She spent the next three months

ugh keyboards to go around, and students were forced to take turns practicing around the clock. Dang Thai Son was just 7 years old at the time. Despite having Madame Lien as both his mother and teacher, he was forced to compete against all the much-older students for his chance to touch the keys just 30 minutes each day. Some of the school's 400 students learning various instruments were taught in mud-wall bunkers. But there was no room underground for all the pianos. Pianists instead banged out Beethoven in the open until being forced to take cover when screaming air raid sirens warned of approaching American B-52 bombers. Some students, determined not to lose their precious turn, terrified villagers by refusing to stop playing despite the danger. The village, however, was never hit.



"It's dark, it's humid and it's dangerous. There's a lot of snakes and frogs and all kinds of insects," Son said, laughing at the memory. "When the parents weren't there, we would go out and just watched how they are fighting each other. Bravo!" With his older sister already a skilled pianist and his brother playing cello, Son said his parents discouraged him from taking up an instrument at first, arguing that the family already had enough musicians. But the young boy was drawn to the keyboard and soon found that music flowed easily from somewhere deep inside. He remembers his mother lovingly coaching him to play the romantic ballads of her favorite composer, Chopin. The emerald green rice fields, the moon and the jungle somehow touched him during those early years. "Today, the relationship between professor and student can sometimes be a business relationship," Son said, perched next to his mom in Hanoi, where the family reunited this month for the Lunar New Year, or Tet. "But at that time in the village, it's like a big family and we shared everything - we shared the pain, we shared also the joy - and it's really such a human relationship that is quite different."



Madame Lien still looks more the part of a socialite than a jungle-dwelling nationalist. Even at 92, her eyebrows are carefully trimmed into tiny crescents, her nails manicured with a clear shellac and her short, thin hair dyed dark, with small pearls adorning her ears. Her eyes snap as she speaks quickly in English laden with a French accent, complaining that her hearing isn't so great anymore. She laughs and apologizes for not being able to easily decipher an American accent, instead offering to speak in Vietnamese, Russian, Polish or even, perhaps, a little Czech.



She has lived a life of luxury. She began studying piano at age 4 as the daughter of Vietnam's first Western-trained engineer, a man who allowed his children to speak only French in the former southern city of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. She rubbed shoulders with the likes of Pablo Picasso and other pro-Communist figures in Paris, and later became Vietnam's first woman to graduate with an overseas music degree from the Prague Conservatory, in what was then Czechoslovakia. But she has also faced her share of hardships as a nationalist married to a Vietnamese communist. "My journey from Prague back to Vietnam was long and a very hard journey," she said, remembering how blisters bubbled all over her feet as she carried her 22-month-old daughter in 1951. "We had to walk with my baby 110 kilometers (68 miles) at night to the North Vietnamese government in the jungle where they were based. It took about three weeks."



She spent the next three months being fully indoctrinated at a re-education camp. She later gave birth to a son while living in the bush, just six months after losing her husband to a bout with tuberculosis. "It was very difficult," she said, her eyes staring at the floor of her upscale lakeside apartment. "I don't want to remember this time." It was also the only period in her life when she was separated from the piano. She was forced to wait until 1954 before she could again find comfort playing Chopin. She was sent to Beijing to record revolutionary music, lullabies and folk songs. "When I first saw a piano again, I was very happy," she said. "I played all night." Madame
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