The music of my childhood

Our generation loves pop. Where I grew up, teenagers blared One Direction and Ed Sheeran as they made trips to the beach and every time I recall my middle school years, my memory is tinted with a glow of dazzling bubble pink pop music. At school, my friends excitedly divulged the latest news on Taylor Swift, and as a young teenager, I enjoyed listening to songs like “Shake it Off” at sleepovers with my friends. If you had asked me what my music taste was like when I was fourteen, I probably would have answered that I listened only to the pop music that came on the radio in the car. 

While I was busy absorbing the sound of pop music at school and with my friends, I was also absorbing the sound of a different kind of music at home. My mom loved putting on her 80’s mandarin pop whenever she folded clothes or cleaned around the house, and our living room had a black Yamaha piano on which my older sister played “River Flows in You” or “Pachelbel’s Canon” at my mom’s request. I didn’t really consider this to be music, though, since my understanding of “music taste” was heavily influenced by what my classmates said about music, and music taste was a concept that only my American friends and teachers ever brought up. No Asian relative of mine had ever asked me about what sort of music I listened to. Moreover, I hated listening to my sister practice piano, and I hated mandarin music. The singers spoke too quickly for me to understand what the lyrics meant, and, in my opinion, the janky tunes of the 80s didn’t hold up to the synthetic, upbeat sounds of modern music. 

My reservations toward this kind of music changed when I started college. During my first semester at Berkeley, I found myself leaning into music that was calming and stabilizing rather than energetic and upbeat. In the midst of a bizarre world that threw different faces and places at me every day, I needed something that could help provide a stable landing place for me in the whirlwind of everyday challenges I faced. I found this stability in the calming piano notes that reminded me of my sister’s piano practice sessions, and the mandarin music that had always followed me around at home. As the semester progressed, Yiruma’s meditative piano notes carried me through my papers and deep reading sessions, and the mandarin pop my mother had always loved listening to became a rhythm I could return to whenever the foreign world of Berkeley became too overwhelming. These songs – familiar to me as a family tradition – served as an important source of comfort at a time when I was adjusting to many new situations in my life. And while I still enjoy listening to pop music every once in a while, I have a baseline now – my own personal music taste – that I can return to whenever I need. 

Article by Lu He