My parents moved from China to St. Louis when I was two years old. In many ways, ours is the quintessential immigrant story. We were unimaginably poor; my dad was a student, and to support us my mom worked fourteen-hour shifts as a cook in a Chinese takeout restaurant, making two dollars an hour. But as difficult as times were, I never felt like we were struggling or that we had less than others. My mom scrimped and saved, and there was always food on the table, and the bills were always paid on time. When I was a little girl, as soon as I knew how to hold a pen, I would spend hours every day by myself, with a notebook and pencil, scribbling and drawing and writing over and over the two or three words I knew how to spell, creating my own little stories. My parents encouraged this behavior, since they knew that other forms of entertainment were costly. My creativity and imagination were my playground. When I discovered reading, a whole universe opened up to me. Suddenly I could disappear into other worlds, travel to exotic lands without ever leaving my bedroom. I met all kinds of people between the pages of my books, making friends with some of them, enemies with others, learning about the world and about how I viewed the world with every turn of a page. Reading was a way for me to spend hours upon hours alone, yet I never felt lonely.
When I was five years old my parents used what little leftover savings they had to send me to piano lessons. Suddenly my world expanded even more. If reading opened up new worlds, music opened up whole other dimensions. It was as if someone had taken the feelings we all have that words can’t express, and brought them to life. Practicing piano every day was a way for me to get lost in my thoughts, to block out whatever real-world problems I was having and just spend a few minutes being transported to someplace better, nicer, less cold and complicated.
So from a very young age, I knew that music, art, and literature were my safe spaces. An escape from the pressures of the outside world, a place where I could retreat when the going got tough. I’ve always been perfectly happy spending lots of time by myself and not feeling like I’m missing out on anything. I credit that comfort with isolation to these imaginary worlds inside my head, between the pages of a book and the notes on a sheet of music.
-Choo Choo Hu, piano