After have taken apart in several rounds of competition, my 13 years old niece, Yaya, had been told that she had won the second place in a National Piano Competition in China. There are another 6 kids sharing the prize, but among them, there are only 2 persons from Beijing, and she is one of that 2 persons.

I am so proud of her, but she wasn’t happy. She wanted to won the first prize, unfortunately there was only one boy from Hunan had that luck. I don’t know where this kind of strong drive of her came from. I never wanted to be the top peach in the tree in my whole life. Well, that’s probably why I am so ordinary.

Apparently she is not like me at all, but I doubt if she is like my sister or brother in-law. From what I know, my sister wasn’t very aggressive and never had been struggling with the prizes, the places and outside compliments. Both my sister and I lived out a very casual way in our school times. There was a bit ambition like all other kids have, but it never grew up to any actual drive to make more effort in order to win.

I always thought Yaya is one of us. She is not a very out-going girl and sometimes seems a bit shy. I guess she is not the one who likes to firstly raise the hand to answer teacher’s question in the class or stand up for the opportunities. She is not very fond of public stuff, like giving a speech, being a leader or act as the first brave one, just like me but surprisingly she takes so seriously about piano, and much more serious than I did. I would have settled for the second place and felt good enough for what I have achieved, but she would not.

My brother in-law had sneaked in the competition room and took a video for Yaya’s performance. I don’t know how he did it. He is a police officer, so I guess he always has his way to figure the thing out I had a look at the video uploaded onto the Internet today, and found that her performance was very impressive. I couldn’t believe that was my niece, that little girl used to play simple notes on the piano back to 6 years ago.

I reckon, for someone who’s at her age, the skills are not an issue. She has got the skills that were required in the music. You can see her playing it very confidently and proficiently. The only thing she needs is the attitude to enjoy the music she plays and the way how to deliver the music to her audience. In another word, she needs to know that she is playing it for others, not only for herself. So it’s not a task that she has to complete, like finishing off the school homework. She has to realise that it’s the course that she actually is supposed to enjoy and immerse herself deep in. If she can’t enjoy it, other people would not enjoy it as well.

However, she was really brilliant. I am so glad that she has gone this far and reached this point of her life. It’s a life-time present she would feel very grateful to have it when she grow up