Since this event is about Rinko’s history with piano, I started reminiscing about my own experiences with the piano.

My parents were never really the type to force us into learning an instrument, so I started wanting to learn the piano after seeing my older sister play. I was enthusiastic about it at first because of how nice the piano sounded to me, but my enthusiasm kinda just melted away when I realized that I would have to sit down with a teacher for thirty minutes or one hour or however long the lesson were, one-on-one, and my mom couldn’t really be in the same room. I was in first grade back then, super attached to my parents and very shy.

I liked learning to play, I think, but I never really got over my shyness and never really opened up to my teacher. I was also really self-conscious, so every time she asked me to play something over again, I felt like I was making some terrible mistake and being criticized (my teacher was actually super nice, it was kinda just an issue on my part). And just to reiterate, I was in first-grade, so I really didn’t understand a single thing my teacher said to me when she explained the musical terms, or how I could improve. So without being able to grasp different ways to do better, I just had to keep playing songs over and over again, not really knowing why.

And then, kinda like Rinko, I played at a recital/competition thing, where I just completely screwed up my performance, and it was just a blow on my tiny ego back then. That experience, along with my anxiety over having to talk to my teacher during lessons, and struggling to improve because I had no idea how to improve, kinda just sucked away my love for piano at the time?

And then third grade, I moved to the states from Taiwan, and it just got worse. We found a new teacher, and she was nice too. But I didn’t speak any English back then, which just made me even more anxious to talk to her. I couldn’t understand a single thing she said, so I remember just dreading to go to lessons.

Flash forward a few years, I quit piano when I started middle school. It’s something I regret, and I did try to go back to it at one point in high school, but it didn’t really feel gratifying anymore. So now I’ve got an out-of-tune piano at home, collecting dust. My parents keep suggesting that we sell it, but sentimental value and all that, I kept saying no.