By the time Rachel Cheung Wai-ching left Hong Kong last year to read for a master's degree in piano performance at Yale University in the US, she had spent nearly half her life at the city's Academy for Performing Arts (APA), whose music department enjoys a reputation for grooming pianists with a future worth tracking.
One year after flying from the nest seemed a good moment to ask the 20-year-old to appraise her past and speculate on her future. Hong Kong is not noted for producing world-class musicians who sustain careers in the top percentile of the classical music industry. Could that be about to change?
Cheung joined the academy's junior department at the age of 10, when she was put in the care of Eleanor Wong, remaining under her tutelage until she completed her bachelor's degree in 2011. During those teenage years, Cheung was generally hailed as a child prodigy and, although she is not comfortable with that tag, the facts corroborate the potential people saw in her. As the youngest soloist ever to give a recital at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2005, she garnered prizes at international competitions before receiving the ultimate accolade of playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No2 with the Sydney Symphony in 2009 under the baton of Russian pianist-turned-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Now in the more comprehensive and competitive melting pot of Yale, Cheung has had to adapt to a shift in culture. 'I feel very different now,' she says. 'Hong Kong was like a cradle; I felt very protected. When I was at the APA I was so lucky to have so many opportunities to perform; somehow, I took everything for granted. But when I went to the United States it was completely different because everyone is treated equally; we have to get opportunities for ourselves, we can't just sit and wait for them to come.'
Cheung's tutor at Yale is Hungarian-born British pianist Peter Frankl, whose teaching style has presented her with a paradigm shift in musicianship, removing the safety net of earlier years.
'When I studied with Ms Wong, she gave me every detail of the music,' Cheung says. 'Mr Frankl gives us a lot of freedom of creativity; he allows us to think for ourselves first, to have our own opinion and personality.'
She admits that flying solo came as a bit of a shock: 'It took me some while to adjust and adapt to the new method, but it's a step closer to becoming a real artist.'