Until middle school, I could not play an instrument. We moved around almost every year and with my family’s finances, school was the priority.
But by the time I was in the seventh grade, my family was in a better situation, and I felt left out because so many of my friends played musical instruments. Some of my friends and brother played the trumpet, and one of my best childhood friends played the piano.
While we had a keyboard for a short period of time, I never got too great at it and wasn’t super interested in it growing up. The piano was a bit too mechanical and formulaic. I wanted to play a string instrument or something with more flavor that could play higher notes.
In particular, I felt left out of many Asian spaces in middle and high school. While many other Asian people played an instrument, whether it was the piano or trumpet, I was the only one who did not.
When I was around 13, I started playing the violin and worked very hard to improve as a beginner. At that time, my family had tenants in the house to pay the bills. I loved instrumentals in video games like Final Fantasy, where there was a violin, so I really wanted to learn and get better going forward.
There was a very distinctive disadvantage: so many of my peers in the orchestra were very advanced in their play because they had been practicing every day since kindergarten. I, at 13, was starting from scratch.
I mention the tenants because I remember when I first started playing, and I was horrible. It sounded awful, and I made a ton of mistakes. I usually practiced after school, around 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. They were college students who were very nice to me, but I could hear them laughing every time they came back to the house while I was playing. It was very clear they were laughing at the quality of my play, which definitely made me feel insecure at the time, but I kept practicing and practicing because I didn’t want people to laugh at me anymore.
I practiced about 20–30 minutes daily for a year and attended lessons at the local music store. My violin instructor was extremely understanding and nonjudgmental. Naturally, I thought I was terrible, and I likely really was horrible.
I remember her horror the first time I tried to shake my fingers haphazardly to try this thing called vibrato I’d seen on YouTube. I distinctly remember my instructor putting stickers on my violin so I knew exactly where the notes I needed to play on the G, D, A, and E strings were and how embarrassed I was when I was the only person to show up to orchestra a year later with the stickers on my violin to show me where to put my fingers.
Over time, I practiced more on the weekends to improve. I got good enough to join my junior high orchestra, and I caught up to many of my friends who started young but didn’t practice.
One thing I didn’t know when I started with the violin was how many people played the violin. At the time, I hadn’t started in an orchestra yet. I didn’t know there were other instruments people played in the orchestra. People played the viola, the cello, and the bass. I did not know what any of those instruments were.
Still, I would show up to orchestra class to see that there were twice as many violin players as cello and viola players and that there was a first chair for the better players in the orchestra and a second chair for the ones the coordinator deemed not as good. If I played the cello, bass, or viola, it would have been much easier to stand out.
But over the course of the year, I kept getting better. Like any teenager, I also wanted to be cool. My friends who also played the violin did not practice much. In fact, they bragged about how they didn’t practice at all and just chilled and played video games. And so I started practicing less as well.
Still, I did practice a lot. I eventually auditioned for the New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) solo performance. After only a year of playing, I was on Level 4 and scored a 27/28 on the test. I distinctly recall the examiner giving me a lot of critical feedback about cadence and how I played but still giving me a high score.
The following year, I joined the “chamber ensemble” — the second-best orchestra in the high school. This was just one step below the “chamber orchestra” of the top orchestra in the school that won all the awards. The new teacher taught it while the veteran teacher taught the chamber orchestra, and I played well enough to make it to the first chair, albeit close to the end of the first chair. Despite being on the cross country team and having a lot of my time taken up by practices and cross country and track meets, I made a few after-school practices and performances.
Again, I was notable not for being the absolute best player but for my rapid improvement. Of course, most of this was because I had been playing the violin for less than two years and was a blank slate.
But there was another concurrent conflict. In eleventh grade, I could enroll in a prestigious science research class at my high school. Previous students did it and leveraged their experience working in labs to get published — as high school students, and it looked great for colleges. There was a competition where you could showcase the research. I recall being overwhelmed by the prestige of this program, and all of my friends (especially the Asian ones) talked about it being the gateway to a school like Harvard or something like that.
By contrast, no one talked about orchestra, which we all took for granted and wasn’t very cool to take seriously. Many of those friends quit orchestra and moved on to the research program.
I always took school very seriously, and as a varsity Cross Country runner, running was as much — if not more — of a priority. But I knew that I could not possibly manage science research and playing in the orchestra. I couldn’t manage it, for one, because both could not possibly fit into my schedule while I took six advanced placement (AP) classes in one year. As a teacher now, I have no clue how they fit that many classes into my schedule, but the classes were only 40–45 minutes each.
But it did mean one of the two had to give, and I do recall that one event that ran concurrently with my decision was when my orchestra director, the new teacher, announced she was being let go. I don’t remember the exact details, but as a teacher now, I know that when there are budget issues, the new, non-tenured teachers are usually the first to be let go. I don’t exactly remember if this came before or after I decided about the following year, but I just found it notable — I chose research over staying in the orchestra.
I’ll keep it short: the research did not go well. I sat in a neuroscience lab coloring the different parts of mice brains on hundreds of scans. It was menial work, and I did not really understand the literature. The lab director was incredibly nice to me, but I was the least of his priorities with the postdoctoral students, graduate students, and undergraduate students also working in his lab. I did not zealously advocate for myself as a high school student enough to get a stellar work product or have something to show for it. I dropped out of that program my senior year to focus more on applying to colleges and my running.
My life would have been much more enriched if I had stayed in the orchestra and kept practicing the violin, striving to improve. But I often watched the people who were the very best at the violin, friends who practiced every day their whole lives, who played difficult songs like it was nothing. They went to school to play the violin, too. I knew one thing for certain when I joined the orchestra and played with those students: I would never be on their level and never catch up, given my late start.
It was a lesson that I shouldn’t have prioritized what I thought I should do over what I wanted to do. Of course, I didn’t know that I would dislike working in a lab and doing research, even if I felt like I should have kept doing it over time. I didn’t know how wrong it was to keep comparing myself to people who started much younger and were better and to focus on enjoying it myself.
Yes, it may never be too late to play again and restart the violin. One day, I would like to try again, and I will endeavor to get the violin fixed and try playing. A lot of supplemental materials came with playing the violin, which were expenses my parents paid when it was difficult, too: resin, sheet music, music stands, and a metronome. With my current time constraints and circumstances, I will most likely be unable to practice at the same level I did in middle and early high school.
Part of what dissuaded me was how much better other violinists were, especially the best ones in my school who went to schools like Oberlin, one of the best schools in the country for music. But I shouldn’t have compared myself to the best orchestra students because I was improving and enjoyed playing the violin. Of course, there were countless times I embarrassed myself and played poorly. One director called me out for being out of tune out of frustration during rehearsal, and I remember being lost a few times and pretending to play the notes during the competition and not doing so, hoping no one from the crowd would notice.
No, I would never be the best. I don’t want to have a defeatist mindset or be negative, but it was more of a testament to how great the best violin players were at my school and their lifelong commitment to it. I was a student and runner before I was a violinist, and I knew those priorities took precedence, so it rationally made sense to quit to pursue bigger priorities.
But I didn’t realize at that time that I was a person who craved improvement more than I craved perfection, or at least I turned into that person. I would never be the best, but I could become the best version of myself under the circumstances.
Recreationally, however, it could have been one thing I did for fun in high school. In my senior year, I realized I liked to write, and some people thought I was pretty good at it, so I joined my school’s newspaper and later the literary magazine. Of course, if I was still in orchestra, there was a chance I wouldn’t have time for all that. Like many seniors, I decided to start coasting and not taking school as seriously, which let me pursue things I enjoyed more and more.
Above all, I remember this story about the violin because I think we all have a violin story like mine—something we enjoyed or loved that we quit too soon.
The biggest lesson I took away was never to quit too soon again, and so I didn’t. I didn’t quit teaching after a disastrous first year, where every day after a while was miserable. I did not quit running after plenty of times when I thought it was time, and the poor results demoralized me. I did not quit law school after a very mediocre first year. I did not quit learning how to swim despite being scared that I would drown.
Most of it was that I used to love the instant gratification of seeing results immediately. It’s taken me a while to move away from that, and I’m still working on it. The toil, tribulations, and failures of being a beginner at anything I set my mind on have benefits long-term, but they’re not what you see right away. Any time I have started something, from the violin to swimming to teaching, has been embarrassing. But I learned from the violin to never quit until I give something enough time.
The violin I played in high school sits in my basement, collecting dust. My mom brought over the violin I played in middle and high school a few years ago. The E string is broken from when one of my cousins tried to play it and messed up tuning it. The horsehair on the bow is worn out, too loose, and needs a lot of resin for me to play again. Yes, it may never be too late to play again and restart the violin. One day, I would like to try again, and I will endeavor to get the violin fixed and just try playing again, likely after I take the bar exam.
I will never be the best. But 10 minutes a day or so stumbling to try to play my favorite violin instrumentals and failing to do so won’t hurt.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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