The Swan Song, by Ruirui Kuang

The Reckoning, by Jeffrey Berg (USA) 2023

​The Swan Song 

The knock on the door comes four minutes late, a bad omen already, as the Chinese character, “four,” is homonymous with the word for “death.” It puts Li in a sour mood. He hopes the “millions of readers” the journalist promised isn’t just hot air. 

The young man at the door has thick black hair slicked high with pomade in stark contrast to Li’s growing bald spot.

“Ah, Mr. Li. Your reputation precedes you. An honor to finally meet you. I’m Huang.” 

They walk into the kitchen, which also doubles as the living area. Out of the corner of his eye, Li sees the journalist absorb everything in one sweep. He tucks his faded shirt more neatly into his belt.

They sit at the Formica table and Li pours them two cups of oolong tea with his good hand. Chinatown bustles outside the window, in front of which sits a photograph of a stately middle-aged woman, red joss sticks, and some browning oranges. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Huang says, glancing back from the photograph. 

Li thinks of the years of fatigue and abdominal cramps his wife shouldered working shifts at the restaurant, the dry cleaner, the school cafeteria. But finally, the rectal bleeding was too much to bear. The diagnosis, the rushed surgery, the money for chemo running out. Her embittered look. “I told you to get a job so we can get health insurance.” 

Li only nods at the young man in front of him now. 

“I guess I should start us off,” the young man tries smiling. Li’s lips are a thin straight line. “I’m doing a piece for the New York Observer – ” he pauses as if to allow a moment for awed recognition, but there is none. “It’s on Chinese artists in your generation, Mr. Li. There’s not much written about Chinese artists in American newspapers, and I want to carve a path.” 

Good luck, Li thinks. 

“You were a well-respected virtuoso in China and the US.” 

“Is that so!” Exclaims Li, though he is still pleased to hear the compliment after so many years. 

“Yes, and I’ve always wanted to speak with you since your last performance at the Carnegie,” Huang carries on. “What have you been doing since?”  

Li blinks, looks down, and covers his left hand with his right.

The last fifteen years are a blur, yet now a vivid image stands out of his wife begging, pleading with him to get a job. Any job. Anything but mope around in the upstairs of their houseback then, the one they had to sell. His wife was from a small village. How could she understand? She could scrub toilets, wait on tables, wash dishes. But he, he had a gift, a calling. So when various adjunct roles didn’t end in a job offer, he shuffled about in his house slippers, avoiding his wife and daughter’s gaze. That was what he did all those years when he should’ve been on stage, in the newspapers, on the faculty of Juilliard. How could he not resent his life’s work being undone by a single moment? A forever punishment for a sliver of glory? 

“I… taught. Here and there.” Li says slowly. “I believed in arming the next generation. Enabling them to stand on the shoulders of my generation for their own progress.” 

“That’s admirable,” Huang means it. “You have so much to teach the world. Your musicality, the emotional richness of your vibrato, the way you handle simultaneous double stop pizzicatos, the–” 

Li lets out a mirthless laugh. “Are you a performer?” 

The young man’s colour deepens. “Oh no, I couldn’t claim to be. I’m just a student of the arts. I report, view it from the outside.” Then sheepishly, “I did own a second-hand violin once...” Li notices for the first time the muted hickey under Huang’s jawline, and feels a sudden softness towards the young man. 

“All the same, I wish my daughter would’ve kept up with music.” 

“She played too? Why did she give it up?” 

Li ponders the space in front of him. 

He recalls a small Jun, playing with her toys in his room while he practiced, asking to touch his violin, dragging her mother to his performances. A younger version of himself holding her elbow as she tests movements with her first bow, fixing her snapped strings, smiling at her eager chirps, “Ba, listen to this!” “Ba, is this right?” 

Why did she quit? He never thought to ask. He forces himself to remember. 

It must have been after Carnegie. Because after Carnegie, he retreated under his sheets. Days became demarcated only by the darkness of closed curtains, and a deeper dark when the sun set behind them. Time kept by the three meals Jun left at his door, the humming of her violin in the evenings.  

One of these days, Li curled in a tight ball on the bed, enveloped by another crushing wave of despair. Suddenly he heard air being sucked in beside him. He blinked open an eye, caught the sweep of hair framing Jun’s shimmering dark irises. He groaned. It was almost noon. 

“Ba, I’m sorry to wake you, but… I think I cracked the Concerto No 2! You know, the Bartok we started working on in the spring? I think I figured out how to play it on the G string. Will you listen to it? I’d love to–” 

“No. You do what you want. I never want to be around that instrument again.” 

There was silence. He thought she left. But then, was there a whimper at the door? He could no longer see her from where he was, so he lifted his head with effort. But too late, the door was already creaking shut. 

“She quit because… because of me.” Li speaks as if to himself.  

“That can’t be! You don’t know that for sure.” Huang says encouragingly. “C’mon, where is she now?”   
“Huh?” 

“Your daughter, where is she now?” 

“Oh. Boston. She left to teach math.” 

“Well then she didn’t go far.” 

Seeing the question on Li’s face, Huang explains, “I mean, math is the companion to music theory. The circle of fifths, for example…” Huang trails off when he sees Li’s face shift. “And I’m lecturing you on musical theory?” he jokes.

Huang uncrosses his legs, leans forward across the table, and almost whispers, “Mr. Li, I hope you’ll forgive me for asking, but… what happened? Your last performance - a resounding critical success - and yet you never played publicly again…”

Li has not allowed his mind to think back to his final Juilliard performance at the Carnegie. Yet now he cannot prevent the flood. The sounds of an orchestra tiptoe into the room, then thunder in his ears. All of a sudden, it gives way to the voice of a lone violin. 

Li was in his long-awaited solo, a Paganini Caprice, the 4th one. It was his shining moment, his chance to prove he deserved that coveted faculty spot. Li stretched his finger just a tad more than he had been able to in practice. There, the vibrato was that much more resonant, the faculty position that much more within reach. 

He heard it before he felt it. The pop in his finger, the sharp pain. He played through it. At the end of the performance, he was declared a genius, a virtuoso. The newspapers ran his image. The department head put his large hand on Li’s shoulder. “Yours for the taking,” he winked. The pride on Li’s face swallowed him whole.  

Then the next day. The doctor’s pristine coat and clean fingernails. The diagnosis – ruptured tendon. The surgery. The doctor’s warnings against playing for the foreseeable future. Li didn’t heed. He pilfered pain medication. It wasn’t until his department head gently sat him down in his office on the last day of the school year, and wouldn’t stop twisting his ring. That was when Li knew. There was no room for a violinist with only a working bow hand.  

“Many say Paganini was in league with the devil, so difficult his pieces, that 4th one especially. Si. Death. Always been bad luck…” The journalist’s voice comes from afar. Li realizes he has just told Huang everything. 

“Wait here a moment.” 

Li gets up, and disappears into the bedroom. Huang hears the scrape of a heavy chest, a lock opening. Li reemerges with a leather violin case. He puts it on the table, dusts it off, and clicks it open. 

“This is the violin I performed with at Carnegie. An original 1803 Johann Baptist Schweitzer. I played no less than 50 violins in the store before I found this one.” He picks it up and places it in Huang’s lap, the gentleness of a father with a newborn. 

Huang runs his hand softly up the fingerboard. “It’s incredible! I can feel the sound!” His pompousness dissolves into a boyish delight. His eyes shimmer so brightly they threaten to burn him up. Li’s chest constricts. Jun’s eyes looked like this too whenever she played.  

“We never had money for a violin or lessons growing up. My dad said I needed a real job to support the family. With my first paycheck, I got a used violin. I played it to pieces.” Huang gives a pained laugh. 

“It’s yours.”

The younger man’s jaw opens and does not shut. “But, I couldn’t..” he stammers.

Li dismisses the concern with a wave of his hand, and Huang reaches out, grabbing Li’s hand in both of his. 

Gazing into the young man’s face, Li sees the protruding folds beneath his own eyes, the ruthless march of the years. He realizes he has not talked to Jun about losing her mother, does not know the shape of Jun’s grief. 

Or his own.

When Huang finally takes leave, promising a glowing article, Li closes the door and leans against it until the fading echo of Huang’s footsteps becomes the sound of his own breath. 

Li sucks in deeply and straightens. He finger-brushes what’s left of his hair across the crown of his head, and ambles towards the landline. He looks back at his wife’s photograph. Her last words, “Take care of her,” reverberate in his mind. He dials the area code for Boston.

Ruirui Kuang

Author's note: "Violin injury inspired by the personal story of Maya Shankar."

Part-time writer, other-time painter, full-time Chinese American, Ruirui Kuang once submitted research deemed “best paper of the class” to John Kerry, won Grandma's Garden Art Show in Cincinnati, had her painting projected onto Harvard University’s Widener steps, and interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda before he became famous. She spends her daytime working in development finance, living on four continents in the process. Her short stories have been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Encomia; her journalism in The New York Observer and The Harvard Crimson. She is currently working on a memoir.