Our third teacher was a soft-spoken jazz guy named Richard, with wide hips. He said he had a two-year-old daughter. At our first meeting, he gave Sophia and me a big lecture about the importance of living in the moment and playing for oneself. … Richard said there were no rules in music, only what felt right, and no one had the right to judge you, and the piano world had been destroyed by commercialism and cut-throat competition. Poor guy – I guess he just didn’t have what it took. … As the eldest daughter of Chinese immigrants, I don’t have time to improvise or make up my own rules. I have a family name to uphold, aging parents to make proud. I like clear goals, and clear ways of measuring success.
This is Amy Chua’s description of the third pianist she interviews to teach her three (or four, it’s not clear) year old daughter. In some ways, it strikes at the heart of what she wants of her children, and of herself, and at the heart of everything I dislike about her style of parenting and what she values.
Her dismissive, condescending tone of “Poor guy” set my teeth on edge. How dare she speak of someone like that! was my first impression. As to what she wants her kids to do and be, I can only recall the story of Astor Piazzola as a counterpoint. Astor Piazzola invented the musical style that has since come to be called nuevo tango, the marriage of Argentinian tango and jazz. He too started playing early, won a scholarship to study under a legendary French composer, Nadia Boulanger. What she taught him in a day turned his life around and set him on course to become who he became, someone who revitalized the Argentine music scene. Here is what he describes of what Nadia taught him in the course of a single day:
When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: “It’s very well written.” And stopped, with a big period, round like a soccer ball. After a long while, she said: “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what’s wrong? I can’t find Piazzolla in this.” And she began to investigate my private life: what I did, what I did and did not play, if I was single, married, or living with someone, she was like an FBI agent! And I was very ashamed to tell her that I was a tango musician. Finally I said, “I play in a night club.” I didn’t want to say cabaret. And she answered, “Night club, mais oui, but that is a cabaret, isn’t it?” “Yes”, I answered, and thought, “I’ll hit this woman in the head with a radio….” It wasn’t easy to lie to her. She kept asking: “You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn’t want to tell her that I was a bandoneón player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that’s Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.
I pray Maya gets a teacher who can say what Nadia tells Astor: “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what’s wrong? I can’t find Piazzolla in this”.
Learning to love the music, to be playful with the music, rather than win competitions and be praised by strangers, is what I hope Maya will do. Of course, Maya may find no love for a musical instrument.
Amy Chua’s descriptions of forcing her daughters to practice are horrifying. What is she so psychotic about, was what kept coming back to me.
Many parents contend that their children will not focus and practice if they’re not badgered and harangued and bullied into doing so. Maya enjoys playing basketball. She picked up that sport among the many that she toyed with. Now, she practices shooting the hoop for an hour or two without anyone badgering her or pestering her. She does it every day. She wanted to play with the adult sized ball in an adult sized hoop. She decided to figure out her own way of shooting the hoop. She didn’t seem to mind that for the first few weeks, she could barely toss the ball halfway up the hoop. These days, she regularly shoots the hoop, drawing applause from some of the other players in the court, because she’s so young. Maya also enjoys playing at the piano. At a friend’s house, she spent 30-40 minutes just striking the keys and making her own music. Now, nothing may come of either. But kids experiment and play, and in so doing, learn to make sense of the world, in their own way. How can we as parents expect them to be creative when we’re pointing out the right way all the time ? Now, I’m not saying that they should figure out how to cross the street in their own way. But, I find that there are very few things such as crossing the street that I have to be dogmatic about. I have to be far more patient than dogmatic. And Maya has demonstrated ample times when she’s figured out a different way to get the same result, sometimes as effective as what I was suggesting, and sometimes even better.
Seeing other kids of Maya’s age, and seeing their creativity in different areas, I’m confident that most kids have some talent or another, it may not be easy to discover and it may not be what we’d consider something to be successful, to have that mansion on the hill. As Ken Robinson puts it:
I meet all kinds of people who don’t enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, “Don’t do this anymore,” they’d wonder what you were talking about. Because it isn’t what they do, it’s who they are. They say, “But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self.” And it’s not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it’s still true of a minority of people. I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.
I did find it impressive that Amy Chua throws herself into the exercise as hard as she expects her daughters to. She reads up on all kinds of piano playing techniques and tricks and tries to impart the knowledge to her daughters. Some of the descriptions of how she spent nights reading up on various aspects of a musical piece or some other activity her daughter was engaged in, was a lot of hard work. Teaching kids to persevere through some hard times is a good thing too.
In the end, I doubt the Chinese model of parenting produces happy kids or self-confident kids. Different kids react differently and finding what works best for our child is what constitutes good parenting. As some research has pointed out (and I’ve written about it earlier), praising kids for their effort instead of the result, seems to foster their taking on incresingly more challenging tasks. In any case, allowing them to discover their passion seems a healthy parenting habit.
Sir Ken Robinson quotes W.B. Yeats when he says: “And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly, for we tread on their dreams”.
Autumn Joy
Related posts:
