When Jing-mei plays the piano at the talent show, it becomes crystal clear to everyone that she has not been practicing very much and that Mr. Chong, her partially deaf piano teacher, cannot hear well enough to judge the quality of her playing.

Prior to the performance, Jing-mei would play "a few bars and then [cheat]," looking at the sheet music over and over rather than memorizing the piece as she was told to do. She says that she mostly daydreamed when she was supposed to be practicing piano, and so she never truly learned the piece as well as she ought.

On the day of the talent show, Jing-mei feels very confident, as though she really is a piano prodigy who is about to make her debut. She is excited about how nice she looks with her dress and her bow, but she forgets to pay attention to her playing. When she hits her first wrong note, she begins to feel a chill throughout her whole body. Her hands continue to fly over all the wrong keys. Jing-mei feels as though she cannot stop herself, and she keeps hoping that her fingers will just land back on the right notes, but they never do. She hopes that the audience will not have noticed anything wrong, but they certainly do, and only Mr. Chong applauds her performance with warmth.

Before the performance, Jing-mei's mother had bragged to her friends about her daughter's natural talent at piano, unaware that Jing-mei wasn't taking her lessons seriously. Jing-mei expects her mother to shout after her failure at the talent show, but her mother's silent disappointment after the performance is unexpectedly worse.