Olympia Moy, a 1L Stein Scholar at Fordham Law, was featured in The Atlantic regarding how she transformed her family’s small music school business into a space for civic change.
Olympia Moy, a 35-year-old with a background in nonprofit work and advocacy who helps manage her parents’ music school, shares the struggle of reconciling her legacy with that of her parents. “My parents would have rather I had come back for a cushy job and a steady income,” she says. “I came back thinking of their business as fertile ground for civic change.”
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While my mom was studying piano at the Mannes School of Music, she was also teaching English and tutoring piano on the side. She also helped open a little candy shop with her mother on Bayard Street. At that time everyone was hustling. A lot of people here had just been uprooted after the Cultural Revolution in China. Coming here, they had to build something from scratch.
By the time I was born, she had turned her piano tutoring into a small business, which she ran out of a residential apartment in Chinatown. My parents had bought that building and the ground-level medical practice, which my dad took over. In the apartment above, we had an upright piano in the living room, another in the kitchen, and in another room there was a Steinway. My mom gave piano lessons, and we held recitals where 15 or 20 people would pile into the apartment and listen to students play.
When my parents bought an apartment building on Henry Street, my mom started running the Florentine School of Music, Art and Academics out of the storefront space. She was selling upright pianos, and people would come to Chinatown, buy a piano, and take it back to Long Island, or Brooklyn, or wherever. In the back, there were two rooms for piano lessons. Then that grew pretty quickly to the point where there were a couple of hundred students, with three to five classes going on at a single time—classes, not even private lessons. There were so many parents, and kids, and class after class coming and going. That’s how I grew up.
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Meanwhile, I think my parents would rather I had come back for a cushy job and a steady income instead of transforming or redefining their legacy, or making them more visible than they want to be. You know, I came back thinking of their business as fertile ground for civic change—and they would rather I not use the family name and not use the family resources. I think my mom feels like she already had a legacy, you know? Quiet, sustained work over time.
Now I’ve been working here for eight years, doing this work on community building, which has taken on different forms over time. I helped organize the first-ever LGBT contingent to march in Chinatown’s Lunar New Year Parade in 2010. I did a lot of that work in the closet, actually. It’s common for a lot of queer Asians to be out in the mainstream community—and proud to be queer and Asian. But when they come back to the Chinese community, they go back into the closet. And I was kind of like that. But when this queer group was facing resistance for marching in the Chinatown parade, I kind of took on a more active role to make it happen.
