Her Parents Wanted Her to Land a Cushy Job. She Wanted to Build Their Legacy

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an oral-history series where Aaron Reiss interviewed the young-adult sons and daughters of Chinatown shopkeepers about how they are helping to keep their families’ businesses alive.

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.”

I spoke with Moy in the spring of 2018. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

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