Becoming Margaret Leng Tan: The Toy Piano Virtuoso Who Couldn’t Stop Counting

by Felix Cheong

How small can greatness get? If you’re Margaret Leng Tan, a toy piano will do very nicely, thank you very much.

Tan is Singapore’s most unusual musical export, a Juilliard-trained musician who made the toy piano her calling card. For turning child’s play into serious art, she received Singapore’s National Arts Council Cultural Medallion, the Lion City’s highest arts accolade, in 2015. Now she’s the subject of a children’s picture book, Becoming Margaret Leng Tan, written by Low Lai Chow and illustrated by Dan Kuah.

And here’s the twist: much of the book is not really about music at all. It is about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

OCD, of course, was not always understood the way it is today. During Tan’s formative years in the 1960s, compulsive behavior, such as repetitive counting, was more likely to be waved away by older folks as peculiar, eccentric, odd.

Odd, before OCD even had a name.

Her condition can be crippling. Yet the same centrifugal force finds its focus for Tan in the piano, which Tan takes up, excels at—after all, music is as much about counting as it is about an ear for harmony—and eventually studies at Juilliard, becoming the school’s first woman to earn a doctorate.

But there is no smooth staircase to scale here. If anything, it’s snakes and ladders. Her glittering concert career takes her around the world, then suddenly bottoms out. She stops performing altogether and ends up walking other people’s dogs.

Why? Because of the voice in her head: do this, do that. Not this, not that. For a musician who has to hear herself, that inner noisemaker can be debilitating.

Then John Cage enters the score.

When Tan meets the avant-garde composer in 1981, he becomes mentor, collaborator and, in a sense, her licence to play truant from her classical music training. Soon, she is teasing, coaxing and forcing music out of teapots, tuna cans and music boxes, turning the screws on piano strings, uncaging sounds from whatever has no business calling itself an instrument.

After Cage dies in 1992, she picks up the toy piano, which soon becomes inseparable from her identity as a performer.

There is something wonderfully Singaporean about Tan sitting before a toy piano. An overachiever from a small country, punching notes above her weight, making an outsized international career from an undersized piano.

The metaphor almost writes itself.

Although it is a picture book, Becoming Margaret Leng Tan often takes a leaf from comics. Some pages break into panels, particularly in scenes showing Tan experimenting with ways to make the piano talk. Kuah, after all, is no stranger to comics, having released the horror anthology 174 in 2023.

 To depict Tan’s obsessive counting, Kuah lets numbers hover, multiply and crowd her field of vision, drawing on projections from her one-woman show Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, first staged in Australia in 2020. He may borrow from an existing visual vocabulary, but his own obsessive attention to detail makes the images distinctly his.

Another instance comes in the scene of Tan’s childhood home. The mosaic tiles are rendered with almost alarming precision. The page has the freeze-frame symmetry of a Wes Anderson film: neatly divided, artistically ordered. Not a pixel out of place.

Heck, even the artwork itself acquires an OCD-like quality.

Shadows are used more dramatically than you might expect in a children’s book. They stretch across rooms and swallow corners, perhaps shadowing the darker aspects of Tan’s condition. One particularly striking spread show two versions of her facing herself, mouths open in a scream so silent you can see it. The conflict is internal, but Kuah gives it a visceral face-off.

Unpaginated, Becoming Margaret Leng Tan

Low’s choice of words often mirrors Tan’s OCD. Certain words recur, such as “UNSTOPPABLE” in caps. The repetition does more than drum home the theme; it gives the prose a slightly compulsive pulse.

But Low, who has nine children’s books to her name, makes Tan neither a victim nor a diagnosis. The musician is always a person first, living with a mind that ticks and tocks like a metronome, sometimes like a motor, sometimes a menace. But always musical.

Towards the end of the book comes another startling revelation.

In 2022, Tan lost the sight in her left eye, something she had kept private until the launch of this book. For a musician, dependent on reading scores, navigating instruments and coordinating movement, the news could have been devastating.

Yet she kept performing.

Still, biographies of exceptional people, especially this first title in a Becoming Extraordinary series by publisher Marshall Cavendish, can sometimes make success look entirely self-generated. For readers not familiar with her career, Tan’s story needs a little socioeconomic context. She came from a family with the means to pay for piano lessons and, later, an overseas education. She had access to a world many working-class children could never enter. In other words, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital.”

None of this, of course, diminishes her achievement. But talent needs opportunity before it can reach out for destiny.

Perhaps that is why Becoming Margaret Leng Tan works so well. Low and Kuah do not offer us a woman who succeeds despite being odd. They show how oddness, discipline, privilege, failure, opportunity and sheer stubbornness have to keep sounding against one another, dissonant but no less creative, until something recognizably hers emerges.

So, how small can greatness get?

Big enough to fit inside a toy piano, and it rings true.

Felix Cheong is a Singapore-based author who has published 33 books across different genres, including eleven graphic novels. He is the author of the graphic medicine books In the Year of the Virus – A Poignant Look Back at the Time When the World Was Affected by the Coronavirus (art by Eko) and A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria (illustrated by Ritwick Roy & Riddhi Trivedi). In January 2027, Felix will publish another graphic medicine book, Opium: A War Story (art by Cheah Sinann). It’s about opium addiction and two Singapore doctors who start an anti-opium movement in 1905.