Chapter Six - Flipping Burgers
Despite that long previous chapter on my summer film projects, piano and grades were still the primary focus in high school.
Thankfully, I got into UCLA... barely. I was accepted into Winter Quarter, largely because of that low, below 1200, SAT score. As many of my Asian friends can attest to, this is the equivalent of getting an F on the grand scale - an "Asian F".
Heewon, however, had scheduled an audition with a faculty member there, who heard me play “Totentanz” and arranged for a full ride, fall admission scholarship.
When I got to college, I thought, how amazing! I would get to take all these GE classes with music lessons on top.
I was wrong.
I would have to take twelve units of music: piano lessons, theory, and performance or ethnomusicology, and two units of whatever general ed I could squeeze in. Additionally, there was no test to pass out of music theory, which I had taken at Colburn since I was thirteen. The icing on the cake: my new private instructor was more interested in learning “Totentanz” himself than teaching me anything.
Four weeks into my first quarter, from outside my fifth floor dorm room of Sproul Hall, I called my mother. I don’t really remember the front end of the conversation, because my ears are still damaged from the high pitch scream.
“You did what???!!!”
I told her I quit the music major, and I was giving back my scholarship. “How are you paying for school?”
Shoot, hadn’t thought of that.
“What are you majoring in?”
Nothing, of course. I was going to major in nothing and get a film degree.
“What are you gonna do with a film degree? You need to get a real job like flipping burgers.”
People never believe me when I tell them this quote. But, in fact, more than a few of the times we’ve talked about film making, she’s told me that I needed a real job. Or a minimum wage job... so I could understand what it meant to work.
I’ve often wondered to myself how practicing the piano every day for hours at a time for many years in a row didn’t qualify as work.
Ironically, just as I was abandoning the music major, I competed in the UCLA Concerto Competition. My talented colleagues from the Colburn days had all scattered to those less prestigious, rather unknown music schools like Curtis, Julliard, and the Royal Academy of Music. So clear path here.
I think the actual competition happened just before the discussion with my mother, and the results were posted three days after.
I won.
The prize was performing with the UCLA Symphony in June.
The funny thing about this was, by the time the concert rolled around, I was wholly undeclared, and nobody had any idea who I was because I had long since vacated the music building.
This girl I had a crush on who lived in my dorm, did spot me in my rented tux before the performance, right as I crashed face-first into the glass cafeteria door while trying to smile at her.
I was fine. Only left a face print.
The concert was a successful swan song.
Of course, I played “Totentanz”.
There is a lesson here. You’ll find as you read on that I came back to piano as an adult, but only because I loved it and was passionate about it. I encourage you to do what makes you feel and what you’re excited about in the arts or in music or simply in creativity.
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