When Juanita Tsu was just 5 years old, she knew she wanted to play the piano. While her father did not give her credit for perseverance at the time, she stuck to her keys, so to speak.
“He was afraid I was too young, that I’d just quit,” Tsu recalled. “But two years later I finally began piano lessons, and when I got older, when he saw how serious I was, he bought me a piano of my own.”
After all, music is in her bloodline. Her father was a classical music aficionado, an aunt sang opera, another was a pianist and piano teacher. And when Tsu was born in Shanghai in 1946, her mother named her Juanita after a popular love song.
Tsu took her love of piano all the way to the Reform Temple of Laguna Woods, where she is the music director, conducting and accompanying the choir at services every Friday.
On Sunday, June 30, she will lead the Temple choir in the Fran Baum Memorial Concert at the Performing Arts Center.
It would seem that Tsu was as far removed from Jewish culture as any outsiders, but throughout her studies and tenure at music schools, she made friends with many Jewish students.
“A lot of the music students at the time were Jewish, and the first words in Yiddish I learned were ‘oy gevalt,’” she recalled. “While visiting Shaker Heights in Cleveland, I went to synagogue, and at the oneg I fell in love with lox and bagels — no cream cheese,” she said, smiling at the memory.
From an early age, Tsu was determined to see the world and have the world know her through her music.
At 15, she entered the National Academy of Arts in Taiwan as a piano performance major.
Once through the academy – equivalent to junior high and high school – she was also fairly fluent in English and thus elected to continue her music studies in the United States.
“My mom had taught me English and bought me college-level books,” she said.
In 1964, she was accepted at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where she earned a bachelor of music degree.
Upon graduation, New York composer Gunther Schuller, whom she describes as an uncle via marriage, brought her to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she earned a master’s degree in music in 1971. She stayed in the area and taught piano until 1977 when she joined the music faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
It was there that she met and married a telecommunications expert from Hong Kong. The marriage ended after 10 years.
“I wanted to practice and perform music rather than raise a family,” Tsu said. “I am a thinker, and besides, I saw my students as my children.”
She said she was baptized into the Congregationalist Church in her mid-40s.
When she moved to Laguna Woods in 2000 to join her parents, who had lived here since 1987, Tsu was hired by the Reform Temple of Laguna Woods to become an accompanist to the choir.
“I was hired by a committee. I only had an oral interview (with then President Jayson Rome) and did not play piano for them,” she said.
After her first rehearsal, on Sept. 8, 2000, and meeting the entire congregation on Rosh Hashanah a month later, she had already made friends like Myrna Shannon, the liaison between the temple and the choir.
“I was proclaimed an honorary Jew,” Tsu said joyfully.
Eventually Tsu acquired enough knowledge of Hebrew (she does not speak it but understands the transliterations between Hebrew and English) to lead the choir and segue into the role of music director.
Tsu also performs with the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Choir and with Spring Wind, a Taiwanese church choir. She does not speak Taiwanese but Mandarin.
“I just love people,” she said, “and music is my language.”
