Little Wonder

One Tuesday morning, as Song unlocked the door, River raced past her and shouted, “What is that?”

“It’s called a piano,” she said, examining the latest acquisition of Apartment 14A. “It makes music, the music we’re always listening to.”

She had seen a piano in person once, in the window of a shopping mall. It had been white, the size of an elephant, with curves that gleamed under the spotlights. This one was more like a donkey, stout and plain, made of some kind of plastic, but when she lifted the lid, she saw that the keys inside were the same, those slippery surfaces, that dizzying run of black and white, like looking down a staircase.

Already, the piano’s legs were scabbed over with stickers, and one of the keys was smeared with what Song hoped was chocolate. As she pol­ished the key with her finger, she bumped against the neighboring key as well. River clapped his hands over his mouth in gleeful horror at the sour twang.

“Orange and Yellow,” he said, and he pressed his stomach to the bench and hauled his legs up and around. He sat with his back straight and his feet dangling, waggling, and his chin cleared the keyboard but not by much; he was four years old, and small because his parents were small.

He raised an index finger like he had an idea. Then he pressed a key, letting his finger sink to the bottom. A smile erupted across his face, his eyes curving with his mouth and sparkling under the lights.

“Gray,” he said, the same way he would point at the sky and say, Gray, a simple proclamation of a fact.

He pressed a different key and said, “Green,” and he declared the other keys Red and Blue and Purple. Song didn’t know the actual names of the keys, so she didn’t correct River as he named them after the colors of the rainbow.

“Gray. That’s my favorite,” River decided, going back to the first key and making that melancholic sound over and over, and Song wondered if that was what he heard when she spoke.

“Yellow,” she challenged now, picturing the rapeseed fields in bloom around her husband, and River released Gray and tapped the note she had polished earlier. “That’s Yellow? Good.”

She left River at the piano, tapping keys and spouting colors. As she washed the dishes in the kitchen, she gazed out of the window at the skyscrapers hovering in the fog. In the summer, the pollution took on a mystical quality, drifting and dreamlike, and on the fourteenth floor, she felt like she was standing at the top of a mountain.

As Song scoured the stovetop, which was crusted with grease, she heard music.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .

She didn’t know where it was coming from, at first. Setting aside the steel wool, she stuck her head out of the kitchen. She called for River and there was no reply but for the music.

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky . . .

She hurried to the living room. River was right where she had left him, sitting at the piano. A strange feeling stole over her as the music continued.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .

Coming up behind her son, she rested her hands on his shoulders. The compact furnace of his body warmed her palms as she watched him play. He hopped down the keys with two index fingers and she felt, through his T-shirt, the stretch of tender muscles.

Landing on the last note with the force of an exclamation point, he sprang away from the piano and thumped his chest. “Mama! Did you see?”

She sat on the piano bench and pulled him into her lap. “Now where did you learn to do that?”

River stretched out his hand and placed it carefully against her throat. “Blue-Blue, Green-Green, Red-Red, Green.”

Turning to the piano, he repeated the colors while tapping at the keys, picking out the melody like it was laid out across the keyboard and all he had to do was follow the rainbow.

Song gave him a thumbs-up. “Awesome. You are too awesome,” she said, and he hugged himself and giggled, tickled by her seriousness.

When she kissed his palm, it smelled like cornmeal and grape juice. She held up his hand, turning it over, and she saw that there was grace in those fingers. She straightened them one by one, those small fingers, those elastic bones.

River had taught himself to do something that she didn’t know how to do. He had listened to her sing this song and he had made the piano sing it back to him. Song glowed with delight. Her son was something indeed.

An image filled her mind, the pianist she had seen all those years ago on TV, and she imagined River in a sparkling purple suit, seated at a piano as grand as the one in the shopping mall, and it was the prettiest picture she had ever seen, a revelation.

Who knew? Not her, but her son, a pianist.

Song stopped by the music store in the shopping mall, and the salesman called her Beautiful Lady and handed her a direc­tory of music teachers.

“You are certainly an imaginative mama,” said the first teacher, laugh­ing, when Song called later that night. “What you’re describing is not possible.”

Song worked her way down to the bottom of the list, and by the time she dialed the last number, she had lost hope. Professor Li was the best piano teacher in Harbin, according to the salesman, which meant he would also be the most expensive and the most selective. He would brush her off as the other teachers had.

When Professor Li answered, Song heard the tinkling of notes in the background. She told him what River had done that morning and he said immediately, in a voice as polished as the piano she imagined him playing, “Come see me. Tomorrow night.”

The next evening after work, they walked into Professor Li’s compound and took the eleva­tor to his floor. When the doors opened, they heard music, big, warm crashes of sound that heralded their arrival, like River was a king and she was a queen and they had an army behind them. The music unfurled like a red carpet, leading them to a door, and River fell behind as Song marched ahead. She turned around and was spellbound by what she saw.

River stood in the middle of the hallway and he turned and he turned and he turned. With inquisitive fingers, he reached out as if to touch the music, and he turned his palms up as if to catch it, and joy bubbled out of his throat as he seized the air, grabbing notes by the fistful.

The crashes of sound took on the shape of a melody, the piano open­ing its arms and sweeping them up. River went still. His smile was a wide sky and he closed his eyes, soaring.

Song’s eyes filled at the sight of her son. The way she loved music was not the way he loved music. Right now, he looked like he had the peace of someone who had lived for a hundred years, and he had just run into an old friend.

She grasped his hands and led him into a twirl. She swung their arms in and out and together they danced through the hallway. Song felt her­self being lifted through time, the music bearing her back to the old home, depositing her in that meadow and under those trees where she had danced when she was twenty-one.

Four years ago, River had fit in the crook of her arm, and she had car­ried him as they danced. Now he stood on his own two feet, waving his arms and jerking his legs, and eventually, when she was no longer young and strong, he would carry her as they danced.

But whether it was four years from now or fourteen or forty, there she would still be, dancing with her son. She saw that the framework of her life would remain the same and she saw that the two of them within it would not, and that was, in her eyes, the picture of love.

Crossing arms and locking hands, the two of them spun like planets, gathering speed as they pulled each other closer.

When the walls stopped spinning, Song took River’s hand, with its sticky palm and strawberry-stained fingertips.

“This is the one who’s going to teach you the piano. He’s going to teach you to play this song. Then you’ll be better than me and better than your Ba.”

River looked up at her. “How do you know?”

“Mama just knows,” she said, smiling down at him as she knocked on the door.

The music stopped. The door swung open, and there was Professor Li.

“Please come in.” He extended a hand, immaculate, the fingers cool and elegant, the fingernails clean. His clothes were pressed and his hair was parted and not a thread or strand was out of place; his appearance was precise as a brass watch, polished to a high shine.

“Good evening, young man,” he said. Then he looked at Song and said, “Good evening,” and his gaze was slow and steady as he spoke, as if they were discussing something of deep meaning. Song blushed a little to see the fire that darkened his eyes, passion, not for her, but something she could feel nonetheless.

He led them into the apartment and Song noted that he walked with his hands in a peculiar position, palms facing backward, and when they sat in the living room, she looked around for more clues as to who he was.

“Mama, look.” River tugged her hand, pointing at the piano. With its angled wing and blinding sheen, it looked like an airplane banking out of the sun.

“Your Ma tells me you can play.” Professor Li opened the keyboard lid. “Show me.”

River hid behind Song, sensing the teetering weight of the moment. Song nudged him.

“Play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ Listen to Mama.”

He did what she said, he was a good boy, her son, but he took his time shuffling to the piano and he dawdled on the bench until Song said, “Play, son,” and he plunked his hands on the keyboard and played.

He played the first note wrong, and he played the second note wrong, and heat crept into Song’s face as he played the third note wrong, too.

“I, I’m so sorry,” she stammered as River played a fourth wrong note, and she was shocked when Professor Li’s lips curved like a bow. He drew a finger down the center, shhh, and shook his head ever so slightly at Song.

After a few more notes, Song realized what Professor Li already knew. River wasn’t trying and failing to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” He was playing another song entirely.

“Tchaikovsky,” Professor Li said softly as the flames leapt in his dark eyes, and then Song remembered.

“That’s what we heard you playing through the door?”

Professor Li nodded. “It’s the greatest showpiece of all time.”

“When will my son be old enough to learn it?”

With a dry laugh, Professor Li said, “When will he have the endur­ance to run a marathon? When will he have the stamina to sprint to the top of a skyscraper? But with me at his side, yes. One day. I’ve never come across such a gift. Your son . . . he’s a little wonder.”

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From Little Wonder by Sophie Chen Keller.© 2026 by Sophie Chen Keller. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.  All rights reserved. Cannot be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.