Steinway and Son
Malcolm Chang


 
My father played the piano - enthusiastically, if not very well. His right hand would pick out a melody in any key, while his left would pound away at C, G, or F major chords - the only ones he had memorized - no matter how jarring the sound. Whatever the song, tempo or key, he randomly alternated the same three chords with abandon, all in the same ¾ waltz signature.  No fancy black key sharps or flats for him.  No dwelling on the melancholy of a minor chord, or searching for the wistfulness of a 7th, or God forbid, the complexity of an augmented 5th. No reason to stray into 4/4 common time – that way lay rock or blues. 

Dad grew up in the big band era – Glen Miller and Benny Goodman, the king of swing.  He had a fondness for crooners like Bing Crosby and Perry Como. He had a special affinity for the romantic balladeer Matt Monro, the London bus driver with the golden voice. A regular bloke who could sing like Frank Sinatra allowed Dad to dream about transcending class and circumstance.

His all-time favorite song was Nat King Cole’s “Fascination”, to which he waltzed with my mother, whenever it was played.  He tried to replicate it on the piano, too, enjoying the simple boom cha-cha rhythm. 1-2-3. 1-2-3. The consistent simplicity of the left hand, with its reliable triple time, left him free to concentrate on the melody and occasionally, to croon along:

It was fascination, I know
And it may have ended right then at the start
Just a passing glance
Just a brief romance
And I might have gone on my way empty hearted…
 
Dad doggedly butchered his way through the classic, blithely skipping over the sour notes and mismatched chords, as my mother listened indulgently.  He always smiled when he played, even as his brow furrowed in concentration, lost in the pleasure of making that sweet, discordant music— happy to create even a poor facsimile of the tunes he loved so well. 
 
Dad’s family bounced around from one South African ghetto township (known as a “location”) to another – from Prospect Township to George Goch, Newclare to Martindale, and finally ending up in Sophiatown—the Harlem of Johannesburg. Each time the black populace was evicted to make way for white suburbs, the peripatetic Chinese and Indian shopkeepers followed their customer base, like egrets trailing great migratory herds.
 
He bought the piano when he was eighteen and working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in the Orange Grove Hotel, a swanky establishment in the White part of Johannesburg. It was one of many jobs that he had as a teenager. Like many of his generation, he left elementary school to work in the family’s "general store," a small room with a few shelves of canned foods and dry goods.  Sometimes he went on delivery runs with his father on a horse drawn cart, dropping off Chinese herbal remedies and home-made lap cheong sausage. 
 
He came of age during the 1930’s and 40’s, when everybody fancied themselves as the next Tommy Dorsey. He formed a band called the Marigolds, playing the drums while his younger brother Raymond played the clarinet. They played dances dressed in white tuxedos like the Count Basie Orchestra. When his friends also imagined themselves behind the wheel of a Chevy Bel-Air convertible, Dad dreamed of owning a Steinway, the best piano in the world.

“What made you choose a piano?” I asked him once, “instead of a guitar or a saxophone.
Wouldn’t it be easier to carry around?”

“Because,” he said, in an earnest ‘this is a life lesson, you should write it down’ tone of voice, “if you can play the piano, you can play any instrument. It may only have six strings while the piano has eighty-eight keys, but the notes are exactly the same.  That’s the beauty of it! Now go and practice. Remember…”

“I know, Dad,” I said, with a laugh. “Practice makes perfect.”
 
He found a second-hand upright Steinway in reasonable condition and paid eight pounds a month for two years - a substantial financial investment when you consider that the monthly rental payments on their shop and living quarters were about sixteen pounds. But his musical aspirations were no match for the realities of a hardscrabble life in the townships, and he never found the time or money for lessons. He sometimes spoke about his disappointment.

“See these hands?” he said, showing me his rough, scarred knuckles and his worn palms. “These hands worked to buy that piano over there, but they could never play it. That’s why I want you to practice. I never had the chance to play, but you do.”
 
After the newly installed National Party government mandated the destruction of Sophiatown, its inner-city proximity deemed too great a threat to White suburbia, he moved to Lady Selborne – the last mixed-race location in Pretoria. He opened his own general store on Stephen Street, next to Abramjee, the Achaar man. The Steinway, his most valuable possession, went with him. But life, as it does, got in the way, and the long hours establishing a new business and his nascent courtship of my mother relegated piano playing to an afterthought. In the cramped and cluttered home behind the shop, it succumbed to the fate of all horizontal surfaces, and became just another shelf. By the time I was born, it had been relegated to the far wall of our sitting room, an ignominious repository for knick-knacks, mail, and old newspapers. The gold lettering proudly proclaiming “Steinway and Sons” had faded into the rich darkness of the cherry wood. The ivory keys, yellow with age, were chipped and broken. If you weren’t careful, you could easily cut a finger playing an arpeggio. I remember my Ah ma, dad’s mom, who ran the house while my parents looked after the shop, hearing me opening the piano lid and coming over to watch me play.

“You know why the keys are chipped?” she said, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Unh-uh,” I said not looking up.

“It’s because they were bitten by rats.”

That stopped me. “No they weren’t,” I said rolling my eyes.

“S’true,”, she said. “Haven’t you heard them in the store room?”

I had heard them in the storeroom, whose door I always ran rather than walked past because it was dark and scary.

“Well,” she went on “at night they come out looking for food. And they find the jam from your fingers that you left behind on the piano.”

I sheepishly wiped my hands on my pants.

“See,” she said triumphantly, “that’s why you have to wash your hands before playing, I keep telling you, but you don’t listen.”

As a young child, I would bang on the piano whenever I was bored, playing a version of “chopsticks” on the black keys using only my knuckles and a closed fist.  Sometimes, I experimented by playing the two notes with similar intervals within each octave, up and down the piano, over and over again, until Ah ma begged me to stop. 

“I’m trying to nap,” she told me from her reclining chair.  “Hush now.”
 
I was sent to a private boarding school at the age of five, as Chinese were not allowed to attend White government schools. My parents enrolled me in piano lessons which I was supposed to attend every Thursday at 4 pm. Unfortunately, no one had thought to provide me with a watch or any way with which to tell the time, I wandered the school grounds blissfully unaware of the time or even day of my lesson, until the piano teacher dispatched some older boy to track me down and drag me to my appointment. She was an old school martinet, rapping knuckles with a wooden ruler for failing to maintain a proper bridge, insisting on endless scales, impatiently tapping on the music sheet, and occasionally my head, with her pencil.  Playing the piano became as joyless as a visit to the dentist, and I “missed” more and more lessons, hiding out in the library or the farthest reaches of the school grounds, until eventually, she stopped sending out the search parties.
 
Once boarding school ended, my father decided that we should attend lessons together every Monday night.  The teacher was a stout Afrikaner lady called Mrs. Van Rensburg, who reminded me of another of my dad’s favorite musicians - Mrs. Mills, the jovial Pub sing-along pianist from the same label as the Beatles.  She recorded nearly forty albums over the course of her unlikely career, many of which contained the word “party” (As in “Mrs. Mills’ party!”, “It’s Party Time!”, and “Let’s have another party!”)  Dad and I started off learning middle of the road popular music of the time, as well as simple classics, like Edelweiss (me) and Love is Blue (Dad). Later, when I moved on to Beethoven, Dad stuck with Nat King Cole. I was an indifferent student. Mrs. Van Rensburg would turn the pages of the music sheet with her plump fingers and admonish me to “Look on the book!”  I dutifully made a show of reading the music while my fingers wandered over the keyboard, but it was no use – I could read the music (slowly) or I could play the tune (from memory), but I couldn’t do both at the same time.   I had learned to play by ear before ever setting eyes on written notes, and my brain resisted making that connection between the musical note on the page and the finger placement on the keyboard. My father suffered from the same mental block. But he relied even more on memorized play, hence the affinity for his holy trinity of favorite chords.  I never progressed beyond Beethoven’s simplest melodies - the “Moonlight” Sonata and Für Elise, or Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca.  Dad would have loved me to continue, perhaps one day to play pieces he considered the apex of virtuosity—Chopin’s Minute Waltz, or the Flight of the Bumblebee—my hands a blur, flying up and down the keyboard. But it was not to be.  The complex hyper speed fingering of Rimsky-Korsakov would remain an impossible dream.   I came to realize that Dad and I had something in common with a lot of people – that we all have a little bit of Mozart in us, but a lot of Salieri - blessed with the ability to recognize genius but cursed with the inability to create great art ourselves.
 
For some variety from the classics, Dad asked me to learn a Mrs. Mills song – a version of Que Sera Sera. I was puzzled that even though I was playing the exact notes as they appeared on the page, the music lacked a certain something.

“It doesn’t sound the same,” I said. 

“That’s because she doesn’t only play the notes on the sheet music,” he replied.  “It’s the ‘filling in’ that gives it life.” By that he meant the extemporaneous trills and flourishes that Mrs. Mills added to the melody.  There was music in the space between the notes, like unnamed colors that existed within the spectrum. 

“How do I do that?” I asked, “it’s not written down on the music sheet. How can I learn to play something that isn’t even there?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it one day,” he smiled. “Just keep playing.”
 
One summer we took a break from lessons and then I went to high school, and we never went back.  Still, Dad loved to hear me tinker on the piano at home, reproducing something I had heard on the radio, or found in a pirated music sheet from Hong Kong.  Sometimes, I would remove the wooden boards in the front of the piano to make it louder or to strum the strings directly with my fingers to recreate the creepy music I had heard in The Exorcist.  I don’t think Dad was disappointed that I stopped formal lessons. In fact, he was inordinately proud that notwithstanding my mediocre piano playing, I had achieved so much of what he had been denied. As long as I gave expression to some kind of right brain endeavor, he was happy.  He himself, notwithstanding his limited prowess on the piano, had the soul of an artist.  As a minimally educated blue collar worker, dad worked pedestrian jobs all his life to put food on the table.  He had been a waiter, a delivery boy, a travelling salesman and a shopkeeper.  When the government finally demolished Lady Selborne as well, he gave up the shop and went to work for the U.S. Information Service. My mother had also left school after the 10th grade to help in her family store and had been a clerical worker and a secretary. It was a struggle that Dad and Mom were determined would not befall their children, and they recognized that music and art were markers of middle class and therefore indispensable to our education and our journey of upward mobility.
 
Though his own musical aspirations were thwarted, Dad found other outlets for artistic expression.  He became a photographer of some note, always in demand for weddings and portraits, and exhibiting prints in international salons.  He was a self-taught painter, working mainly in oils in an impressionist style.  His favorite piece was a painting of my mother, which he named “A Portrait of My Love”, after the Matt Monro ballad. 

It would take I know, a Michelangelo 
And he would need the glow of dawn that paints the sky above, 
To try and paint a portrait of my love
 
Later, he tried his hand at calligraphy and flower pressing.  Jack of all trades, he said, and master of none. But he considered this an accomplishment to be proud of, rather than a dilettantish slight.
 
When I got married and moved into my own apartment in Johannesburg, Dad insisted that I take the piano.  For my grandchildren, he said, hopeful that the next generation would fulfill the dream.  Later, I emigrated, and there was no question that the Steinway would make the journey too.  The movers came a week before and created a special crate on site.  The piano endured a journey first to Toronto, then Chicago and finally Irvine, a city fifty miles south of Los Angeles.  It emerged slightly battered, with a pair of broken wheels and another dead key but mostly intact, cursed at by several teams of movers in three different countries.  Both of my children learned to play.  Neither one was a prodigy, nor did they continue piano instruction beyond elementary school, although they both also played various instruments - viola, clarinet, saxophone and guitar. Perhaps Dad was right – if you can play the piano, you can play any instrument.  Dad visited us in California and heard my son (then just six) play on the Steinway he had bought almost fifty years earlier. He didn’t play the Rach III, or even an etude by Chopin. He played a simplified rendition of “Turkey in the Straw”. Dad smiled through the entire performance, missed notes and all, with barely contained glee and tears in his eyes.
 
Dad discovered golf late in life and it quickly became his new passion.  He even joined the prestigious Irene Country Club in the Eastern suburbs of Pretoria, becoming the first Chinese member in its history. He played golf about as well as he played the piano, which is to say with more gusto than skill, but made many friends amongst the older members. They formed a group that they defiantly called “The Coffin Dodgers” and met regularly every Wednesday, even as they sadly watched their numbers dwindle over the years, grateful for each moment that they could still be present to raise a glass in a missing friend’s memory.  He had come to love the game and the companionship so much, in such a short time, that he jokingly declared that when his time came, he would like to die on a golf course. The Gods, in their infinite mercy, granted him this final wish between the 9th and 10th holes at Irene.  He had just recorded the best 9-hole score of his life.  The very fact that I can utter these words—He died at the Irene Country Club while playing a round of golf—is a testament to how far the grade school dropout and lap cheong delivery boy had come.
 
We moved from California to New York after the kids grew up and moved away. Given the size of East Coast apartments, we knew we couldn’t take the piano, so we gave it to a family friend with young children and saw it one last time in their playroom, kids jostling for their turn to play. It fit right in.
 
The Steinway’s long, roundabout journey began in Germany, where it was handcrafted in 1938.  It found its way to South Africa and traveled to Canada and then on to California. Had it made one last trip with us, it would have ended up in New York City, the home of Steinway and Sons, the company founded in 1853 in Manhattan.  I went on a tour of the factory in Astoria, Queens where the pianos are still made. The attention to detail, quality, and deep sense of history behind the brand almost made me regret leaving it behind. How perfect it would have been for the instrument to come ‘home’.  It would have been a fitting end to a wonderful story. But life is messy like that. Our stories are not perfect arcs. The memories that resided in its rich tone, in its warm dark wood with its faded lettering, in its imperfect condition, seemed too important to let it go. It could have been a family heirloom, passed on to generations yet unborn.  It was not to be, but my father would have understood. Dad and the Steinway piano are no longer with us, but they left us the legacy of these lessons—that there is music in the space between the notes, and that we can find joy in playing enthusiastically, if not very well.










​

About the Author: Malcolm Chang is a third generation Chinese South African now living in New York.

This story is one in a series of memoirs about his experience growing up Chinese
during the Apartheid era in South Africa, with all of the confusion and conflict that it
entailed. His first short story, "The Cruelty of Children", was published in the
Newtown Literary Journal and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

​He is currently working on a novel based on the life of the man who assassinated the
South African Prime Minister in 1966.

---