Her skinny fingers flash across the black wooden fingerboard like tree limbs flailing in a storm. She's so frail and waifish. She still sleeps w/ her bunny doll. But @ certain moments in the song, her body bucks w/ confidence, chin jutting out with bravado. She's a maestro, a child prodigy, people say. + she's only 11 years old.
Most kids do their 6th grade English project on dinosaurs, or Britney Spears. She did hers on violin master Jascha Heifetz. She gleefully shows me a Youtube clip of him playing Paganini's Caprice #24.
http://www.youtube.com/wat
So what makes him so great? Well, his intonation... What's that? I ask. Oh, that's the accuracy of pitch when you… + I can't catch the rest. She's so comfortable talking technical specifics, like a child mechanic explaining the valves in my car engine.
Her parents urge her to play 4 us, and after some prodding, she obliges. It's a piece from the opera Carmen. Her intonation is a little off, I notice. She just started learning it, her parents apologize to me. For long concertos, it usually takes her 2 months to learn, and 1 month to perfect for performance level.
Play another one, her parents say. She asks 4 the sheet music. You forgot it already? They sound annoyed. So she starts to play, without the music.
2 hours of practice @ a time is all her fragile nerves can handle. Another famous maestro played 14 hours a day. How proud her parents would be if she could play that much.
She only placed 3rd @ the prestigious Concord violin musical competition in Chicago. That's nice. 1st place would've been nicer. After all, her uncle IS a world-famous baritone for the most prestigious symphonic orchestra in Korea. Her cousin IS an up + coming pop star. Her teachers see potential in her. Her parents have big dreams for her.
But what she really wants is to be able to play outside with her friends. Watch TV. Go shopping. Instead, each afternoon, she flips the cover of the custom-built floor socket, plugs in the light attached to her professional stand. + practices. On occasion, she ruefully steals a glance outside @ the boys playin ice hockey out on the lake.
She broke down last summer. She + her mom went to an Adventist retreat center in Korea to recoup. A week of Bible study + prayer later, her daughter apologized first, crying, saying that she'd be more obedient. Later, her mom declared to the group, I'll never force my daughter to play violin again! Her daughter beamed. For 2 months, she ran through the lily fields, capturing frogs by the creek, letting her hair run wild. She was free!
But that was last summer. Her dad came to pick them up @ the airport. + things went back to normal. Over the last 6 months, her smile's slowly faded. Every Saturday is another fight. Daddy is warming up the car for the 5, sometimes 6 or 7 hour drive to Chicago for the lesson w/ a Jewish maestro @ Northwestern University. + the long, silent drive back.
But oh how she loves Daddy still! mother and daughter decided to get baptized together. Secretly, because Daddy would forbid it. The night before, she cried all nite. What about Daddy? oh he'll come around, her mom said then. He still hasn't.
As we talk tonight, he seems so laid-back, jolly. No overt Kim Jong Il tendencies. I know he grew up dirt poor, as most of our Korean parents did. The famine of 53, when all the weeds + tree bark were stripped clean by a starving country. He immigrated to the States w/ a few bucks in his pocket, graduated from U of Illionois, and built a successful accounting firm. + his daughter's gonna have all the opportunities 4 success that he never had.
It might be hard now, he tells me, but in a few years she'll be in high school + she'll be motivated to practice 4 herself. Really? Where will his daughter be 5 years from now?
A prodigy concertmaster @ the NY Philharmonic?
Estranged from her parents?
In the church?
Suicidal?
It looks hopeless now. I have to believe, though, that the God who randomly worked it out 4 me to meet these people, is the same God who is gonna find some way to reach them, guide them, closer to Him.
I'm sitting here typing this story in the guestroom, as the little violin maestro is sleeping with her bunny doll in her room next door.
"I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for." (Jeremiah 29:11)
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