It was true. In the late 90s, a piano was a luxury for an ordinary working-class family.
They continued walking and came to a classroom at the end of the hallway.
The sound coming from here was the most piercing.
How could one describe that sound?
It was like a rusty saw cutting through wet wood—no, even worse than that. It was sharp and grating, enough to make your scalp tingle.
"This is... the violin class?" Chen Jianguo said, looking at the sign on the door.
Inside the classroom, seven or eight children were craning their necks, holding bows in their hands, and creating a racket under the teacher’s direction.
Chen Zhuo stood at the door, his brow furrowed slightly.
To him, it didn’t just sound bad; it felt wrong.
The waveforms in the sound were chaotic, the frequencies unstable.
It was like the gears of a precision instrument failing to mesh, letting out a pained groan.
"This is a great idea!"
Chen Jianguo’s eyes lit up.
"This thing is small, not too expensive, and you can just carry it around. If the school has a performance or something later, he can just get up on stage... that presence, tsk tsk."
Liu Xiuying was also tempted, mainly because she saw that the female teacher had a very elegant air about her, with long hair draping over her shoulders and a perfectly straight posture.
"Xiaozhuo, do you want to learn this?" Liu Xiuying asked, squatting down.
Chen Zhuo watched the teacher demonstrating the posture for holding the violin.
He saw the teacher’s fingers pressing on the fingerboard, the bow drawing across the strings, and the strings vibrating to produce sound waves.
’String instruments... they produce sound through the vibration of strings. The frequency is related to the string’s length, tension, and density.’
High school physics formulas automatically popped into his mind again.
Although he couldn’t calculate the specific values yet, he found this instrument very interesting.
Unlike a piano with its fixed pitches, a violin’s intonation depends entirely on the position of the fingers.
If you’re off by even a millimeter, the frequency changes, and the note goes out of tune.
This meant it was a game that required extreme precision and control.
"Okay." Chen Zhuo nodded. "I’ll learn this one."
The process of learning the violin was far less elegant than his parents had imagined.
For a beginner, the violin was practically a torture device.
You had to crane your neck at a strange angle to hold the instrument’s body, twist your left hand to press the fingerboard with your wrist suspended, and control a bow longer than a chopstick with your right hand, all while keeping it straight.
In the first lesson, Chen Zhuo only learned how to hold the violin.
When he got home, a red mark had already formed on his neck from the friction.
In the second lesson, he learned to play open strings.
"SCREE—SCRAPE—"
The first time Chen Zhuo drew the bow across the E string, the shrill sound made even him shudder.
The teacher in charge, Teacher Zhao, was a strict middle-aged woman. She held a small wooden stick and tapped it on Chen Zhuo’s elbow.
"Relax your wrist! Don’t be stiff as an iron rod! It needs to be flexible!"
Chen Zhuo was in agony.
His brain knew how to apply the force—use the principle of leverage to transfer the weight of his arm to the bow.
But his body couldn’t do it.
In his six-year-old body, the smaller muscle groups were simply not under his control.
He tried to relax, but his hand would stiffen against his will. He tried to draw the bow straight, but it always slid crookedly onto the fingerboard.
"This child..." Teacher Zhao shook her head and said to Liu Xiuying, who had come to pick him up, "His hand is too stiff. And it seems he... has no feel for music."
"No feel for music?" Liu Xiuying’s heart sank.
"Yes."
Teacher Zhao was blunt.
"When other children play, even though it sounds awful, you can feel their emotion—some urgent, some slow. When your Chen Zhuo plays, it’s like he’s completing a task. He’s not listening to the music; he’s solving a math problem."
Teacher Zhao was right.
Chen Zhuo was indeed solving a problem.
When he practiced at home, he never thought about emotions like beauty or sadness.
His mind was completely filled with:
’Bow speed must be even... contact point must be two centimeters above the bridge... pressure must be constant...’
He had turned playing the violin into a mechanical engineering project.
He practiced like this for three months.
Other children could already stumble their way through "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," but Chen Zhuo was still practicing open strings and scales.
Chen Jianguo was starting to think about giving up.
"Maybe we should just stop? Every time he practices, it’s like he’s marching to his execution. I’ve never once seen him smile."
Until one evening.
Chen Jianguo was adjusting their old black-and-white television. The signal was poor, filling the screen with static and an accompanying, piercing electronic hum.
Chen Zhuo was practicing his violin nearby.
His violin was a little out of tune.
Violins are very sensitive to temperature and humidity and need to be tuned every day.
Normally, he would have to wait for his lesson next week to have the teacher tune it, or a parent would help. But Chen Jianguo was tone-deaf and couldn’t hear the pitches correctly at all.
Chen Zhuo put down his bow and held the violin upright.
He reached out and twisted the tuning pegs on the scroll.
PLINK, PLINK...
He plucked the A string.
In his ears—or rather, in his brain—the sound wasn’t a "La," but a frequency.
Hz.
The international standard pitch.
Although he didn’t know the number 440, he remembered the feeling of the sound from when Teacher Zhao had last tuned the violin.
The vibration of that waveform had left an absolute coordinate point in his brain.
The current sound was a bit flat; the frequency was too low, probably only around 435 Hz.
Chen Zhuo twisted the peg, tightening it a little.
"PLINK."
Hz.
’Almost there.’
He fine-tuned it again, his finger’s movement almost imperceptible.
"PLINK."
Hz.
’Perfect.’
That sense of seamless order had returned, just like with the repaired pocket watch, sending a pleasant shiver through his brain.
Next were the E, D, and G strings.
The violin is tuned in fifths. The interval between any two adjacent strings is a perfect fifth, with a frequency ratio of 3:2.

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