By process of elimination

He didn’t choose the clarinet. He didn’t really choose the band, either.

The story starts with a rejection. In secondary school in Singapore, every student signs up for a co-curricular activity, and Khang got into none of the ones he wanted. What was left came down to a teacher with a two-item menu: scouts, or band. Scouts came with Saturday school. Khang already played piano. He picked band — and you can decide for yourself how much of that was the love of music and how much was the lie-in.

Then the band handed him an instrument, and it wasn’t his first choice. He doesn’t even remember what his first choice was — which tells you exactly how much the clarinet was given to him rather than chosen. So here is the shape of it: the most deliberate person I know, the one who won’t let a single claim go ungrounded, arrived at the great musical love of his life by pure process of elimination.

Fifteen years later, he owns his own clarinets and still plays.

The conversion took, and then some. At the University of Washington — where he was, on paper, a computer science major — he picked up a second, unofficial title: the honorary music major. He earned it by geography. He spent most of his hours in the music building, not the CS one: wind ensemble, orchestra, daily practice on top of rehearsals, private lessons with Benjamin Lulich — principal clarinetist of the Seattle Symphony, who also teaches at UW as an artist-in-residence. Which is how a computer-science major lands in a world-class clarinet studio without leaving campus. He’ll admit, with no visible guilt, to skipping the odd class for it. “It was fun” is the entire defense, and honestly it holds up.

He still plays in a tight circle who take it as seriously as he does. There’s Not A Clarinet Choir — a Singapore collective his friends assembled from clarinetists of every background, the kind of group that picks a deadpan name and then actually backs it up, posting as @notaclarinetchoir on Instagram and YouTube — plus Ventus Band and the Philharmonic Winds, an established Singapore wind orchestra. The instrument he didn’t pick has followed him across two continents.

There’s a rule underneath all this, and it’s the most deliberate thing about how he plays. The clarinet is for fun — on purpose, as policy. As a kid he ground through graded piano exams, the ABRSM treadmill, and the grading slowly drained the joy out of it until he actively disliked the instrument; by his own line, he has since “returned his piano skills to his teacher.” He watched rigor kill one instrument and resolved that the clarinet would never get the same treatment. No exams, no grades, no turning it into a job. It stays the creative outlet, full stop.

Which would make him sound relaxed about it — except he owns three clarinets (two B-flats and an A), cheerfully calls that “really too many,” and is right now eyeing a new mouthpiece, a new barrel, maybe a new bell. “It is really a pay-to-win game,” he says, delighted. So the rigor didn’t disappear; it relocated. He won’t sit an exam, but he will absolutely min-max the hardware — because, as he puts it, he can make sounding better fun and meaningful in a way that “I got a cert” never was. He pours himself into the thing he can hear and refuses to perform for the certificate. Which, if you’ve read anything else here, is the whole man in miniature — just wearing a tuxedo.

Here’s the part that won’t fit the tidy accomplished-musician story: after fifteen years, he still gets the nerves, badly. And he is, by his own cheerful admission, known for squeaking — the clarinet’s signature betrayal, a reed’s way of broadcasting your heart rate to the room. I asked for the most memorable one, in front of someone he was trying to impress. He answered in eight words: “I am known for squeaking. Let’s stop there.” So we’ll stop there.

One last thing. Asked which instrument he’d want stranded on a desert island, he didn’t reach for anything romantic. He reached for logistics — the flute. “It is light, easy to carry around in a desert.” The honorary music major, optimizing again. Even the daydream comes with a packing list.