how was a black wurlitzer spinet piano in 1949

#How was a black wurlitzer spinet piano in 1949 tv

A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even most of the European countries. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children she read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s Digest, and a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”Įvery night after dinner, my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned.

I would never feel the need to sulk for anything.īut sometimes the prodigy would become impatient. In my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect.

I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtains, waiting to hear the right music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, trying each one on for size. In fact, in the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I liked the haircut and it made me actually look forward to my future fame. I now had hair the length of a boy’s, with straight-across bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. “Peter Pan is very popular these days,” the instructor assured my mother. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. “You look like Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. Instead of big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to a beauty training school in the Mission district and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. “ Ni kan,” said my mother as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying, “Oh my goodness.” My mother would poke my arm and say, “ Ni kan”-You watch.

#How was a black wurlitzer spinet piano in 1949 tv

We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. There were so many ways for things to get better. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”Īmerica was where all my mother’s hopes lay. “Of course you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could work for the government and get good retirement. My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America.

Shirley Temple: a child singer-actress, famous in the 1930’s and 1940’s Prodigy (n.): a very smart, specially talented child Peter Pan: a boy from a story Jing Mei gets a short haircut like Peter Pan Beyond Reproach (n.): perfect, not making any mistakes