Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

Copyright © 2017 by Musae Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

Originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Viking, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017.

CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kym, Min, author.

Title: Gone : a girl, a violin, a life unstrung / Min Kym.

Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054104 (print) | LCCN 2016054944 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451496072 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451496089 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780451496096 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kym, Min. | Violinists—Biography. | Loss (Psychology) | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC ML418.K96 A3 2017 (print) | LCC ML418.K96 (ebook) | DDC 787.2092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016054104

ISBN 9780451496072

Ebook ISBN 9780451496096

Cover design by Christopher Brand

Cover photographs: (rip) George Baier IV; (author) Toby Jacobs

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Listen As You Read

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Coda

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Penguin Random House and Warner Classics have partnered to release an album to accompany Gone.

As you read, you can listen to the pieces described in the book, played by Min Kym. Most of the pieces were recorded at the time when she originally performed them, though they have now been specially remastered for this companion album. When music referred to in the book is available on the album, you will see

after the referenced piece.

Gone: The Album has been released on Warner Classics and is available for streaming, download, and as a CD from Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, and selected music retailers. For links and more information, visit www.gonethealbum.com.

Finally, Gone has also been published as an unabridged audiobook, read by Rebecca Yeo and interwoven with music from the album. It is available for download from Audible and other websites.

Gone: The Album

MIN KYM

Salut d’Amour

Edward Elgar; 1999, Abbey Road, piano by Gordon Back

Méditation, from the opera Thaïs

Jules Massenet; 1999, Abbey Road, piano by Gordon Back

Caprice No. 16

Niccolò Paganini; 1990, Royal College of Music

Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28

Camille Saint-Saëns; 1997, Abbey Road, piano by Gordon Back

Sonata for Solo Violin in D major, Op. 115

Sergei Prokofiev; 2001, Abbey Road

Symphonie Espagnole in D minor, Op. 21

Édouard Lalo; 2001, Abbey Road, with LSO and Barry Wordsworth

Poème, Op. 25

Ernest Chausson; 1997, Abbey Road, piano by Gordon Back

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, 2nd movement

Johannes Brahms; 2009, Henry Wood Hall, with Sir Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra

Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108, 1st movement

Johannes Brahms; 2009, Champs Hill, piano by Ian Brown

I’ve been dreaming about my violin. I am waiting to board an airplane, maybe flying to a concert, maybe flying away from one. It’s hard to say. I am alone. Maybe I should be with my mother or my old tutor. It’s hard to say. My violin is with me but the woman at the check-in says it has to go down into the hold. I don’t want it to go into the hold, it’s never been put there before, but those are the airline’s rules—or is it that I have not filled out a form properly? I have the feeling that it could all be my fault. I lift the case up and place the violin on the conveyor belt. The woman ties a label to the handle, presses her foot to start the conveyor-belt motor. The violin gives a little start, as if it’s been pushed in the back, something it won’t have liked, and then starts to be carried away, slowly disappearing through the rubber flaps. Do I see it tip up as it reaches the end, as if it’s fallen off a cliff? I can’t quite make it out, but in that instant something tells me I will never see my violin again. A little time later I am in the plane, or maybe I am out of the plane. We have flown, or we have landed, or something has happened to cause us to disembark. That’s it. Something has happened to cause us to disembark. Everyone is happy that they are safe, but I know that something terrible has happened. No one will say what, but something terrible has happened. An announcement comes on. There has been an explosion, in the hold. We will have to wait to find out what has happened to our luggage, which bags have been saved and which have not. We wait and we wait. No one comes to tell me whether my violin is alive or whether my violin is dead. I am alone and yet I am barely there. I’ve gone. I am no longer quite me. It’s a worrying thought. Then I tell myself not to worry. It’s a dream. There is no plane, no hold, no explosion. My violin is with me. We are safe. I am whole.

I wake up. It’s not a dream at all.

It started like this.

We were a Korean family, living in London. My father was a mechanical engineer working for Daewoo, before the company started making cars. It wasn’t so famous then. We’d been living in England for three years. Like my older sister, I was learning English at school. At home we spoke Korean. It was perfectly natural. We’d be going home eventually.

Meanwhile, we got to learn English ways. Every week I would go with my sister to the local music school my mother had found in the Yellow Pages, and every week I would sit there, kicking my heels while my sister had her piano lesson. She was good, my sister. I would listen to her play and wonder whether it would ever be my turn. I started writing, picked up the pen with my left hand. No, I couldn’t do that. I had to put my left hand behind my back, use my right. At school no one had batted an eyelid, but my mother was worried about what people would think when we went back to Korea. In Korea it was considered bad luck to be left-handed. So I became right-handed. Korea was still our final destination. We went to a Korean church, and, once a week, to a Korean school two and a half hours away. But the journey gave me nosebleeds, so my mother taught me to read and write Korean at home. It was important. Korea was where our home lay.

Then, one day, my mother asked me the question I’d been waiting for, and everything changed.

Do you want to play?

She’d already decided I wasn’t going to play the piano. There was only one piano teacher in the school and no available slots on the day of my sister’s lesson. If I chose the piano, my mother would have to accompany me on another day, and that would have defeated the whole purpose of the exercise. It had to be something else. There were only two spaces free at the same time as my sister learned her piano: a trumpet space and a violin space. The trumpet didn’t appeal at all. But the violin! I leapt at the idea.

I had to wait a week, a week where the space lay open, unused, where a violin waited for me, untouched. I found it almost unbearable. The prospect gnawed at my bones. I had to do something. Before we went to bed, my sister and I would often play little games, act out little plays with each other. One of us would be a waitress, the other a customer; one of us would be a doctor, the other a patient. I always imagined, at that age, that I would be a doctor. I had been in the hospital myself and had liked the doctors who looked after me, liked the idea of growing up to be like them, helping patients get better. Now, I insisted, we would not play a game at all. We would play duets. So my sister made a paper keyboard while I copied the shape of a violin from our children’s encyclopedia and cut it out. Together we played our duets. When it was over I took my violin to bed, played it some more, under the bedclothes. It was silent, but I could hear it. It weighed nothing, but I could feel it.

My best friend was also taking violin lessons. She offered to lend me her quarter-size, but it was too big. So my mother went down to the local music shop and bought a tiny eight-size violin. It was a harsh, factory-made thing from China, but when I held it I could feel the romance within. I had a history of teaching myself to play instruments. I’d taught myself the piano, recorder and harmonica. By the time the day came around, I’d worked out how to play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

It might have been then, on my first lesson, or it might have been my second; it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but let me say that I knew right away that holding a violin, playing a violin, was not simply for me, but it was me. Everything about it seemed so easy, so natural; the way it settled on my body, my fingers so utterly comfortable in that position. There was nothing awkward or alien about it at all: my arm stretched out, my hand grasped the neck, my chin and shoulder pressed to the body, my legs firm on the floor. There was a normality to it that seemed completely familiar. I knew I could play anything. Anything. This was not arrogance—I was a shy child, reluctant to come forward, to give voice, to take center stage—but more simply that I had found, not only my home and my voice, but my element. I could swim in this world. I could dive and soar. I could ride crests and float down streams, swim with or against any current. I felt like a creature released, alive in herself for the first time.

There was a problem. I was shown how to work the big horsehair bow with the nub of rosin, shown how the hard nut transformed into a soft, white powder, covering the strands and seeping into the air. The bow thus oiled, I found out how to draw the sound out, how you had to coax it. But the rosin gave me asthma. I was allergic to it, wasn’t able to play for more than half an hour before being felled by a terrible wheezing, my chest seized in an iron grip, my lungs convulsed, fighting for air that wasn’t there. I was put on steroids to keep the attacks at bay. But rather than being a hindrance, my asthma became an indication of my talent. I couldn’t practice like anyone else, couldn’t put the hours in. But it didn’t hold me back. I could still progress; progress at a rate that was way outside the norm. Asthma, the potentially debilitating nature of it, became a mark of my agility, a badge denoting a child who possessed unusual skill. Other children got asthma. Only, mine proved I was unlike the others. It marked me out.

I swam fast now, immersed in my element. I reached Grade 2 in the first eight weeks, and a month later came Grade 4. I know it sounds unlikely, but that’s how quick and easy it was for me. It was just a natural thing to do. I picked it up. I played. My only frustration was the sound that was coming out of the wood: I knew it could be better. My goal right away was not to sound like a baby. I wanted a grown-up voice, instinctively knew the difference, knew what a grown-up voice was, how it should be. The ear was the driving force, not the fingers. The fingers were merely muscle and bone. The playing—what it is, what it should be, what it must be—came from the ear. The ear was my element too. I had perfect pitch.

I had always lived in a world of sound. I can hardly remember a time when I could not read music. My mother claims she never taught me, and I certainly don’t remember learning. What I do remember is my father coming back from a business trip and bringing with him a little xylophone, the name of each key—A, B-flat, B, C—painted on the colored slats. Perhaps that’s how I learned. Certainly the words of music became my favored language, how I heard the world, interpreted it. A bicycle ring was an E-flat. The squeak of a door, C major. When I heard people talk, I listened to the rhythm of their voices, their inflections, rather than the matter of their actual words.

Grade 2, Grade 4, it sounds like hard work. It was work, I suppose, but it was mainly fun. I could do it. My teacher probably pushed me, but I was never aware of it. Lessons weren’t lessons, they were little journeys, every one different, every one leading to a new destination. We played duets. He called me his little assistant as I went around the class, tuning all the other pupils’ instruments. I was the youngest in a class of ten. He understood that, above all, I was a perfectionist, that it mattered absolutely to me, the sound that came out, that it was never just about the notes. He made me think of music as a story. Most of the pieces I played with him—Wieniawski’s Légende, Elgar’s Salut d’Amour—he’d tell me a story, and where there wasn’t one, I would make one up, cobble tales and myths together, Icarus flying too close to the sun.

He would give me records, on birthdays, holidays, Christmas; not all violin music, but always classical music, always food for my ears. Beethoven’s Fourth was like a schoolgirl crush, I fell in love with it so hard. There were others, but the one that stood out, the one that confirmed everything that I already believed in, was the double album by Austrian-born violinist Fritz Kreisler. I had never heard of Kreisler before, knew nothing of the legend that surrounded him, never fully understood (although I think I knew it deep in my heart) the magnitude of what a violin, the right violin, could offer. But hearing Kreisler play was when I heard the evidence of the possible; when I realized what the violin was truly capable of, that it had a voice, a personality, a view of things. Kreisler showed me how it lived and breathed and raised its soul to the heavens. I listened to his recording of Brahms and Beethoven, but also his own compositions, the Liebesleid, the Liebesfreude and the Schön Rosmarin, and pieces of utter charm such as Dvorˇák’s Humoresque No. 7. I played them over and over again, never tiring, only wondering at the great marvel of Kreisler being Kreisler; how his playing was Kreisler: how his violin was Kreisler, how every note he played was Kreisler. Maybe it was then that I understood that I had a voice of my own too.

By this time I had graduated from my factory Chinese violin to a better-made quarter-size. I was both sorry and relieved to say goodbye to it—though it has never really left me. I have it still. It was, and still is, a part of me, as are all the violins I have owned. I have kept them all—all except one.

My sister had graduated from our little music school to the Purcell School in Harrow on the Hill. Like the time of her music lessons, I grew envious of her age. She was nine; I was seven. She’d come back with grown-up tales of singing in the choir, of playing music all day, and there I was, languishing in my ordinary school with my meager weekly violin lessons. I longed for release. Then, one day an unexpected opportunity came. I was with my mother at the Purcell School, collecting my sister. I had my little violin with me. The headmaster, John Bain, was there. He said, Can you play that? He asked it as a kind, indulgent question any grown-up might ask a little girl, but I took it as a request. Certainly I could. I took out my violin and played. I played Bach’s Concerto in A minor. After I finished he said he thought he might be able to bend the rules: I would be allowed in two years earlier than usual. And considering the burden on my parents, he would see what he could do about financial help.

One brief hour on one afternoon and the future suddenly shone ahead. I could almost see it.

I was already living in two worlds, the world of music and my other life at school. Or was it three: music, school and home? Our home life was certainly very different from everyone else’s. As young children, my sister and I would never start our meal until our father had finished. When we had finished, then would come our mother’s turn. Father first, children second, mother last: that was the immovable Korean order. Other things that seemed perfectly normal to us would have perplexed and outraged our friends. If I wanted to drink a glass of water, I would ask permission. It wasn’t a question of being refused a glass of water, it was a question of respect, of acknowledging the pecking order. It ran from top to bottom. My father wouldn’t let my mother drive. She would have liked to, but he was adamant. His word ruled, but we hardly saw him. By the time we woke up, he would have already gone to work. By the time he came back, we were already in bed. On the weekends he’d be off to play golf, so we didn’t see him then either. He was a remote but kind man, with a deep and sometimes fearsome voice. My mother’s voice was warm and funny but with an unpredictable edge of volatility to it. She cooked and fed us all, did the housework and lived alone, with a distant husband. After a night’s drinking he’d often come back late with colleagues, expecting her to cook a small banquet for his guests. And she would be proud to do so. It was the Korean way.

It wasn’t a question of right or wrong, it was