why, and my mother asked if I had noticed the scar on my cousin’s left cheek.

It was conspicuous. Of course I had seen it.

Mother said my cousin’s husband had made that mark by hitting her with a boiling hot spatula.

I asked why her husband would do such a thing.

My mother said she did not know and did not want to know. She reminded me never to ask my cousin about the scar.

My cousin stayed with us for two weeks, during which time my mother arranged for me to sleep on the couch in the living room while my cousin slept in my bed.

Every night for those two weeks I had difficulty getting to sleep. As I tossed and turned, I would hear my cousin tossing and turning in my bed, too. This correspondence made me feel that the night wasn’t just a time, but also a space where we could be together, both then and in the future.

Many times I envisioned a future in which we could be alone together. I saw myself as a dashing youth, while my cousin was still just as young and pretty as she was when I was thirteen. She would be wearing a brightly coloured apron as she brought out my favourite dishes: spicy hot tofu and steamed breaded pork chops. I would stare at her pale white arms, as another of those thrilling and embarrassing palpitations coursed through my body.

It was the most amazing two weeks of my life. My nocturnal excitement and agitation left me dazed during the day. I could not focus on anything. No matter whether it was on the blackboard, on the sheet music, or in the sky. Everywhere I looked I saw an image of my cousin. A bead of sweat on the tip of her nose. The curves at the corner of her mouth. Her billowing hair, her swelling breasts. The tempting crevice between her upper and lower arms when she pressed them together. Every day after school I would rush home as fast as I could, to be with her as quickly as possible. I wanted to smell that womanly scent emanating out of her deepest being.

One Friday evening, my parents went to the hospital to see a colleague who had had a sudden stroke. They ate dinner in a rush and left.

This was the first time (and as it turned out, the only time) I had ever been alone with my cousin. I deliberately ate slowly, because I didn’t want my miraculous meal with her to end. Every time our eyes met, a tender smile would appear on her face. I felt as though that smile belonged to me and me alone. To me that smile was the acme of beauty, a kind that even music could not convey, and that no one else could appreciate. I was infatuated. I felt I’d stepped into the world of tomorrow to become a handsome young man.

“Why did he hit you?” I asked brusquely, incensed.

My cousin smiled at me, but did not seem to think this was a question I should be asking. “Because”—she paused—“because he knows I don’t love him.”

I never imagined that my cousin would respond in this way. “If you didn’t love him why did you get married?” I asked.

My cousin put down her chopsticks, and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not everything in life has a why.”

But that didn’t stop me. I had many other questions to ask, many more whys. “Then why don’t you get a divorce?” I asked.

My cousin looked me in the eye. “Because he doesn’t want to get a divorce,” she said helplessly.

I was even sadder than she. I could not understand how anyone could stand being trapped in a relationship like that. “Have you never loved him?” I asked.

My cousin looked distressed. She nodded and said, “I love someone else.”

This mention of someone else was a comfort to me. It was as if that someone else was myself. “Then why didn’t you get married to this someone else?” I couldn’t wait to ask.

“Because I could not get married to him,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because he died,” my cousin said, distraught. “Because he’s already dead.”

Her revelation chilled me to the bone. I did not dare ask any other questions. I did not want to make my cousin unhappy. I looked down, thinking of the first corpse I had seen, a junior high school student who had drowned in the reservoir. I was only seven years old at the time. I had squeezed through the onlookers and seen an alabaster body, and I realized then how terrifying death was, even when it was a complete stranger. How terrifying the death of a loved one would be!

Nobody knew about our conversation. Still less did anyone know about the emotional and psychological effect it would have on me and my life. Love and death had met in my heart, engendering a depression and terror that I’ve never been able to escape.

That evening, under the influence of the emotional shock, I practiced Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As I was practicing the sixteenth variation, I heard a mysterious voice from deep within the music. “He’s not dead, he’s not dead, he’s not dead,” the voice kept repeating for a full minute. It conveyed to me the sublimity of the music and the majesty of my performance. I vowed to practice all the harder to win a prize in the next piano competition, just as everyone expected me to do. I wanted to comfort the wounded angel with an honour, to send a secret message to my cousin—that the man she loved was not dead, that he was growing into a man at an amazing pace.

The sound of the toilet flushing interrupted my thoughts. I noticed that my cousin had just gone to the bathroom. To notice such a thing seemed so vulgar of me that I stopped playing, plunged into shame. I stuck my cheek on the piano keys. I had to escape that shame.

But then, the sound of water appeared again; my cousin was about to take a shower. I became conscious of her taking off all her clothes. I heard the sound of the shower curtain and of the water ricocheting off her body onto the curtain. Shame immediately yielded to a powerful curiosity.

I slowly left the piano bench, walked out of the room, and gently pressed my face against the frosted glass door of the bathroom. I couldn’t see a thing; but I could hear. I could hear in the fluctuations in the sound of the water the changes in my cousin’s posture. Those shifts, full of temptation, made me palpitate violently from head to toe. I was on the verge of collapse. I felt a powerful cramping in the lower left half of my abdomen. A spasm of heat spurt out of my body. I felt ashamed.

I only saw my cousin’s husband once. The time he came to take her away. He looked just as my relatives described him, cultivated and educated. I could not associate him with the person who had smacked her across the face with a boiling hot spatula. As I watched him take my cousin away—or I should say, as I watched my cousin leave with him—I felt an intense hatred. Not for the person who took away my angel, mind you; the person I hated was my angel. “Why is she going with him?” I asked my mother in despair.

My mother said, distractedly, “She’s going home.”

This vague answer cut my wounded heart like a knife. “That’s not her home,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?” my mother asked, still distracted. “Then tell me, where is her home?”

I looked down. I knew I could not tell her that my cousin’s home was far away, in the future. I could not say that her home was my home. I hated my cousin! I could not forgive her for suddenly abandoning me, for leaving with someone she did not love. I could not forgive her for turning my first love into my first loss in love.

This was thirteen years ago, but I remember it all clear as day.

Had I gone to the ceremony, I would have pointed at the bald guy standing beside me, and cried out: “It’s him!” He was my teacher and mentor, a fact that everybody knew. Yet had I appeared at the award ceremony, I would have let everybody know that he was also the devil who had almost dragged me down into hell.

What brought us together was the provincial youth piano competition. He was one of the judges, and I was the youngest prizewinner, not yet eleven years old at the time. After the competition ended, he walked over to my parents, full of praise, and said that he wanted to take me on as his pupil. My parents were thrilled, because he was a teacher with a good reputation, and all parents dreamed of their children receiving instruction from him. His eagerness to take me on was not just an assessment of my present talents, but also a prophecy of my future triumphs.

Indeed, after a year of instruction, I had made rapid progress. It was a happy year, an ordinary year. During every class, my mother would sit beside me, and afterwards give a detailed summary of the famous teacher’s lesson, assessing his pedagogy. She said that I was so lucky to be able to receive such expert instruction. And she had just as much praise for my progress as well. My mother even reassessed her initial reserve about my prospects as a pianist. She felt ever more certain that piano should be my lifelong profession.

But then the next summer, things went awry. My mother told me one day that so self-aware an adolescent as me should not need his mother to sit in on every lesson. Later on I learned that this was the devil’s own recommendation. My mother did as my teacher said. She described it as “training” for me—an abnormal training regime, as it turned out.

I soon noticed that the devil treated me very differently when my mother was not there. In her absence, he became much more affectionate, even passionate. There was a lot of hand touching. He would often put his arm around my shoulders and start stroking my back. And when the lesson was over, rather than a simple pat on the head, he would hold me tightly for the longest time, before finally saying goodbye.

The impact my cousin had on me did not escape the devil’s notice. During those amazing two weeks when my cousin stayed with us, he had a temper tantrum every lesson. He reprimanded me for my lack of focus, for seeming to allow my eyes to drift from the music. Yet in the week after my cousin broke my heart, when I was in an even poorer state, the devil seemed extremely accommodating, as if he knew that a change had occurred in my life. He appeared quite pleased that I had experienced such a loss of love. It was like schadenfreude.

One day, for the first time, he put his hand on my thigh, and began to demonstrate the fingering and forcefulness with his fat fingers.

The feel of his fingers on my skin left me queasy. But I did not dare resist him, as he said that this was a particularly effective method he had invented.

He said that a demonstration on my leg would make it easier for me to remember the various techniques, because of the nervous connection between my thigh and my brain. After practice that day, the eager devil not only held me tightly, but gave me a kiss on the lips.

I felt powerfully ashamed.

That day, I rushed home, wanting to tell my mother immediately about the weird things that the devil had done. But the instant I got home, I felt so overcome with shame that I changed my mind. I feared my mother would criticize me or laugh at me. I was even more afraid that she would not believe me. I decided not to let my mother know what had happened, not ever.

My mother agreed to sit with me through the next class, but the day before the lesson I told her she did not have to come anymore, that I wanted to go by myself.

To this day I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe I was afraid that she would find out about the secret the devil and I were keeping. But that was a big mistake, for the devil now perceived my weakness. He saw that I did not have the courage or ability to resist.

From then on, he was even more depraved. As long as my mother didn’t sit in, he was sure to use his “special method,” over and over again.

One day, his fingers got closer and closer to my groin. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept on playing.

Finally, he thrust his fingers into my pants.

My body responded swiftly and violently out of a mixture of shame and fear.

“Look, it understands music!” the devil said in an inspirational voice. “Music has made it strong, peerlessly strong.”

I did not dare to look down. Staring stubbornly ahead at the sheet music, I did not stop playing. But I did not know what I was playing. My cousin’s wet body, with its shifting postures, appeared before my eyes. I seemed to be back with my face pressed against the frosted glass of the bathroom door.

I suspected that the devil already knew my secret. I had nowhere to hide.

My body was again on the verge of collapse. I pressed my legs close together, trying to prevent it, but it was already too late. That hot wave that had left me so red-faced once again spurted out of my body.

A smirk I’d never seen before appeared on the devil’s face. Before I knew what was happening, the devil did something that left me feeling even more ashamed. He lowered his head and kissed the wet patch that had appeared on the crotch of my pants.

Impulsively, I stood up, grabbed my music, and rushed out of hell.

When I arrived home, I told my parents I wanted to study with my original teacher.

My parents asked me why.

I said I preferred to study with a lady.

“What difference does it make? At your age!” my mother said.

My father reprimanded me for not knowing what was good for me, and for disappointing my mentor, who had such high hopes for me.

They did not agree to let me switch teachers. They said that the big competition was approaching, the greatest challenge I had ever faced in my life. No matter what the reason, I should not change teachers at a time like this. My mother urged me to stick it out. My father said that sticking it out was the only way to defend my dignity as a piano prodigy.

That evening, the overwhelming sense of shame I felt left me completely unable to sleep. Strange visions ricocheted around in my head. I imagined that my little birdie had become a crawling caterpillar that got bigger and longer until it had become a boa constrictor. The boa constrictor wrapped itself around my feeble body. Every time I went somewhere I would see people pointing at me and gesturing. In a corner of the city square, a devil was holding up a torch, closing in on me. The boa constrictor released me abruptly and started to grapple with the devil. After several rounds, a white flame flicked out of the mouth of the snake, turning the devil into air. My strange fantasy left my mind and body even more exhausted.

I even thought about killing myself, for the first time in my life. I thought that only death could wash away the intolerable shame that I felt. It was my cousin who brought me back from the edge. In my worst desperation, I suddenly thought of her. I thought of going to find her, of telling her what I could not tell anyone. Before dawn, I reached under my bed to retrieve the envelope with my yearly allowance, which Chinese children receive every Chinese New Year. Then I quietly snuck out the front door.

At the entrance of our community was a taxi. I got in and told the exhausted driver to take me to the train station. There I bought a ticket to Shilong.

As soon as I got on the train, I felt sleep instantly overtake me, and I passed out, with my head resting against the window.

By the time I woke up, or was woken up by the conductor, the train had already reached its destination in Guangzhou. The lady conductor immediately discovered that I had run away from home, and took me to the on-board policeman, who turned me over to the railway police in the station.

My mother got the call, and rushed over right away to take me home.

On the highway bus home, my mother peppered me with questions, but I did not reply to any of them. I just rested my head against the window, my right hand mechanically playing the first few bars of the Goldberg Variations on the window, over and over. Then suddenly, a strange thought occurred to me. I decided to practice relentlessly and win a prize in the upcoming national piano competition. I knew that if I did our city would hold an award ceremony for me; I would stand on the podium with the devil. This was my chance. I would point at his bald head and tell everybody, “It’s him!” The thought galvanized me. I told my mother that I no longer planned to switch teachers, but that I hoped she would still sit with me through every lesson. “We’re covering too much ground now,” I said. “I can’t remember it all on my own.”

Later on many things happened that everybody knows about. The opportunity I had created for myself arrived after I won the prize, but I did not have the courage to publicize my humiliation. My parents did not understand, and so all I could do was avoid it by going AWOL. As I hid in the power room, doubly ashamed now because of my withdrawal, I decided never to touch a piano again. I had to get away and stay away. I had to forget I had ever dreamed of becoming a pianist.

My decision did not surprise my parents. They did not colour or blanch. The last time I’d left home was still fresh in their memories, and they had a lingering fear I might do it again. After they found me back in my room, they went back to their own bedroom and had a heated argument.

My mother came out alone, walked over, rested her hand on my shoulder, and reminded me tenderly that I should not waste time, that I should use every moment to review my schoolwork. She reminded me that the midterms were coming. From her exhortation, which had nothing to do with my decision to abandon piano, I knew the result of their argument: they would compromise. And that was the first time they had ever compromised with me.

Thirteen years have passed, and it’s as if this all happened yesterday.

It was the death of the devil that reminded me of all of this.

I never again touched the piano after the night of the ceremony. I also gave up reading and chess and all my other hobbies. I became a kid that lacked interest in everything. My grades suffered, plummeted actually. Although I managed to do well enough to make it into the best high school in the city, once there my performance kept sliding. In the end I only managed to qualify for an average university located in the town of Shantou, majoring in secretarial work. In the first term of my third year, I became disgusted with my studies, and for a time felt like dropping out. But my parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and I did not dare to make trouble for them. I knew that on the day when they had compromised with me regarding my decision, they’d opened up a rift between them, a rift which presaged the ultimate rupture in their relationship.

I managed to finish my studies. And after graduation my father got me a job in a little agency in the municipal government. I worked there for over four years before transferring to a well-known real estate company where one of my mother’s classmates from university worked as office manager. I have worked for her ever since.

Thirteen years. A pretty ordinary, uneventful thirteen years. In the end my parents got a divorce. Since then, no major events have occurred in my life. Of course sometimes people recognize me. And I’ve heard people discussing me behind my back or to my face. The most frequently heard expression is “What a pity.” But it doesn’t bother me at all when they judge me or when they sigh. They don’t know the hellish darkness that I endured. They do not know the distress or desperation or despair I suffered on account of the angel, and then the devil. Nor do they know that I don’t find it a pity at all. I don’t care in the least that I was once a prodigy that everybody in the city knew. I don’t care that now I am nobody.

Perhaps the psychological, or should I say physiological, change brought on by my “initiation”—which I found unfathomable at the time—was a major event in my life. In the past few years, people have often tried to set me up. But I’ve discovered that I no longer am interested in the opposite sex, I even feel a deep distaste. To me, girls are filthy and boring. I feel like they will sully me and disturb my daily routine. I even vaguely sense that this kind of psychological, or perhaps physiological, reaction is a kind of trauma or scar, the result of those two painful experiences thirteen years ago. But whether the angel or the devil was to blame, I’m not too sure.

Now the devil is dead. His death surely counts as a major event in my life. He took an overdose of antidepressants and died on the sofa where I had often sat: the site of many painful memories. I knew that after I stopped playing the piano, a major change occurred in the devil’s life. He stopped accepting students. And he stopped serving as a judge. He stopped going out, or even taking calls. My mother would go to visit him twice a year, and she said his home was a smelly mess. She said many people had tried to help him find a woman to take care of him, but he refused all offers. She said in the past few years, he’d smoked and drunk a lot. He was suffering from a serious depression.

It was my mother who told me about the devil’s death. She didn’t expect that I would want to attend his funeral. She looked at me uncomprehendingly. In the past thirteen years I had never expressed any interest in the devil’s situation. “Don’t you know what kind of impact your decision to stop studying piano had on him?” my mother asked. “All this time I’ve felt guilty. He had such high hopes for you.”

It would’ve been easy for me to turn my mother’s guilt into hate. But I didn’t feel like doing so. I did not feel like letting her know what the devil had done to me thirteen years ago, polluting and traumatizing me. The pollution was easily washed away when I got home, but the emotional scars I bear can never heal.

I’ve lived with these scars ever since. A very plain thirteen years it has been, and after all this time, I no longer hate him, not even a little. I’m even a little bit grateful to him. This was why I wanted to attend his funeral.

How could I be grateful? Had it not been for his fat fingers sending music into my pants—his own uniquely heuristic approach to pedagogy, as he described it—I would still be a prodigy today. I would still think of myself as a prodigy. And I would certainly still be dreaming the dream of a wunderkind.

But that was a dream my parents made me dream. It was a dream that our manic society made me dream. Truly, I’m now somewhat grateful to my mentor. His devilish conduct changed a prodigy everybody knew into a mediocre man. And that’s all I am now. A mediocrity.