Chapter 4: What the Erhu Knows
Her name was Lin Suyin, and she was furious at her right hand.
Not in the dramatic way — not slamming things or muttering curses. Lin Suyin expressed frustration the way she did most things: quietly, precisely, repeatedly. She had been playing the same eight bars of the same piece since six in the morning, and it was now past seven, and the passage still did not sound the way it sounded in her head.
The room she practiced in was a converted storage space at the back of her family's tea shop, barely large enough for a chair and a music stand. Boxes of Longjing and Biluochun lined the walls, and the air always carried the faint green sweetness of dried leaves. Lin Suyin had practiced here since she was seven years old. She found the smell steadying.
She raised her bow again.
The passage was technically achievable — she knew that, because she had achieved it in practice sessions where no one was watching and her mind had gone quiet enough to get out of her own way. The problem was that quiet mind was not currently available. She was thinking about the bow pressure. She was thinking about the upcoming conservatory audition. She was thinking about the fact that she could hear, in the sound she was making, a kind of grasping — a quality of effortful wanting — that she loathed in her own playing.
The music should breathe, her first teacher had told her. You hold it and it dies.
She knew this. She could not stop doing the opposite.
She played the passage again. It came out tense and technically proficient and entirely wrong.
She lowered the bow. Pressed her eyes closed. Breathed.
From somewhere in the tea shop, she heard her grandmother moving — the soft particular shuffle of a very old woman who had spent sixty years on these same floors and knew every inch of them. Then her grandmother's voice, unhurried: 'Suyin. Breakfast first. The music is still here after.'
Lin Suyin opened her eyes.
"Two more minutes, Nai Nai."
Silence. Then the shuffle retreating, which was her grandmother's way of communicating that she disagreed but would not argue about it.
She put the bow down, went to have breakfast, and tried not to think about the conservatory audition, which was in six weeks.
* * *
She heard him before she saw him.
Or rather: she heard nothing, and then became aware that the silence had changed.
Lin Suyin was on her way through the school's side garden — a route she took because it was quieter than the main path and had old stones that she liked — when she stopped walking without quite knowing why. The garden was empty in the early morning. Stone benches, a small old plum tree that had survived three renovation projects through sheer stubbornness, and the sound of the city over the walls like a familiar song.
Someone was sitting on the far bench.
A boy. She recognized him faintly — same year, she thought, the one who played chess. He had a notebook open on his knee but he wasn't writing in it. He was sitting with his head tilted slightly back, eyes half-closed, and he appeared to be listening to something that she could not identify.
He looked, she thought, like a person who had all the time in the world.
She was about to continue past when he spoke, without looking at her:
"Your second finger."
Lin Suyin stopped.
"I'm sorry?"
"When you play erhu." He looked at her now — calm eyes, no particular expression. Not challenging. Just stating something that appeared obvious to him. "Your second finger is angled inward on the bow. It creates tension that runs up your wrist and into your shoulder. That's why the passage sounds like it's straining."
The silence that followed was very loud.
"You heard me playing this morning?" Her voice was careful.
"From the street. Only for a moment — I was passing." He paused. "I wasn't trying to evaluate your playing. I just noticed it the way you notice a stuck door. Something in the alignment preventing what wants to happen."
Lin Suyin looked at him for a long moment. She was a private person about her music and she did not particularly appreciate unsolicited technical feedback. She was about to say something cool and final about it when she realized, with a kind of helpless precision, that he was correct.
'How do you fix it?' she heard herself ask.
He tilted his head, as if the question required thought. 'You already know how. You've played it correctly before — you mentioned it to yourself in your mind while you were frustrated this morning.' He paused. 'Or, I assume you have. The mistake is rarely unknown. It's the knowing-while-doing that's hard.'
"You can't know what I thought to myself."
"No," he agreed. "I'm making an inference based on the pattern. When someone practices the same passage that many times in a row, they usually know what's wrong. They're practicing the knowing, not the technique."
She sat down on the opposite bench. She was not sure why. Maybe because her feet were cold and the morning was cold and this was, if nothing else, a more interesting conversation than she'd expected to be having before first period.
"So what do I do."
"Stop trying to hear the mistake while you're making it," he said. "Play something entirely different for ten minutes. Something you've known since you were a child, something that lives in your hands without thinking. Let your right hand remember what it knows. Then come back to the hard passage from that place."
Lin Suyin thought about it. It was simple advice. She had a feeling it would work, which was slightly annoying because she had been struggling with this passage for three weeks and the solution was apparently to stop struggling with it.
"Why does that work?" she asked.
He seemed pleased by the question — genuinely, not condescendingly. 'Because the hand that plays since childhood is connected to a different part of you than the hand that performs for auditions. One is trying to get somewhere. The other just is somewhere. You need the second one to teach the first one.
"Do you play?"
"I used to play many things." He said it easily, without elaboration. "I'm Wei Liang."
"I know who you are. Chess."
"Mostly."
She stood. The bell for first period would ring in three minutes. 'Thank you,' she said, with her usual precision — neither warm nor cold, just accurate.
"Tell me if it helps," he said, and went back to his notebook, and she had the feeling that she would.