12/11/2023: Freedom is Not Free
It’s Monday book review time again. I read The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations by Zhu Xiao Mei during the Thanksgiving break. I stumbled upon Ms Zhu’s performance of the Goldberg Variations on YouTube and I really like it. I like it more than the Gould performance actually. The music flows naturally and beautifully without pretension or bravado. I picked up her memoir expecting to read a story about the making of a great pianist. But the story ended up being mostly a victim memoir of the Cultural Revolution.
Ms. Zhu was born in 1949 and was admitted into the Beijing Conservatory of Music when she was 10. Her school delved into chaos during the cultural revolution. The students were asked to participate in the self criticism and self denunciation sessions all day long and became revolutionaries. Many of her teachers became subjects of the criticism, denunciation and physical punishment, were labeled as anti-revolutionary and some of them tragically committed suicide. Her white-collar middle class background made her a member of the Five Black Categories. Classical music was labeled as bourgeois and thus anti-revolutionary and banned. She was sent to a labor camp and later went to a re-education camp. The turmoil lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 when Mao Zedong died. She finally got out of China in the early 1980s when she was in her thirties.
On her flight to America, the passenger sitting next to her mentioned Laozi /Tao Te Ching (老子). She has never heard of that. I was shocked reading about this. Tao Te Ching is one of the Chinese classics every student would learn in high school in Taiwan. Even if we don’t remember anything, we at least know about it. But Ms. Zhu was trying to make a point here. In her formative years, roughly from age 12 to 27, she didn’t get much of an education. All she learned is Mao propaganda. She was deeply traumatized by the experience at the education-less re-education camp. She also expressed regrets about suspecting that her father was a spy, rejecting her grandma's plea to spend time with her and spying and denouncing a camp mate because she wanted to be a proper revolutionary. As an impressionable young women during the Cultural Revolution, she was deeply traumatized by the dehumanizing experience and her own participation.
But her post-trauma growth is also astounding. When she got the opportunity to play piano again, she went all in, practiced all the time and sought the best education she could get. Her trauma made her music deeper and more spiritual. During an interview, she said she played the Goldberg Variations daily as a meditation exercise (I wish I could do the same!) and she finally found peace in music. She did say it out loud that Mao Zedong is a war criminal and that explains why I couldn’t find a Chinese version of this book. I read the Road to Serfdom right after this book. It’s sobering. People who want socialism should go ahead and read this book and see how people’s lives were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution from the first hand account. People like Ms. Zhu paid a very deep personal price to enlighten the free world to not delve into the socialism chaos. Fast forward today, I found the woke oppressor/victim ideology toxic. People are automatically labeled based on their race and gender. Their character and actions don’t matter. How is this different from the Red Five Categories and Black Five Categories in the Cultural Revolution? If we don’t stop this insanity by reforming our education system, the cost will be enormous. Freedom is not free. We have to fight hard for it.