"Turn off TV," she called from the

"Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't
have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before,
and look what happened she was the stupid one.
She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she said
once again, louder.
"I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius."
She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.
"No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been
inside me all along.
"No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She
was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under
my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was
heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying.
"You want me to be something that I'm not!" I sobbed. " I'll never be the kind of daughter you want me to
be!"
"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow
their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"
"Then I wish I weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got
scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this
awful side of me had surfaced, at last.
"Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly.
And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I
remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been
born!" I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them."
It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack,
and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle,
lifeless.
It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many
times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't
become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.
Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.
And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward
at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So
I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.
And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? For
after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped. The lid to the
piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.
So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not
played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed. "Are you
sure?" I asked shyly. "I mean, won't you and Dad miss it?" "No, this your piano," she said firmly. "Always
your piano. You only one can play."
"Well, I probably can't play anymore," I said. "It's been years." "You pick up fast," my mother said, as if
she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I
couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if
announcing a fact that could never be disproved. "Take it," she said.
But I didn't at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, every time I saw it in my
parents' living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny
trophy that I had won back.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely
sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been bgetting things in order for
my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof
boxes. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk
against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me.