Gifted children fill the city's concert halls and thrill their parents, but at what cost to their development, asks Clarence Tsui
TWO MONTHS AGO, Vanessa Wong Wai-yin won a Gold Prize at the International Chopin Piano Festival in Tokyo. Now she's telling me how she loves Impressionist painters and loathes the mundanity of television. She also says Hong Kong schools place far too much emphasis on conventional subjects and expresses her distaste for infantile sloth.
'Every child wants to dodge work once in a while,' the pianist says solemnly. 'When I think of the meticulous attention my father and mother have given me, I'll tell myself I cannot be like that.'
Maturity surely came early for Vanessa: she is just 11.
'Her thoughts are well beyond her actual age,' says Vanessa's father, Wong Man-lung, who works in chemical technology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. 'She plays music in a way usually pianists in their 20s do.' As Vanessa launches herself at the piano keys, her father's face reveals a mix of glee, trepidation and pride in his musical daughter. Or daughters, to be exact: his second daughter, six-year-old Valerie, also won a Silver Prize in her age group in Tokyo.
'They are very docile children,' says their mother, Choi Yik-au, a former secretary. 'We've made arrangements for them every day so they know that, for example, they have to practise after dinner. They just regard it as something they should do, so they don't feel as if it's a hard slog.'