Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [44]
“Dad, don’t worry!” I laughed reassuringly. “It turned out to be a lucky thing. Jed ended up going to law school instead, and he loves the law. It’s just a funny story.”
“But now you say he’s working for the government,” my father said accusingly. I could tell he had a picture in his head of Jed in a booth stamping forms at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
For the third time, I patiently explained to my parents that Jed, wanting to do something in the public interest, had left his Wall Street law firm to work as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of NewYork. “It’s really prestigious,” I explained, “and it was such a hard job to get. Jed took an eighty percent pay cut for it.”
“Eighty percent!” my mother burst out.
“Mom, it’s only for three years,” I said wearily, starting to give up. Among our Western friends, saying that Jed was taking a pay cut to do public service always brought “good-for-you’s” and pats on the back. “If nothing else, it’s important experience. Jed likes litigation. He might want to be a trial lawyer.”
“Why?” my mother asked bitterly. “Because he wanted to be an actor?” This last word she spat out, as if it carried an indelible moral stain.
It’s funny to think back on that now and how much my parents have changed since then. By the time I was thinking about Juilliard for Lulu, my parents idolized Jed. (Ironically, by then the son of one of our good family friends had become a famous actor in Hong Kong, and my parents’ view about acting had totally changed too.) They had also figured out that Juilliard was famous (“Yo-Yo Ma!”). But like Jed, they didn’t understand why I wanted Lulu to try for the Pre-College program.
“You don’t want her to be a professional violinist, do you?” my father asked, puzzled.
I didn’t have an answer, but that didn’t stop me from being stubborn. Around the time that I submitted Sophia’s CD to the piano competition, I submitted Lulu’s application to Juilliard.
As I’ve said, raising kids the Chinese way is much harder than raising them the Western way. There is simply no respite. Just as I’d finally finished working with Sophia around the clock for two months on her pieces, I had to turn right around and do the same for Lulu.
The Juilliard Pre-College audition process is set up in a way that maximizes pressure. Applicants Lulu’s age have to be prepared to play three octaves of major and minor scales and arpeggios, an étude, a slow and fast movement of a concerto, and another contrasting piece—all by memory, obviously. At the actual audition, the kids go into a room, without parents, and play before a panel of roughly five to ten Pre-College faculty members, who can ask to hear any part of any piece in any order and stop them at any time. The Pre-College violin faculty includes big names like Itzhak Perlman and the New York Philharmonic’s concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, as well as some of the most prominent teachers of young violinists in the world. We had our eye on a teacher by the name of Naoko Tanaka, who, like Mrs. Vamos, was in the highest demand, with students from all over the world clawing to get into her studio. We knew of Miss Tanaka because Kiwon had studied with her for nine years, before going off at the age of seventeen to study with Mrs. Vamos.
It was especially hard to help Lulu prepare, because she was still maintaining that she would never in a million years do the audition. She hated everything she’d heard about it from Kiwon. She knew that some of the applicants would fly in from China, South Korea, and India just for the audition, which they’d been working toward for years. Others would have auditioned before and been rejected two or three times. Still others were already taking private lessons with Pre-College faculty members.
But I hunkered down. “It will be your decision in the end, Lulu,” I lied. “We’ll get prepared for the audition, but if in the end you really don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.” “Never not try something out of fear,” I would pontificate at other times. “Everything