Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [29]
It was much harder to find pianos for Sophia in foreign countries, and ingenuity was often required. London, of all places, proved surprisingly difficult. We were there for four days, because Jed was receiving an award for his book The Interpretation of Murder, a historical thriller based on Sigmund Freud’s one and only visit to the United States in 1909. Jed’s book was the #1 best seller in the UK for a while, and he was treated as something of a celebrity. This didn’t help me one bit on the music front. When I asked the concierge at our boutique Chelsea hotel (courtesy of Jed’s publisher) if we might find a time to practice on the piano in their library, she looked horrified, as if I’d asked to turn the hotel into a Laotian refugee camp.
“The library? Oh my goodness, no. I’m afraid not.”
Later that day, a maid evidently reported to her superiors that Lulu was practicing violin in our room, and she was asked to stop. Fortunately, through the Internet I found a place in London that rented piano practice rooms for a small hourly fee. Every day, while Jed was doing his radio and television interviews, the girls and I would march out of the hotel and take a bus to the store, which resembled a funeral parlor and was squeezed between two falafel shops. After ninety minutes of practicing, we’d take a bus back to the hotel.
We did this kind of thing all over the place. In Leuven, Belgium, we practiced in a former convent. In another city, which I no longer recall, I found a Spanish restaurant with a piano that allowed Sophia to practice between 3:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M., while the staff mopped the floor and set the tables for dinner. Occasionally, Jed got annoyed at me for making our vacations tense. “So, shall we see the Colosseum this afternoon,” he’d say sardonically, “or go to that piano store again?”
Sophia got mad at me too. She hated it when I told hotel people she was a “concert pianist.” “Don’t say that, Mommy! It’s not true and it’s embarrassing.”
I totally disagreed. “You’re a pianist, and you give concerts, Sophia. That’s makes you a concert pianist.”
Finally, all too often, Lulu and I got into tedious, escalating arguments, wasting so much time we’d miss a museum’s opening hours or have to cancel a dinner reservation.
It was worth it. Whenever we got back to New Haven, Sophia and Lulu always stunned their music teachers with the progress they’d made away from home. Shortly after a trip to Xi’an, China—where I made Sophia practice at the crack of dawn for two hours before I would allow us to go see the 8000 life-sized Terracotta Warriors commissioned by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to serve him in the afterlife—Sophia won her second concerto competition, this time playing Mozart’s Concerto no. 15 in B-flat Major. Meanwhile, Lulu was invited to play as the first violinist in all kinds of trios and quartets, and we suddenly found ourselves being wooed by other violin teachers, who were always on the lookout for young talent.
But even I have to admit that it sometimes got hard. I remember once we took a vacation to Greece with my parents. After seeing Athens (where we managed to slip in a little practicing between the Acropolis and the Temple of Poseidon), we took a small plane to the island of Crete. We arrived at our bed-and-breakfast around three in the afternoon, and my father wanted to head out immediately. He couldn’t wait to show the girls the Palace of Knossos,