During the last 8 years I was in Beijing, I lived in a high rise apartment building on the western side of the city. On the other side of the shared wall between my second bedroom (which doubled as my office) and my neighbor’s apartment was a piano. I know this because every night at 9PM, the little…
piano
A Musical Send-off
In the baggage claim area of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport (MSP) there sits an (out of tune) piano, literally begging someone to sit down and play it. When my mom and sister took me to the airport on Monday for my flight to China, my mom announced that she wanted to sit down and play…
Sneaking a Piano into a Labor Camp
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao-mei, a budding pianist at the Beijing Music Conservatory was sent (along with some of her classmates) to a labor camp near Zhangjiakou, a small city about 100 miles northwest of Beijing. She would remain there for five years. Life in the camp was brutal, but security was lax enough…