“An artist, then, like Anna,” Priscilla says, elbowing Anna in the side teasingly.
“I guess you could say that, but she doesn’t make anything fancy. If my mom’s cooking was music, it would be . . . folk music or, I don’t know, country music. Not like the stuff Anna plays. I could be wrong, though. I’ve never heard Anna play. I just assumed it was classical music.”
Instead of commenting, Anna shrugs and stuffs more noodles into her mouth. Little wisps of hair are hanging in front of her face, but I don’t tuck them behind her ear. She doesn’t like that.
“Really? Never?” Priscilla asks in disbelief. When I shake my head, she continues, “Not even her YouTube video?”
“There’s a YouTube video?” That’s the first I’ve heard of it, and now I’m kicking myself that I never searched her name on the Internet.
“You didn’t show him?” Priscilla asks Anna.
“No, it’s not like that’s an accurate representation of how I play,” Anna says in that same careful soft voice from before. I didn’t make it up. She changes into someone else around her sister. “It’s just a trick of clever editing and—”
“Oh my God, we have to show him.” Priscilla pulls her phone from the pocket of her tight jeans and opens YouTube, where she searches for “anna sun vivaldi” before saying, “You can’t just search her name because this pop song comes up.”
“Your name is a song?” I ask.
Anna grins at me, and in a voice that’s closer to regular—but not quite there—she says, “That sounds like a line from a poem. You must like me a lot.”
Priscilla rolls her eyes. “You guys are too cute. Okay, here it is.” She holds her phone out for me to take.
As I accept it, I see a thumbnail picture of Anna on a stage with her violin. It has more than a hundred million views.
“Holy shit,” I say.
Priscilla smiles at me. “Impressive, right?” She elbows Anna again, affectionately this time.
Anna makes a point of stuffing her mouth with the biggest wonton in her bowl, but even as she acts like she’s ignoring us, I can tell she’s paying close attention.
I start the video and watch as a woman in a black dress, unmistakably Anna, carries her violin across the stage. And trips on a cellist’s music stand, almost falling over. Flustered, she rights the music stand, picks up all the sheet music that fell to the floor, and stuffs it back where it was.
“So, so sorry, Mr. Music Stand. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Video Anna says, patting the music stand while the offended cello player stares at her with his mouth hanging open and the crowd breaks into laughter.
Next to me, Real Anna presses a hand over her eyes. “I have a bad habit of talking to inanimate objects.”
That’s so like her that I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning. It only gets harder when Video Anna reaches center stage and self-consciously addresses the audience. “Hi, thank you, everyone, for, um, coming here tonight. I regret to inform you that world-renowned violinist Daniel Hope and several of our finest San Francisco Symphony violinists were in a car accident earlier today. Rest assured, the doctors say that while there are some broken bones, Daniel, along with everyone else, is expected to make a full recovery and play again in the near future. Anyway, because of this, I’ll be, um, soloing for you tonight. My sincerest apologies to those who came here to listen to Daniel. I’m disappointed, too.”
There’s a long pause, and the camera zooms in on faces in the audience, showing their grimaces and expressions of regret. Then Anna nods at the musicians behind her on the stage and lifts her violin to her chin. Her posture straightens. Her eyes focus. Her awkwardness falls away.
She plays.
And she defies every single expectation that the first part of the clip could have led someone to have. She’s not the Asian equivalent of a dumb blonde. She’s not a second-rate backup player.
Anna is talented.
The music builds like a storm and pours from her violin with a violence that’s all the more impressive for how controlled it is. Her fingers are precise. They don’t slip. Her movements are perfectly fluid. But more than that, what I hear and see, what draws me to her more than anything else, is passion. She’s lost to the music. The look on her face, it’s pain, it’s pleasure, joy, sorrow, everything all at once.
She’s beautiful.
When the video finishes, I can’t speak.
“Amazing, right?” Priscilla says.
I clear my throat and swallow before I say, “Yeah.” I look at Anna, and it’s like I’m seeing her for the first time all over again. “I had no idea . . .”
She meets my eyes for the barest second before she glances away. “Don’t look at me like that. After that beginning, I only needed to be passable to impress people. I’m just a regular violinist.”
“I don’t think you’d have gotten a hundred million views if you were just passable,” I say with a laugh.