Hye-Seon Sin rocks gently on a porch settee, reflecting on the difficult and lonely path that brought her from Korea to this unlikely place, a tree-lined residential street in Kalamazoo, Mich., and on the turning point that lies immediately ahead in her young life.
She wears faded jeans and a trendy American-style top with an Asian dragon on the front, a kind of fashion statement about the cultural crosscurrents she has been navigating recently. Hye-Seon has spent nearly all of her 18 years developing her extraordinary musical talent, leaving her family in Korea four years ago to study piano in the United States under circumstances that would have taxed the emotional resources of someone twice her age: living alone in New York and Kalamazoo, struggling with a foreign language and doggedly pursuing a classical performance career that is far from guaranteed. She has no regrets. “It was a good experience to come here and know American people and how they’re living,” she says.
It is a cool June evening and she is at the home of a fellow piano student for a farewell dinner. The next morning she will fly to New York and look for an apartment. Her mother, Sang-Hi, who came from Korea to oversee the next set of big decisions in her daughter’s life, will stay to pack up her things. Hye-Seon has been accepted at the prestigious Mannes College of Music, a conservatory of 300 students, the next big step toward realizing her dream. She is one of those countless gifted youngsters, many of them from Asia, who come to America and willingly sacrifice childhood for hours of practice and recitals and competitions, daring the long odds against a solo career.
“Piano playing . . . is difficult work,” pianist Russell Sherman writes in “Piano Pieces,” a collection of essays. “It is lonely, repetitious, frustrating and the rewards are ephemeral.”
Yet the Hye-Seons of the world persist, driven by their talent and deep love of the music. In Kalamazoo, Hye-Seon found heartache and hope and freedom. She learned about a different culture and isolation and, throughout, about herself.
When Sang-Hi Seo was pregnant with Hye-Seon (pronounced HAY-Sun), she dreamt about music. Sang-Hi, a petite woman with a light voice that jumps octaves in mid-sentence, studied music in college and was a mezzo-soprano soloist. “I prayed to make her good and with strong fingers to play the piano,” says Sang-Hi, who, as is customary in Korea, kept her maiden name.
Hye-Seon was born in Seoul, but spent most of her childhood in Taegu, the country’s third-largest city. At 1 year old, she would sit at the piano and crash her hands along the keys. “My mother says I played by myself for hours like that,” she recalls. At 3 years old, she began playing melodies, and a year later she was practicing two hours a day. A photo Hye-Seon keeps on her dresser is of her first recital at age 4. She looks serene in a puffy sherbet-yellow dress with flowers in her hair and drop earrings.
Each year in grade school, Hye-Seon completed a form. One question asked: “What is your future?” Year after year, she answered: “Pianist.” On one form, Hye-Seon’s father, a physician, wrote that his daughter’s character was “light and clear.” She entered piano competitions, and at age 11 played her first solo concert with an orchestra.
Despite her exceptional talent, Hye-Seon was not unique among young Koreans, whose families encourage musicianship at the earliest possible age. “After the Korean War, families used to buy a piano before they would a refrigerator,” says Yong Hi Moon, a Michigan State University piano professor who left Korea at 17 to study abroad. Religion is one reason the piano is emphasized throughout Korea: Parents want their children to accompany the hymns at church, Moon says. Also, she notes, “Koreans really have the temperament of wanting to be a star.”
It is that drive that led Hye-Seon to study in America. Western music was not seriously studied in Korea until relatively recently, so the national experience with the great composers of the 20th Century, for example, is limited. For aspiring Korean artists, the obvious path to a performance career is to go abroad.
Hye-Seon announced to her mother one day that she wanted to go to America before she was 16 to study piano. “I felt I should go there fast,” Hye-Seon says, and her parents readily agreed. She joined scores of other foreign students–from Poland, Russia, Japan and elsewhere–who each year fill the rosters of performing-arts high schools.
Arriving in New York in the fall of 1996, she moved in with a family she had met through her elementary school teacher in Korea. She stayed just five days; they had no piano. She moved in with another family, who charged her $1,700 a month for rent. “We knew it was too much money to pay,” she says. She stayed there about six weeks.
“Me and my mom never felt I should live by myself. That’s why I tried with those families,” Hye-Soon recalls, but she finally decided to live alone. Her mother signed the rental agreement for an apartment in Queens, in a building full of musicians who wouldn’t mind if she practiced a lot. Sang-Hi says she did not worry about her daughter living alone in New York. “Hye-Seon has a strong mind and her knowledge is higher than others, so I didn’t worry.”
She attended the Professional Children’s School and studied at the Manhattan School of Music. Many of the students at her private high school were Korean, which disappointed Hye-Seon and her mother. Why move thousands of miles from home to live in a microcosm of Korean culture? New York City, they decided, was not America. The Midwest was America.
“She came to Michigan to go to a real American high school,” says her mother. Hye -Seon’s fellow students were puzzled by the move. “My friends, they all say, `Why go to there, to Michigan? You’re crazy.’ “
Indeed, why pick Kalamazoo as a stop along the path to potential stardom? While the town hosts a major music festival and has a state university and liberal arts college that both have strong piano faculties, it is hardly the nation’s hub for classical music training. A Korean connection, however tenuous, influenced Hye-Seon’s decision: A former neighbor in Korea had moved there.
In Kalamazoo, Hye-Seon quickly discovered that the real America can be a lonely place for a high school student with limited English. The Catholic school she attended, which had just five Asian students, was far different from the professional children’s school in New York, where homework was tailored for students who speak English as a second language. In New York, she frequented Korean neighborhood eateries and had Korean friends. In Kalamazoo, she ate fast food, often by herself. Her contact with Korean culture was mainly through daily talks on the phone with her mother, e-mails with friends back home and soap-opera videos she checked out from the Korean market in town.
“I have one friend,” she told me when I met her last year after she had just finished a difficult junior year. “She has no friends; she is really shy. I’m not really a quiet person, but I changed. Now I’m quiet. In Korea, people are really kind to foreigners, but here people think, `I’m better than you.’ I don’t know why,” she said solemnly, blinking through long black bangs.
She lived on her own in a powder-blue house in need of a paint job. Her Steinway grand piano looked somewhat lost in the dingy living room, like a duchess who finds herself bunking in steerage. There was a hastily purchased pine table, a mirror, television, VCR and a wall hanging that Hye-Seon’s sister made in a 2nd-grade school project. In artful Korean lettering, it says, roughly translated, “Your spirit is more important than your head.”
As she sank into isolation, her spirit flagged. The language barrier caused her to flounder in her studies and limited her social life. She couldn’t express herself well, and she couldn’t follow the fast clip of Americanese. Her piano teacher, an associate professor at Western Michigan University, was too busy to give her young student special attention, and the teacher’s studio was filled with university students, not high schoolers who might befriend Hye-Seon. She began missing weeks of school, sleeping late and complaining of stomach pains and headaches. Worst of all, she didn’t practice her piano.
“I lost my confidence,” Hye-Seon recalls. “I didn’t have any happiness for music. I was really sick because I was depressed.”
Her teacher, Silvia Roederer, says, “She was a very gifted student. (But) there were a lot of things in her life that prevented her from having the space and concentration to practice well. It was sort of a spiral going downhill.”
She would notice an improvement in her student when her mother visited from Korea. “A parent taking care of her would have relieved her of many, many things she had to busy herself with, day-to-day things,” says Roederer. That view was echoed by another professor, who auditioned Hye-Seon for college enrollment. If Hye-Seon had been admitted, the professor said, “I would have sat the mother down right away and told her what she should have and shouldn’t have done. I’ve never seen anyone who would leave a child like that. Hye-Seon is lost.”
Hye-Seon is aware of these sentiments, but she stands by the decisions that put her on her own in a strange country without close family support. “If music makes me happier, then it’s OK without my mom,” she says. During a visit to her daughter in Kalamazoo, Sang-Hi says it is up to Hye-Seon whether she stays in the U.S. “She says that this is my way,” Hye-Seon says, translating for her mother. “If I live my life the way I’m supposed to, that is what I must do.”
After a year, Roederer went on sabbatical and sent Hye-Seon to study with Jill Christian, a teacher at Kalamazoo College. During one of Sang-Hi’s visits, Christian told the mother that her daughter “would not reach her personal potential until she got her personal life straightened out.”
“A well-adjusted teenager with a home, family and friends is in a better position to grow musically. Hye-Seon definitely needed a support system,” says Christian, recalling the long tradition of teachers’ taking in talented students to help them along. Christian took Hye-Seon to the local art fair and invited her to visit on a weekend so she wouldn’t “sit in her house all alone on a beautiful summer day.”
That summer day last year may have marked a turning point for Hye-Seon, the bottom of her emotional and artistic slump: She found the neighbor’s trampoline.
“She quietly left the house; I didn’t even know she’d gone, and when I looked out the front window, there she was jumping up and down like a kid,” says Christian. “She was just laughing and smiling. And jumping higher and higher. Her shoes were off and her hair was flying all over and the neighbor kids came around and they held hands and jumped. She did that for at least a half-hour. I’d never heard her laugh before that.”
Hye-Seon finally began to meet the “real Americans” she’d come to the Midwest to find. She went to piano camp in Indiana for three weeks and socialized with Korean-American musicians. Through the regular repertoire classes in Christian’s studio, in which peers play for one another, Hye-Seon met other high schoolers who loved music. Preparing for college auditions motivated her to practice and enter competitions. She joined the choir at school, and on her birthday last November, a group of friends surprised her with a celebratory dinner.
Several townspeople also offered to help. A Korean family insisted she leave her apartment and come live with them, but it was difficult to practice with young children around, and she soon moved out. Another Korean woman, Sun-O Mitchell, drove Hye-Seon to piano lessons and the grocery store each week.
The Boucher family, who live just a few blocks from Hye-Seon, helped with typing papers and homework assignments, provided dinner and rides, and even mowed her lawn after the grass grew so high that a neighbor complained and she risked being cited by the city. A daughter, Mariah Boucher, also studies with Christian; she met Hye-Seon at a recital and the two began chattering away, each happy to find a musical peer.
“If I have friends, I’m really happy here,” Hye-Seon says, then laughs at herself. “I’m simple.”
As her mood improved, so did her music. Last winter, Christian called Hye-Seon to tell her she’d won a regional competition and would perform with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. Hye-Seon was disbelieving. She called Christian back 10 minutes later. “I just want to make sure,” she said. “I won? This is the contest you play with an orchestra, and I won?”
As she resumed playing recitals and competitions, Hye-Seon had to face down the demons of public performing–the anxiety, the memory slips, the pressure. And she was out of practice.
One of her first performances was early last winter at the Yamaha piano competition for high school students held at Hope College’s chapel in Holland, Mich. Wearing a snug-fitting black blouse with ruffles, a long straight skirt and red, open-toed heels, Hye-Seon was the first competitor to walk up to the stage and seat herself at the grand piano. She fidgeted nervously with the piano bench, her hair, her glasses. She hadn’t slept most of the night due to anxiety and a cold.
She rubbed her hands together, then pounded them down decisively on the opening chord of the G Minor Chopin Ballade. After several minutes, the judges stopped her playing and requested to hear her Bach selection. When she finished the demanding piece, Hye-Seon sighed audibly. “Could we have the Grieg now?” asked one of the judges. “Take a deep breath.”
Hye-Seon hit the opening cadenza with flair and might. The Grieg concerto rolls out with a sweeping, powerful introduction, followed by a theme of lyrical beauty. Hye-Seon’s hands, white flashes on the dimly-lit stage, flew over the keys, crashing bass chords and fingering the intricate arpeggios. She concluded with a segment of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, with its treble sequences that bubble and ripple.
Music, dense and ebullient, transformed the vast cave of the chapel, brightening its shadowy recesses, warming the chilled space to life. It was easy then to understand why Hye-Seon craved this as nourishment, why she let it direct her course in life. When the half-hour audition was over, Hye-Seon left the stage soundlessly, without a trace of emotion. Then, as she entered a back pew, she put her head in her hands and began to cry. “I played bad, I played really bad,” she said. There was no consoling her.
Hours later, the competitors and their parents gathered to hear the verdict of the three judges. Two competitors laughed and talked together. Hye-Seon watched them from a distance. “They are so happy,” she said, sounding puzzled. The pair were named the winner and runner-up.
Yong Hi Moon, the MSU professor, was a judge at the Yamaha competition and was impressed with Hye-Seon, but later expressed reservations after hearing her at a private audition. “When I heard her in the Yamaha, I thought she was musical. I thought she had raw talent. In the audition, I felt less,” says Moon. If a student possesses the dream as well as the talent, Moon says, she will “tough it through” with that student. “That is not to say she will finally realize it. You have to have luck and opportunity. “
What do professors do with a student such as Hye-Seon, who comes to them saying that their dream in life is to be a great solo performer? Marc Silverman, chair of the piano department at Manhattan School of Music, tries to dissuade them. “There is no such thing as a famous pianist,” he says. “You try to be the finest artist you can be in your own terms. Few have sought fame, which is advertising and marketing . . . That’s the stuff of rock stars. Having a life in music is how you can serve music, not what music can do for you.”
Hye-Seon knows that becoming a concert pianist is a long shot, but she is undeterred. At one point, she shrugs her shoulders and says, “I don’t care if I’m famous, I’m just trying to work hard.” On another day, after a lesson, she hugs her scores to her chest and says: “I love piano. I love music. I don’t want it to be about money.” For now, she holds tightly to her dream. She’s firmly against returning to Korea as one of the many who come bearing U.S. doctorates, seeking professorships and performance dates.
Sherman, the pianist and author, noted in “Piano Pieces” that the legions of talented players pose an ethical problem for piano teachers. “Individual teachers must pause before guiding their talented pupils into a society which has little sustaining need for them. . . .”
But, like Hye-Seon, “the students play away, riding the thread of habit and hope,” Sherman wrote. “And their souls, in some sporadic and awkward way, expand. They detect the potential for genuine personal identity, as distinct from communal fashions and peer submersion . . . Let them study the piano. Society needs them.”
This spring, Hye-Seon auditioned at Julliard and the Manhattan School of Music. She wasn’t selected. In May, with panic rising about her future, she had the Mannes audition. Out of 700 musicians auditioning on a variety of instruments, she was one of the 140 chosen. She will study with, she hopes, the same teacher over four years, so that a strong mentoring relationship can develop.
“Conservatory is where you suck it up and find out if you have what it takes to make it in music,” says Allison Scola, assistant to the dean at Mannes. “We have a high turnover rate every year.”
Hye-Seon, back on the porch in Kalamazoo, says she does not regret coming to the U.S., despite her academic and social struggles. Freedom–of dress, of expression, of emotion–is what she says she values most about her American experience. “In Korea, it is something strict there,” she says. “Here, I can give what I want to the music. I got many musical things from coming here. I feel free emotionally.”
Besides, she says, it is important for artistic development to go new places. “If you are a photographer and only take pictures here, you only see things one way,” she says. “And if you go someplace else, you see new things and see things differently. It is the same way with music, only with your ears.”
Just weeks before, Hye-Seon had played her final recital in Kalamazoo. She asked a friend from high school to sing a solo while she accompanied her on the piano. She played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
