I met Olivia and Noah at orchestra auditions in the first week of semester in 2012. I spotted a girl with pale skin in a tangerine sweater from across the auditorium. The sweater was loud. Demanded attention. I knew I wanted to be her friend. When I approached her after the audition, I saw that she’d matched the sweater with jeans the colour of beetroot and R.M. Williams boots. I discovered she was an English major too.
As I walk into the theatre I look down at my faded black jeans. Ripped cotton shirt reflected in the sliding door.
Olivia is sitting in the front row, ankles crossed. She looks up from her phone.
‘Hey.’
The double door cracks open and Noah enters as if on cue. He’s carrying his clarinet and a plastic bag. I am relieved to see he’s also casually dressed; baggy grey sweater, brown cargo pants, thongs. As he comes closer, I see he hasn’t shaved in days.
‘Hi, girls.’
Olivia tilts her face up to meet his. He is so tall.
‘What’s in the bag?’
He opens it. Shapes, Doritos, Mars bars and LCMs.
‘Were we meant to bring something?’ I ask.
His eyes lift quickly. ‘I thought we might go see a movie if we finish early.’
‘I’ve asked you to come play the clarinet,’ Olivia says. ‘Not distract us.’
He looks wounded.
He deposits his things on a seat and Olivia and I climb onto the stage. We align the stands, place the music on the metal plates, tune up.
She lifts her gaze. ‘How’s the practice going?’
I tell her I haven’t been documenting sessions on Google Docs like we promised we’d do, but I am following the exercises in the order we planned.
‘I can’t seem to practise after five. I’m just so exhausted. The humidity is killing me.’
I am interested in Olivia. I really am. But my brain turns off each time she complains about playing. I don’t understand her struggles. Instead, I give her my best sympathetic expression.
She clears her throat and rolls her shoulders.
We begin with Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3. A series of difficult passages in tenth position. I watch her lift the scroll of her violin as her fingers drop onto the E string, micro-millimetre shifts. Firm bow pressure, inching closer to the bridge.
Noah’s voice cuts in.
‘What?’ I shout.
‘I can’t hear Olivia.’ He looks at me, then down at the mouthpiece he is screwing onto his clarinet.
‘I can hear myself,’ Olivia says.
Noah walks up with sheet music clamped under his arm, clarinet in hand. ‘From where I was sitting, it sounded like you were playing forte and you were playing piano.’
‘There’s no specific marking,’ I say.
Noah points to the sheet music. ‘Dolce.’
Sweetly. Loud sweet? Or soft sweet?
‘I suppose maybe tone it down a little?’ Olivia blinks at me.
I’m not a soloist anymore. Why do I keep forgetting?
For the rest of the hour, I play with a dulled, weak force. I feel bad for my Strad, lent to me by a mining investor in Germany. It deserves to be heard only on its own. The idea of it being part of an orchestra is like asking Oprah to join the Today Show. Noah plays with the usual compliance of a tutti clarinet, blowing with mild interest. There’s a reason why all clarinet players are the same. No one who wants to stand out plays the clarinet.
‘So, movie?’ Noah asks me while Olivia is in the bathroom.
‘I’ve got stuff on, sorry.’
My first lie to Noah. I feel bad that I don’t feel bad.
6
I wasn’t always a dishonest kid. Though, I certainly wasn’t a typical kid either. I do recall the year or so I had a normal life.
Year one. I was Mrs R’s favourite student. In the classroom, I sat on the carpet with my legs crossed, back straight. When Mrs R gave an instruction, I’d bolt straight to it. I was always eager to be loved, especially by my teachers.
Jenny Lee was the only other Asian in my class. She was much prettier than me, though I didn’t know it back then. I just thought people preferred her because her skin was whiter than mine. I had darker skin back then. I was bark, dirt, milk chocolate. I didn’t mind it though. Sometimes people thought I was Native American, which made me feel special because I loved Pocahontas. She was dark-skinned and beautiful. A white man with a plain name fell in love with her. After seeing that movie, I began to believe that it was possible for someone like me to be loved. Or at least to be noticed by a man; the right kind of man.
Before Jenny Lee, before Mrs R, there was the violin. My mother told me I’d begged for lessons after I saw someone playing on television in preschool. I don’t remember.
By the time I started year two, I’d been playing for two and a half years and had competed in three competitions in Australia. My mother wanted me to stay in school, though she’d been told by her friends that a child with my talent should be sent away—‘To America! To Germany!’ Those places sounded like suburbs or towns I’d not yet visited because my parents didn’t have time to take us anywhere. I’d only seen the city a handful of times when my mother took us to my father’s dental surgery in Chinatown.
I forgot to eat sometimes, I was so consumed by practice. When it became really bad during the first year of touring—this was when I was eight—my mother kept a food diary to make sure I ate at regular hours. Her bag was full of muesli bars, tubs of nuts and dried fruit. I found toilet breaks distracting too. Every second away from the violin made me anxious. Later, they called me obsessive compulsive and tried to medicate me, but I refused to take anything in case it affected my playing. When I was six, I performed at a festival on an open stage. After my last note, the clapping started. I stayed and smiled and took several bows. But then my mother raced onto the stage and pulled me off. In the toilets, my stockings wet and warm, she asked why I hadn’t gone offstage.
‘The clapping was for me,’ I said. I was only six but had already acquired the language of self-abuse.
Mrs R often asked me to bring my violin to class, usually on Fridays. I was a stand-in for the kids who forgot to bring in their show-and-tells. I remember playing with half my mind occupied by what my hands were doing, the other half on the kids sitting cross-legged in front of me, chins in hands, backs curved. Some of them dozed off; some of them looked intrigued at first then quickly lost interest. I hated seeing how easily I bored them. I wanted to be like Stacey Williams who was a gymnast and showed off tricks in the playground, bending in unusual places, making her body do magical, wonderful things. I wanted to be liked the way Stacey Williams was liked, but my violin never gave me much of a chance. The violin is the instrument of the highly strung, alpha types—hard-working, obsessively disciplined kids. No wonder string sections around the world are dominated by Asians.
In the playground I was called Stringer. Violin Nerd didn’t have the same ring. Stringer followed me around that entire year. I was too scared to tell Mrs R about the name-calling. What if she told me to stop playing the violin? If I didn’t have the violin, I would be no one.
I worked hard to be good. Even before I could write an entire sentence in English, I could play all the Mozart sonatas. With my eyes closed. While the kids in my class went to the oval on Saturdays to kick balls, I was practising in my room.