I was born in 1997 and started playing the violin at the age of 3. Among the children who learn the violin, I am considered talented and have achieved enviable achievements in online Chinese class.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I won a full scholarship from an American art school with my specialty in violin, and went abroad to study violin performance. I have always been regarded as a “child of other people” among my peers.
However, in my sophomore year, I changed my major, and now I am studying for a Ph.D. in biology. My choice may seem incomprehensible to others, but it has been hidden in my heart for a long time.
Looking back on my journey of learning the piano for nearly 20 years, of course there is love for the violin, the joy and joy when I get excellent grades, and the warmth when I go to school with my mother…
But more, it is exhaustion and resistance , fear, and, as a child from a working family, face the guilt of a family that has devoted everything to learning art and has been in debt for many years.
Are children from working families worthy of artistic dreams? I have read the experience of Qintong around me and asked myself countless times about this question, but there is no answer.
Practicing the piano is an inescapable nightmare
Behind the children who study art, there is usually an art-loving father or mother, and I have two.
Because the three children in the family are all daughters, the grandfather felt that he could not hold his head up, and he rarely had a good temper with the children. My mother has shown great interest in art since she was a child.
She cried and clamored to learn music and dance several times, but was suppressed by her grandfather. In the end, she went to university with excellent grades and majored in chemistry.
Probably to make up for the regret that my childhood art dream was stifled in the cradle. Since I was 3 years old, my mother has taken me to various interest classes in the Children’s Palace, such as folk dance, ballet, Go, violin… whatever there is I’ve tried it all.
After some attempts, I showed a certain talent for playing the violin, so my acquaintance introduced me, and my mother took me to a “one-on-one” private online Chinese class with the teacher from the Provincial Department of Culture. After several years of practice, I started to participate in violin competitions at the age of 7, and won provincial and municipal rankings many times.
Money and time are limited, so my mother decided to let me focus on practicing the violin.
In this regard, my father also raised his hands in favor of it. My father and his three brothers were all born in the early 1960s. My grandfather had a primary school education and worked in a factory, and my grandmother could not read a single word.
Although the life at the bottom is a bit difficult, the family is harmonious and friendly. My dad is the youngest, and his grades are not as outstanding as his two brothers. He went to Shanghai to join the army when he was old.
After retiring from the army, he formed a band because of his hobby of music, and went to various places to “walk around”. He once went to Shenzhen to join his elder brother who opened the factory, and finally settled down in the state-owned factory in his hometown-in the 90s, this was considered a good job.
It was in this state-owned factory that parents from different branches, one loved singing and playing the guitar, and the other was beautiful and loved dancing, they met and fell in love and got married.
My dad often jokes that my musical talent is inherited from him, but I also repeatedly emphasize that it is because of him that whenever I see boys playing bands and guitars, I feel that there is a “father smell”, which greatly restricts my mate selection scope.
Through selection, I was admitted to the Municipal Art Primary School. There are only about 100 students in the whole school, and there is only one class for each grade, with about 20 students in the whole class.
Most people think that families who study art are in good conditions—for example, many of the parents of my primary school classmates are university professors or members of the military art troupe—but in fact, there are also some children like me who come from working families.
I didn’t feel much about it at the time, but when I grew up and heard my parents talk about it, I realized that the art teacher didn’t even bother to say hello when they met them, and was busy chatting with the parents of the art troupe.
My family was not considered poor at the time, but my parents only received a dead wage of about 1,000 yuan. My mother looked forward to me eagerly, and she was willing to spend money on learning the piano, and everything else was the next best thing, and she could save money on food and clothing. Until my sophomore year, our family of three lived in a small house of less than 60 square meters.
The house is a dormitory in the factory, with a strange shape. There are two rooms, one on the second floor and one on the third floor. In the middle, you have to share the upstairs passage with a neighbor, so you have two keys. When I was 6 years old, my parents saved more than 7,000 yuan and put the house under their own names.
In the first few years when I was in elementary school, my parents also looked at several houses and wanted to move out of this small house. But I learn the violin once a week, 100 yuan/hour, and in order not to fall behind in my cultural performance, I have to take supplementary classes for Mathematical Olympiad and English.
Around 2005, the profitability of my parents’ factory declined, and they began to lay off workers on a large scale, and had to move to new districts farther away. Considering the pressure of life and being tired of taking the bus to and from get off work every day, my dad decided to buy out his seniority and open his own shop.
When I was in the fifth grade, my dad’s chess and card room opened on the snack street in front of our house, while my mother struggled to maintain her daily work and spent more energy on supervising my piano practice.
Although my parents have paid a lot for my online Chinese class, for me when I was young, practicing piano was an unavoidable nightmare every day.