By Kelly Ng // The Tapestry Project SG
Given Eileen Chai’s illustrious athletic and musical careers, forged with much sweat and tears and undergirded by utter determination to excel, her pedagogy might be surprising.
The violin teacher and performer’s practice of teaching – under her music school Music Sparkles SG – is now centred on sharing a love of music, and teaching her budding musicians the freedom of expressing themselves through it.
Eileen is also a proponent of outreach through music. She runs 3am Music Collective, which brings musicians who share a desire to raise awareness for mental health issues. She also leads a group of young string players who brings their love of music to the community.
“The education system in Singapore already exerts much stress, and the last thing I want is for violin lessons to be another pressure point. So when a child has no time to practice, I modify the lesson to fit their bandwidth,” she said. “I’ve always believed that music has more functions than taking the exams. It is a gateway to mindfulness, a tool to learn about love and empathy, and an avenue for expression.”
Eileen, now 42, speaks from experience.
Some of her negative encounters while training abroad as a young gymnast have helped shape her music pedagogy.
Inspired by Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, who in 1976 became the first gymnast in Olympic history to be awarded the perfect score for her performance on the uneven bars, a young Eileen set her mind to be among the crème de la crème in the sport.
At seven, Eileen became the youngest artistic gymnast to qualify for the 1985 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games. In artistic gymnastics, athletes perform short routines on different apparatuses, such as the beam or uneven bars.
At nine, she travelled alone to undergo intensive training in Guangzhou, China, where her days started at 6am with runs around the track and conditioning exercises. It was followed by at least six-and-a-half more hours of gymnastics training each day.
On one hand, the physical rigour was fruitful for Eileen. Over the next decade, she went on to compete in another four SEA Games in gymnastics, track-and-field, and springboard diving. Ever the high achiever, Eileen later picked up the violin as an undergraduate and passed the Grade 8 examinations within a year.
But other aspects of her experiences training in China, as well as her days as a distinguished sportswoman, left longlasting and adverse consequences on her. Among other things, these childhood experiences include observing fellow young athletes being subjected to physical violence and being motivated by fear. For example, she saw local Chinese athletes forced to hold certain positions for up to two hours if they did not get it right the first time. They were also hit and slapped when they could not perfect a certain item, she recalled.
Although Eileen, as a foreign athlete, was not subject to the same treatment, these episodes left a profound psychological impact on her. “I lost all confidence in myself. I lived in constant fear of being judged, of doing wrong and being punished,” she said.
Even in her adulthood, Eileen would be easily triggered by remarks that people made, often overthinking, and was always anticipating the worst-case scenarios.
“My mind would be preoccupied by all the ‘what-if’s’. I had a tendency to twist the things that people say. For example, they may have asked a very innocent question, like, ‘How are you today?’ And I’d be thinking, ‘Wow, they know what I’m going through? I did something bad today?’ ” she said.
“Or, if they asked, ‘Hey, what is next for you?’ I’d be thinking, ugh, I’m useless.”
It was only in 2016 that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social performing anxiety.
PTSD affects many people who survive major, overwhelming experiences that were shocking, scary, or dangerous. Individuals with PTSD may be easily startled, feel tense, and experience angry outbursts, nightmares, etc.
A person with social performance anxiety exhibits symptoms of both social anxiety and performance anxiety. In Eileen’s case, she feels anxiety or fear in certain or all social situations, including doing everyday things in front of others, even eating or drinking. She is often afraid that she will be humiliated, judged, and rejected.
She recalled a situation in recent years when she was invited to watch a fellow musician’s performance.
She recalled: “For that entire day, I was gearing up my mind for (the performance). It didn’t help that my husband was overseas at that time. If not, he could have gone with me and if anything happened, I’d hide behind him like a kid. So I thought okay, we can do this. And I dressed up nicely and was going to get ready to go, when at the doorway suddenly my knees just gave way. I went into a meltdown and started to cry. And then I just couldn’t move.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that Eileen was better able to manage her condition. Her psychiatrist, Dr Ken Ung, recommended “inner child therapy” – which involves recognising and accepting things that caused pain during one’s childhood.
“I had to practice talking to my ‘kid self’ … learn to grieve my losses. So when some of these anxiety triggers surface, and they still do, I had to learn to explain to the ‘kid’ in me to let things go. And it was because of this that I slowly started to recover,” she said.
It is fitting that Eileen has been working with children as a violin teacher and performer. Her company, Chai360, which she co-founded with her husband, provides violin and viola lessons for kids and adults. Eileen and her students also perform for the community through a grounds-up movement named “Strings for Kindness”.
Music is her choice platform for giving back to the community, Eileen said, because it has great capacity to encourage communication, expression, and mindfulness.
“I never really learnt to express or communicate my feelings as a child. So now, whenever the kids come for lessons, I encourage them to express their feelings of the day. I ask them how they feel when they play a particular piece of music, and basically encourage them to have a chat about their thoughts and feelings with me,” she said.
“There is a story to every piece of music, and I encourage them to express that through their faces and their bodies while playing it.”
Because she understands how childhood experiences can profoundly shape one’s character and decisions later in life, Eileen wants to use her music classes to help children open up and share their personal stories, to know that they cared for, and to show care to people around them through their music.
“Music is special. I always find opportunities during lessons to share and encourage my students to play the music for their loved ones as a means of saying ‘thank you’ to them, to show gratitude for the help or friendship that they have received. I once had a student tell me that she wanted to use music to help people, so that she can give through music as well,” she said.
Images kindly provided by Ms Eileen Chai.
To read our previous interview click here.