My Journey into the World of Dance

 I was born in Sacramento, California, in the autumn of 1998. At that time, my parents had just immigrated to America and were struggling to build a new life in the land of the free. Too busy to take care of me, my parents sent me back to China as soon as I was old enough to get on a plane. From the age of ten months to three years, I was constantly shuffled back and forth between my grandparents in China and my busy parents in the US. I settled in California for preschool, but I didn’t speak a word of English. Terrified of people, I was very shy and preferred to keep to myself. The teachers worried that I was anti-social, but the truth was that I quite enjoyed playing by myself. I’d sit in a corner and babble to myself and my invisible friends for hours. My parents said that I initially cried every day in preschool because I couldn’t understand English. After two weeks, I had somehow taught myself English (or my own interpretation of it), but nobody in preschool could understand me.

As a kid, I always had an inexhaustible amount of energy. If I wasn’t running around outside, then I was running around inside, pretending that the floor was lava or there was a bomb and screaming my head off. I loved being outdoors and spent many a summer barefoot in the grass and eating watermelon by the pool. My parents tried to instill some sort of order in me and get me to sit down and do something quiet and ladylike, but I was a wild child. I couldn’t sit still without going crazy. So at a young age, they signed me up for ballet and drama class, swimming and summer camps, hoping that I would somehow burn up all that energy. I never seemed to run out of steam, but I did manage to get very tan.

Growing up in America with Chinese parents, I felt like I lived a dual life. I spoke Chinese with my parents and grandparents back home, and English with my teachers and friends at school. I celebrated Halloween and Christmas and the Fourth of July, but also Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival. I was an only child and the pride of my family. I got good grades and my teachers praised me for being smart and responsible, so naturally I became quite selfish and conceited. My parents doted on me, and I developed nicely into a spoiled brat. As long as I kept my grades up, I could pretty much do whatever.

But as I grew older and started to spend more time with my friends instead of family, I began to get a little out of control. I always had a burning curiosity for life and a crazy determination to experience everything. Sometime during my elementary years, my shyness melted away and I became more sociable. I went to birthday celebrations and concerts, pool parties and sleepovers. I grew up on Disney Channel and Pop-Tarts, and watched and read the same things as my friends. At school, I didn’t have a single Chinese friend; at home, I stopped speaking Chinese. I was living the American dream, and I loved it.

By middle school, I just wanted to rebel against everything back home. I had always had a stubborn streak, as well as a spark of rebellion that my mom could never understand. On the surface, I still got good grades and was a model student, but back home, I was constantly at war. I hated the Chinese side of my life, thinking it made me different from my Western friends. I found my heritage lame and embarrassing, and as a teenager trying to fit in with her friends, I did everything I could to hide that part of my life.

Then, everything changed in the summer of 2010. Xian Yun Academy of the Arts opened in San Francisco, a two-hour drive from where I lived. Not only was it a bilingual school that taught academic courses, it also featured a dance curriculum that allowed students to study and train in classical Chinese dance as well as a mission to instill traditional values. At that time, I had never heard of classical Chinese dance, nor had I ever left home. Two hours away seemed like a different world, and I was dead set on not going.

My parents, however, were absolutely thrilled at this opportunity. They thought that by sending me to learn dance at a school filled with many other kids like me, I could learn discipline and endurance, as well as reconnect with the culture I was so determined to break away from. I, however, was horrified at the idea of leaving my entire life behind to go and dance with a bunch of Chinese people. I cried, I threw a fit, I even threatened to run away, but nothing I did could convince my parents otherwise. They had seen the destruction that society was wreaking upon me, and since they drove the cars and held the credit cards, I lost.

And so began my journey into classical Chinese dance. To be honest, I hated it at first. I wasn’t one of those people who discovered their passion from the beginning. In the early days, I just wanted to quit. This new lifestyle was so different from before, and I was tired and lonely and homesick. I was raised to never give up, but those days, I was so ready to throw in the towel. If anything got me through that period, it was the fact that for the first time, I was surrounded by a group of people so much like me. A lot of us were raised bi-culturally, yet many people seemed proud of their heritage. We watched the same American TV shows, yet we also sat through the same Chinese cartoons that our grandparents played for us. We ate burgers and pizza and drank soda, yet we were also raised on rice and noodles. In school we played American sports and games, yet we all knew Chinese songs and games as well.

Their enthusiasm was infectious, and slowly, I grew to be proud of my Chinese heritage. Before, I was constantly running away from my Chinese side, yet now I found myself returning to it more and more. I was dancing on the border between two cultures and loving the miracles that blossomed from this synergy. It was in this cultural sweet spot that I found the best of both worlds: Oreo bubble tea and pork floss pizza, black sesame ice cream and rice patty burgers. We would spend Saturdays watching American movies and eating ice cream sandwiches and Sundays shopping Chinatown and buying Asian pastries. In the era before Snapchat and Instagram, we went in big groups to the park to play hide and seek or the Chinese versions of tag instead of staying glued to computers and phones. We saved up our money to go to Asian stationery stores, then splurged big on stickers and notebooks and cute little pens. The next week we saved up again, then blew our savings on pretzels and candy and doughnuts at Safeway. It was a simple life, but a life better than any I had known before. I never knew how happy I could feel freezing a juice box and eating the sugary slush with friends, or how hard we could laugh from swinging on a hammock until we all flipped over and fell into the dirt.

That wasn’t to say life as a dancer was easy, though—those early years were unforgettable not only because we laughed together, but also because we struggled together. Dancing is a very demanding art form, and I don’t recall a single day that I didn’t have to endure in some way. At my very first audition, there was another male student. He was as stiff as a board, but unfortunately, I was even stiffer. Thus began my arduous transformation from a steel plank into a rubber band. I went home that first week drenched in sweat, covered in bruises, and so exhausted my soul felt hollow. When my alarm rang in the mornings, I felt so sore it ached to breathe, and I would just lie there like a corpse until I finally mustered enough courage to raise an arm and turn off the alarm. I lived for the end of dance class, and my favorite part of each day was the moment before I fell asleep at night, when I would try to stay awake just to savor the feeling of being absolutely immobile. I would dread looking at the clock every Sunday night, because I wanted to freeze time and make the weekend last forever.

But that’s the funny thing about time—no matter what happens, it just keeps ticking on. As the days blended into weeks and the weeks turned into months, dancing somehow became easier. Stretching wasn’t so painful anymore, and class wasn’t as unbearable. But in dance and in life, there are always higher peaks to shoot for. I’ll never forget the first time I got up from a front walkover—I thought I’d literally reached the apex of “difficult.” Little did I know, there was a whole other world of aerial techniques and dance formations that we would eventually be introduced to. In stretching class, as soon as we were able to go down in splits, our front legs were placed onto higher mats so we could work on over splits. There were front splits and side splits and a whole repertoire of back stretches. I remember feeling mind-blown the first time we were partnered up to sit on each other’s knees. Was there anything dancers didn’t stretch?! I was worried that soon we’d be stretching elbows or necks or something.

What was special about Xian Yun Academy, though, was that as we trained, we also got a taste of performing in front of a live audience. Sometimes we would travel to neighboring schools or events like local parades and festivals. These opportunities gave me my first taste of performing before an audience. I’ll never forget the first time I stood before a crowd—it was foreign and strange and way out of my comfort zone. With so many eyes staring me down, I felt like a sardine thrown into a flock of hungry seagulls, but as soon as the music started, I forgot about all that. I think somewhere inside me there was still a crazy little kid who just loved to laugh and have fun, and I let the excitement of making people smile drown out my fears and insecurities. The arts connect people through music and dance, and there’s no shorter distance between two people than laughter and joy. That day, I felt the indescribable sense of happiness that comes from making others smile. We might have gathered as strangers, but that day we left as friends. How many people can come home from an office job saying that they inspired huge crowds of people without saying a single word? From that moment, I knew that the performing arts would always be a part of my life.

We went through many things together in those painful early days, sharing laughs and sharing tears. We performed in high school auditoriums and Chinatown parades, danced in convention centers and on asphalt floors, and our friendships were solidified by one unforgettable memory after another. Eventually, these people became family to me, and I sometimes forgot I was an only child. In the two years I spent training in California, I became more social and cooperative, more open to ideas and less selfish. I learned to love the culture and diversity that make me who I am, and most importantly, I found my passion. Looking back, those two years had already taken me a million miles away from the brat who used to cry because she didn’t want to go to Chinese school on Saturdays.

I always thought that two years of dance training was a nice end to my crazy childhood, the last chapter in my book of youth. But how wrong I was! Little did I know how deeply I would be involved in the world of dance. Instead of the last chapter, this was only the prologue to my artistic career that would send me across the country to Fei Tian Academy of the Arts in New York, and continues today as I perform with Shen Yun.