The Secret Piano by Zhu Xiao-Mei ✔✔✔✔✔

Zhu Xiao Mei was born in post-war China to middle-class parents.  Taught first by her mother , she showed unusual talent and was just 10 yrears old when she began intensive studies at the Beijing Conservatory of Music.  In 1966, when she was 17 Mao's Cultural Revolution began and life changed forever. Her family members were scattered and sent to prison or labor camps and three years later, Xiao-Mei was sent to a work camp in Mongolia where she spent the next five years in horrific living conditions.  She - like all the others there - were brainwashed and she truly believed she was helping the Revolution by informing on her prison mates, renouncing her family, and submitting to self-criticism, a very important aspect of life in the prison.  But still she kept her passion for music, and when the Revolution finally ended, it was her piano and her music that helped her to heal.

She eventually fled to Hong Kong, from there to the US, where she found it very difficult to live and function, although she had a wonderful piano professor.  She then went to Paris, where she still lives.

Her philosophy of music is all tied in with her way of living - Taoism is very strong here.  I downloaded her recording of the Goldberg Variations and it is truly amazing.  She's a very inspirational woman.

I downloaded this book because it was cheap and also as a further study towards our Book Club theme of China from 1885 to the present.  I didn't expect it to be so musically inspirational! As a matter of fact, after I read Part One I fooled around with the idea of not continuing, but the remainder of the book was even more interesting.