Saturday, December 19, 1998

Home for winter break. The store is exactly the same, which is the most comforting thing in the world. The oranges are in their pyramid. The man who buys lottery tickets and eggnog was in line. The cooler still hums its almost-B-flat.

But Practice Room B has changed. While I was gone, Appa fixed the back door so it closes all the way, and put in a little space heater, and a new bulb, a brighter one, and he moved the Choco Pies to the other wall so the rice sacks are all on one side, because I told him once, two years ago, that the rice is good for the sound. He didn't say anything about it. I just walked back there with my case this morning and saw it.

First-semester jury was last week. Five teachers behind a table, ten minutes, a sheet of comments afterward. Mine said: "Lovely tone. Good musical instincts. Relax the left hand." Mr. Aronov read it and said, "Yes. Relax. I've been telling you." He has been telling me. I don't know how to relax while I'm doing the thing I care about most.

Practiced: 4 hrs, in Practice Room B, in a warm room, for once

Sunday, November 22, 1998

My left forearm ached tonight, on the inside, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, after a six-hour day. A dull, warm ache, like after carrying groceries. I put a bag of frozen peas from the dorm freezer on it and it went away. Meredith says pianists get that all the time and it's nothing, you just stretch.

So I stretched. It's nothing.

Practiced: 6 hrs

Thursday, October 15, 1998

The practice rooms here are on the top two floors. Little rooms, each with a piano, a mirror, and a narrow window in the door so people can look in and see if it's taken. You sign up on a sheet in the hallway, and if you're late, you lose it, and people are waiting in the hall with their cases. I've learned to get there at 7 a.m.

Here's the thing no one tells you. Everyone here was the best one in their town. Everyone. The girl in the room next to mine was the best one in all of Oregon. The boy across the hall played with an orchestra when he was eleven. In Queens I was "the violin girl." Here I'm in the middle. I can hear it through the walls, all day long, forty people practicing at once, and half of them are better than me, and I can tell which half.

So I practice more. Six hours, most days. Mr. Aronov says quality, not quantity. I say yes, Mr. Aronov, and then I practice six hours.

I miss Practice Room B. It's too quiet here between my notes, and too loud with everybody else's. I miss the cooler.

Practiced: 6 hrs 15 min

Monday, August 31, 1998

Moved into the dorm today. The conservatory is forty minutes from our apartment door, the 7 train and then one more, and it's another planet.

Appa drove my stuff in the store van and double-parked and carried everything up himself while Umma made my bed with sheets she brought from home. My roommate is Meredith, a pianist from Houston, very tall, very nice, with a Texas accent that I could listen to all day. Umma packed a jar of her kimchi in three plastic bags inside a shopping bag, and put it in our little refrigerator, and Meredith opened the refrigerator door an hour later and said, "Oh my gosh, what IS that?" I'm going to count how many weeks until she eats some.

At the door Appa shook my hand. Like a business thing. Then he said, in Korean, "Practice, and eat," and they went back down the stairs, and I watched out the window as the van pulled away with STORE written on the side in Korean and in English. Then I sat on my bed and cried a little and then unpacked my violin first, before my clothes.

Practiced: 1 hr (in a practice room! a real one!)

Friday, June 26, 1998

Graduated. Halmoni came in her hanbok, the pale green one, and sat in the bleachers in the heat like a queen. Danny brought a Game Boy. Umma and Appa closed the store for three hours and Mr. Choi from the dry cleaner next door watched the front, which I'm told has never happened in the history of the world. I played in the orchestra for the processional, and then walked across and got my diploma, and when they said my name I heard Halmoni over everyone else.

Practiced: 2 hrs (after, in my graduation dress, in Practice Room B, because it was Friday)

Friday, May 15, 1998

Frank Sinatra died last night. Appa has played a Sinatra tape in the store all day on the boom box behind the register. Every Korean dad in the world sings "My Way" at the noraebang, the karaoke place, and my dad is no exception; at church dinners he sings it with his eyes closed and his hand on his heart. Today he just played it, over and over, and hummed along while he restacked the oranges, and when the customers came up to pay he told each one, "Very sad day." Danny said Appa is more upset about Sinatra than about Seinfeld ending. Appa doesn't know what Seinfeld is.

Practiced: 3 hrs (a little Sinatra, very quietly, for Appa, at closing)

Wednesday, April 1, 1998

The letter came on April Fool's Day, so for the first five minutes I thought it was a joke. It's not a joke. It was a thick envelope. I'm in. With a scholarship, part of the tuition. Not all.

I opened it at the kitchen table. Umma read it, and read it again, and then got up without a word and went down to the store, and Danny told me later she went into the walk-in cooler and stood there and cried, so the customers wouldn't see. That's where she goes. I didn't know that until today.

Appa read it and did the math on the back of the envelope, the part the scholarship doesn't cover. He was quiet. Then he said, "We can." Just that. "We can." Then he went to bed at nine because he has to get up at four. And this morning at the produce market, Danny says (Danny went with him, it was spring break), Appa showed the letter to all the men he buys from, the Italian guys and the Greek guy and the Dominican guys, men who've never heard of a conservatory, and they all shook his hand.

Practiced: 3 hrs. Mostly smiling.

Saturday, March 7, 1998

Audition day.

Appa drove me in, in the store van, and parked illegally, and waited. Umma kept the store and called my pager four times.

The warm-up floor: a long hallway of rooms, and every room had a violinist in it, and they were all playing the same Paganini, the same Bruch, the same scales, faster than me. A girl was warming up in the bathroom, in the handicapped stall, with the door open. A mother was massaging her son's shoulders like a boxer's. I sat in a corner and played open strings very softly and tried to breathe.

Then the room. Five people behind a long table. A woman with glasses on a chain said, "Bach, please." I played the Adagio, and my bow shook on the first chord, and then it stopped shaking. They let me play the whole thing. Then Bruch. They stopped me after the first page, which Mr. Aronov said they would, which is normal, which still feels like being hung up on. Then the Paganini, all of it. Then a man at the end said, "D-flat major, three octaves," which is the scale I hate most, and I played it, and I didn't die.

Twelve minutes. Five months of practicing, and twelve minutes.

Appa had a parking ticket on the windshield. He folded it and put it in his pocket and asked, "Good?" I said I don't know. He said, "Good," and drove us home over the bridge, and bought me a hot dog on Northern Boulevard, which he never does.

Practiced: 12 minutes that counted

Wednesday, January 28, 1998

Seollal, Korean New Year, the one day a year the store is closed.

In the morning Danny and I put on our hanbok (mine is too short in the arms now) and did sebae, the deep bow, all the way to the floor, first to Halmoni, then to Appa and Umma, and said, "Saehae bok mani badeuseyo," receive many blessings in the new year. Then they give you money in an envelope and a piece of advice. Halmoni's advice to Danny: study. Halmoni's advice to me, holding my hands and turning them over and looking at my fingertips, which have calluses: "Don't forget your mother's hands." I don't know exactly what she meant. I think I do.

Then tteokguk, rice cake soup, because when you eat it you become a year older. Danny had three bowls so he could be fifteen.

Practiced: 4 hrs, in the closed store, with the lights off in the front and nobody knocking

Sunday, January 11, 1998

Mock audition at church, for practice. After the second service the pastor announced it, and about sixty people stayed in the sanctuary to listen to me play my whole audition list straight through, like the real thing. Mr. Aronov said to do it in front of people who make me nervous. Church people make me very nervous. They know my mother.

I messed up the Paganini in the same spot as always. Nobody noticed except me and Umma, who plays piano, which nobody at church knows. Afterward the grandmothers pressed rice cakes into my hands and one of the deacons told me I should play "Amazing Grace" at the audition, because it's what the judges would want to hear. I thanked him.

Practiced: 5 hrs (mock audition included)

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