Just recently, my mom pulled out a tape of my piano playing and played it in the car. I was probably 7. On the tape, I first announced the title of each piece, then played the piece through once on the piano. In the “Sonatine,” I struggled to stay in tempo because I was too eager to share with the world my great discovery of the differences between major and minor scales. In the “Minuette,” I danced the steps with an ambiguous blend between overconfidence and timidity in my left hand bass notes; my right hand wanted to sing the melody so badly that kicked the left hand behind into the darkness of catch-up. Right when I started to feel a little more comfortable about playing in front of the microphone, my 4-year-old brother decided that he wanted to participate in MY performance. My annoyance with him culminated when he repeated the title of my third piece “Farewell” in barely distinguishable syllables about 10 seconds into the piece. I paused in appall: Ah! He ruined it. He ruined it all. Then I gathered myself with the maturity of an older sister and kept playing. The running notes in the minor passages sounded more tragic than ever. Right before ending the piece, he spouted another series of undistinguishable syllables. This time, knowing that his participation fortuitously matched with the progression of the music, I let it go—again—and ended with the piece with a relief and aggression.

“It sounds more natural this way,” my mother tried to ease my anger. Fine, whatever you say. What do you mean by “natural” anyways?

“The fourth song is ‘the Old Witch.’” I slipped right into the persona of the Old Witch. Rebellion was never hard to learn. I think it had already been simmering inside me for several years by that time. The fact that I played “the Old Witch” last was no coincidence. I always identified with it better than any of those pretty little classical pieces. Now, for the first time, with its dark ostinato, my left hand proudly marched like an evil woman. The right hand was now leading the march in the direction of glory that quickly overshadowed the disturbances and noises of the immediate past. For once, the hands were in synchrony and harmony. Neither my brother nor my mother existed at this point. There was no microphone, no tape recorder. There was nothing but the march of the Old Witch…

Cut, the end that snippet of my childhood. I should know that I’m listening to the tape as an artifact of a lost past now as a 26-year-old graduate student in music. How did I feel as a 7-year-old about my first recording? I really don’t know. Was I really 7? I actually don’t remember. I’d like to think that this recording indicates something about me, the present self. I’d like to think of it as an early germ of my contemplation over the idea of gender inequality as it played out between me and my brother under the regime of my parents. Gender inequality--What a cliché. The term and concept was something that I picked up mostly from watching lots of cheesy Taiwanese soap operas. To this day, I’m not sure if it was a reality or just a frame of mind—made up by my young self, as it was shaped by the society I lived in.
I tried very hard to recall all the detail of my early childhood and the effort eventually became an act of re-creating a self in the present. The past in remembrance is full of holes. To recollect the past is as much about absence as presence. The absence of a memory ends up being just as significant as its presence. To assert a meaning about my past, I fill in the holes with ideas from my present real self. The present self always wants to bring the absences into presence, bring the dark passages into light. The past is not only repressed, but oppressed too. Remembering is an act of imposition of the present self upon the past self—oh, I’m embarrassed by my totalitarian instinct now.

While the present seems to have the upperhand in the act of most remembering, sometimes the past just creeps up from behind and electrocutes the present, like a dejavu. I’d like to think that the Spice Girls is no longer in existence in my present reality. But the fact that their CD still sits comfortably in my CD collection is undeniable. The CD is another artifact of my past, the self that was desperately seeking social acceptance into the environment in which I felt like an outsider for a long time. The story of my adolescent insecurity began after my move to the US at age 12. It was a time that I’d like to forget, even now. But every attempt to forget has undesirably revived the memory. In a sense, to forget something is to forget that I remember.

What music meant to me transformed when I moved to the States. Before that, playing the piano was a mostly a chore. It was a part of life that I resisted at times because of its stringent disciplinary nature. But there were moments of inspiration—I remember that I used to always ask my mom to play “Turkish March” on our Aiwa system at home just so I could wildly dance to it. Between music and art, I always favored art as a means of self expression (I was trained in both). After the move, the social alienation that I experienced led me to self-contemplation. I was for the first time expressing my self through piano playing to my self. The rebellion against practice suddenly transformed into a submission to the discipline because it was one thing that didn’t really change in my life, and that I could claim. So the authority became a refuge.

Surely, it didn’t take long before I broke out of my private piano practice and began to seek social acceptance. I began to study the billboard charts. I wanted to find out what my peers were listening to so that I could also rush to the record store to buy the same records. I quickly came to own a collection of albums by groups such as the Four Non-Blondes, Blind Melon, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Beck, etc. Yes, I invested a lot of money and time in order to become a white-washed grunge Asian girl. By the end of my high school years, I reached my goal. I went to college with a whole new identity, then with my long hippie hair parted in the middle, always wearing a bead necklace symbolic of “ethnic hip” in the language of the white kids around me.

Thinking back, the purchase of the Spice Girls album peaked the progression in my attempt to become a part of mainstream America. I’m not sure if I want to remember all this. In some ways, I prefer the younger version of me that was much more adorable and less insidious. I guess adolescence is supposed to be conflict-laden, at least that’s what I understood (or understand?) as the American way.

Sometime during college, my piano playing became less private when I found out that there were people around me that appreciated it. I always remember the time when I played at a retirement home (as a volunteer musician for their Sunday supper), a slim elderly lady with long limbs shuffled up behind my piano bench. Before I realized it, she was dancing to my “Bei mir bist du shein,” the first song that I ever attempted to improvise on. My god, it worked! She was dancing to MY music! Then I understood music’s capacity as not just a means of self expression, but as a dialogue. I too was dancing, in my head, on the keys. Another time when I returned, I saw the lady sitting in a wheel chair not moving much. I knew, at least I hoped, that she was again dancing to my music.

Remembrance is about forgetting as much as it is about remembering. Memory seems to be recalled in fragments, but only one fragment at a time. To remember is to concentrate on the already recalled memory fragments while forgetting that there are many others forgotten. The Old Witch is fortuitously saved by my mom. Re-living the experience of becoming the Old Witch brought along many other latent memories into light: the dance to “Turkish March,” the Spice Girls CD, and the lady at the retirement home. Even though I know the reality of a coherent self cannot actually exist across temporal dimension, I am compelled to make a coherent self through the serendipitous process of memory recollection. The coherent self can only exist in the present moment.

An autobiography is a study of self through time. With the fragments recollected thus far, I have now recreated a version of my self that didn’t exist before. Just a few days ago, I was feeling like a parasite feeding on people’s creative culture-making because I felt like studying anything—especially art—inevitably freezes it in time and place. I too want to participate in culture making! Perhaps, academia is part of culture but it just doesn’t admit to be. Today, I no longer feel that my academic identity is parasitic to culture making because I have re-created a new self that believes in the potential of re-creation. Culture making begins from self (re-)making. A transgressive use of memory is self interrogation. I interrogate my past to come to the realization of the latent qualities for which I should be responsible in leading to better ends. A better me is a more actively responsible me in culture-making.