My life: Jahja Ling

I was born in Jakarta in 1951. My parents are Indonesian Chinese, originally from Fujian province. In 1946, while my father was a civil servant with the Dutch administration, they took in a lady from Wuhan, in central China. Li Zhixiu was a piano teacher and started a kindergarten at my parents' house. Kids were always singing nursery rhymes, with Li playing the piano my grandma bought for my sister. That became my listening memory. One thing the Dutch left behind after 300 years in Indonesia was the tradition of Western classical music. My father - with his thousands of vinyl records - was familiar with musical legends, such as conductor Erich Kleiber and violinist David Oistrakh. He brought me the knowledge of classical music. But it was Ms Li who took me to the Chinese church where I first sang and harmonised Christian songs and, after formal music training at age seven, played piano and conducted the choir.

I had a solid training in Mandarin, but it all ended with the anti-Chinese campaign in the 1960s. I even had to take an Indonesian name, Jahja Irwandiarto Mursalim. Jahja, my new first name, pronounced "ya-h-ya", is the Arabic rendition of Johann, as in Johann Sebastian Bach. Although I have long resumed my Chinese surname, after becoming an American citizen in 1980, I decided to keep Jahja for the sake of my Indonesian origins.

I had always wanted to study in Europe, but instead I went to New York on a scholarship after I won the Jakarta Piano Competition in 1968. Professor Mieczysław Munz, of the famous Juilliard School, had been advised by my teacher to hear me play. So en route to a holiday in Bali, he saw me rehearse the Grieg concerto. "You should come to Juilliard," he said afterwards. And I did.

In 1970, I went abroad for the first time. The first stop was Hong Kong. From there I went straight to New York. For five years at Juilliard I majored in the piano, while studying choral conducting with John Nelson, who told me after a year I had a natural talent in conducting and that I should take that as a major. After graduating, I took his advice and studied orchestral conducting at Yale University under Professor Otto-Werner Mueller, who was a student of the late German guru Richard Strauss. So my wish for European training came true after all.

In spite of my conducting studies at Yale, where I obtained a doctoral degree in 1985, the school advised me not to give up my piano career. I acceded and participated in the 1977 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Israel, where I won a bronze medal. After the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, I did my first Asian tour as a pianist, including in Hong Kong, at the new Academic Hall of the Baptist College (now University).

At the Tanglewood Music Festival in Boston, in 1979, I met the late Leonard Bernstein. He became a mentor to me and granted me a conducting fellowship at the festival in 1980. "You'll be a good conductor one day," he said to me after a concert, with a hug.