Stringing Along
The first time someone dropped a dollar into his case, he asked his son how much rice it would buy—as much as it would take a Chinese peasant days to earn. “We are an American miracle,” he marveled; “America is a miracle.”
Some years ago, on an afternoon stroll down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, you might have seen an old Chinese man sawing away on his fiddle. Perhaps you also saw a little girl at his side, concentrating intensely on her own bow strokes, engrossed in a mélange of honking taxis, chatting passers-by, and Mozart or Haydn. For nearly a decade, the duo made a daily contribution to the urban soundscape. These days, the grandfather plays solo on the city’s streets, while his granddaughter realizes one of the biggest dreams she has ever dared to entertain.
Sifting through such vivid memories years later, I finally understood why my grandfather called us an “American miracle.”
In 1949, when the Communists took over China, my grandfather was a mere teenager; at the time, the political overhaul appeared to him a blessing. Schools formerly reserved for the wealthy opened their doors to the children of the poor, allowing him to pursue his love of classical music at Hubei Conservatory. Despite the Communists’ claims to have democratized China, however, citizens were forced to abide the censorious habits of the regime; as an artist, my grandfather did not take well to this fact.
After publicly voicing his dissatisfaction, the government removed Grandpa from his post as a cultural minister and made him a cook for a construction crew—a job he ended up holding for twenty-five years. The position separated him from his family for months – on some occasions, even years – at a time, leaving my grandmother to raise their two sons, my father and my uncle, on her own. Were it not for the violin, he might have found the loneliness unbearable. It was through music that my grandparents were able to bring meaning to their suffering. Grandma dispensed with six months of her salary to buy my father and uncle child-sized violins; and, whenever Grandpa came home, he would give his children music lessons. When they had grown a bit older, Grandma would send them on train rides, hundreds of miles long, to play for their father.
Those lessons paid off. My father and mother, also a violinist, earned scholarships to study music at Michigan State University, and my grandparents and I followed them two years later. At the same time, China issued a letter of apology to Grandpa, asking him to resume his previous post. Grandpa refused, saying, “I’d rather play on the sidewalks of freedom any day than in the grandest halls of oppression.”
While my parents were completing their studies, I stayed with my grandparents in Chicago’s Chinatown. They planned to retire in China as soon as my parents settled into stable jobs—but things did not go according to plan. While driving back to school after visiting my father in Tennessee, where he had just received a position at the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, my mother died in a car accident, only three weeks before her graduation. Her death left my father destitute, and, having also just hurt his fingering hand, he was both physically and emotionally incapable of continuing to work alone in Nashville. He moved to be closer to my grandparents, who stayed to take care of me in Chicago; but we all lacked money, language, friends, and now a large part of our family. To sustain us all, Grandma babysat, and Grandpa resumed his career as a performer—on the city’s streets and in its airports and subway stations. The first time someone dropped a dollar into his case, he asked his son how much rice it would buy—as much as it would take a Chinese peasant days to earn. “We are an American miracle,” he marveled; “America is a miracle.”
Grandpa handed his love of the violin down to me; and, when I reached the age of six, we became a duo. Rain or shine, about 360 days every year for almost a decade, he would pick me up after school, and we would hit the town. In the summer, after an hour or two performing across from the Hancock Center, Grandpa would take me to Oak Street Beach for a refreshing swim, after which we would diligently return to our post. When asked once whether I would rather be playing with my friends, I replied, confused by the question, “No, doing this with Grandpa is like a game. Isn’t that why they call it ‘playing’ music?”
Of course, with the harmony came dissonance. On one of the coldest Thanksgiving Days I can remember, Grandpa insisted we go out, despite my protests that no one would be around. He contended that we could not slack off just because some call the day a holiday, and so we went. My fingers were so cold I could not even extend my pinky finger to the second string, and I burst into tears out of frustration. On my Thanksgiving, I was grateful that no one was there to witness my embarrassment.
Unlike my classmates who remained sheltered in the Chinatown community, my early exposure to the outside world precipitated questions of identity. Despite attending a largely Chinese grammar school, all the students had English names. I felt insecure about my own strange and monosyllabic “Yi,” which some often pronounced “Ee.” An elderly woman had come to take a liking to me and came to see us perform everyday, and one day, when she inquired of my name, I blurted out “Mary!” Shame overcame me immediately, and all I could say to myself was “Thank God Grandpa doesn’t understand English.”
Those days were among the most beautiful, sublimely simple, and formative in all my life—and their far-reaching effects verify the most fantastical versions of the American dream (My playing with the C.S.O. is not the least among such Utopian realities). Every day we would open our cases, and every month, no matter how much we’d made, my grandparents would stow five-hundred dollars away for college.
Nevertheless, as I could only understand later, rent and college were only the tangible reasons for our daily street presence. Grandpa vividly recalls when China and America were allies during WWII and the Chinese Civil War. America sent food supplies that kept many from starving, each carton labeled, “Gift of the People of the United States of America.” For Grandpa, playing music on the street was his way of offering thanks to this country for taking us in, providing for us, and giving us refuge—his way of doing justice to that memory.
That a grandfather and his granddaughter could play on any corner of their choosing, and moreover, that people, caught in the riptide of rush-hour, would pause to drop their bags, bare their hands to the brutal cold to deposit some change into the little girl’s sticker-covered case, allowing themselves to be spellbound and appreciate what the immigrant duo humbly offers—that remains a most magnificent phenomenon.
