It is Sunday morning and we are driving over Fangcaodi for Aidan’s piano recital. Yang and I are discussing the one parent rule allowed for the recital. I am inclined to abide by the rules and Yang says, never mind, it’s a silly over reaction to the flu scare and we should just go. Besides, if they complain we will say we have two kids since Lydia is also in tow. When we got to Fangcaodi and made it up the four flights of stairs where the music room is (strangely the stairs remind of All Souls) someone asks who Lydia is and outside of that, no one bothers us and the rule turned out not to be a big deal for those who ignored it.

There were about 15 kids total to play and I was trying to do the math. 10 minutes per kid puts us at 2.5 hours. Trouble. I’m thinking the one parent thing wasn’t such a bad idea. But it was indeed a lot faster than that, with each kid taking only a few minutes. As we listened to kids before Aidan I was reminded of when we first got the piano. Aidan was four I think and made a comment about wanting to play. That afternoon arrangements were made by Yang’s father to have a piano delivered the next day and sure enough one was. Yang arranged for piano lessons for Aidan but he did not have much patience for it nor much finger length for it. Last year, in kindergarten he started playing more seriously with lessons at school as Lydia is now doing as well. When Aidan went to Fangcaodi in the fall one of the lunch time activities we enrolled him in was piano lessons.

So, back to the recital. All the kids stand up one by one, introduce themselves, play a tune selected for the skill level, say thank you to the audience, and sit down. The audience provides applause and digital photographs at just the right moment.  A couple of kids before Aidan played what I considered more fancy tunes than he’s been playing. Then Aidan played and he totally nailed it. Probably the best, I’ve heard him play that bit of music. Certainly better than the video below (made at home tonight) in which he’s a bit slow in the transitions. Yang said flat out that Aidan was the best of all the students and I can’t disagree because she won’t allow me to. I would say Aidan was clearly in the top 2-3 with many of the other players at Lydia’s level, also in the video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn52jD_fIQ&hl=en]

During the middle of the recital and at the end, the teachers played. Yang said this was to show their skill level. I said their level is shown in their students. After the last student played, a collective and bilingual “that’s it, we’re out of here” was heard. But alas, we had to listen through a bit more speaking from the teacher (special winter lessons at a special price) and then for the award ceremony. Aidan won the award for “most potential” which we liked as opposed to “hardest worker” or “best attendance” or “most improved”. Although, I could naturally come of with five or six less than positive meanings for “most potential”. But I kept silent, only whispering that Aidan should have been awarded “doesn’t play anything like dad”.