by Su Tong
Dance of Heartbreak
Men, too, have hopes; soft, malleable things, like aquatic plants. In general, they are hidden deep inside, but the pain they conceal can easily well up again, if some little fish takes a nibble at the sore spot. This sensation is known as recurrence, or wish recurrence.
My thickset frame means I’m destined for a life without dance, but the story I wish to relate took place in my childhood. People are all identical when they’re small, and I was as lively and clever as the rest of you. And I was a good dancer. It’s true. As a kid, I was a very good dancer.
It happened when I was in Grade 4, at Red Flag Elementary School; but even today the whole affair remains fresh in my mind. On one enchanting spring afternoon, Ms Duan Hong called me over from the rope-skipping crowd. She held my hand as we crossed the playground while all the other children cast envious glances my way. Ms Duan was a lady in her fifties who wore white running shoes and had started teaching dance and choir when my father was still at school. I should tell you that if Ms Duan took you by the hand it meant you were in luck. Perhaps you were going to be chosen for the cultural propaganda team.
When I came into the office with Ms Duan, I immediately spotted Li Xiaoguo standing by the window, drawing chalk airplanes and artillery on the glass. Ms Duan said, ‘Xiaoguo, behave. Take a seat and don’t fidget.’ He came running over with a titter and sat down on the one and only stool. His face had been brightly painted with rouge, and he cocked his head, looking contemptuously at me with the whites of his eyes. I knew what he meant by this. He meant, ‘What are you doing here?’
Ms Duan made me stand up straight and then, her hand tightly clasped on the cosmetic case, she started to do my make-up. Her fingers worked tenderly and ably over my features. Finally, she clapped her hands, subjecting me to close scrutiny and proclaimed, ‘Yes! Now you look like a Red Child.’ At this point Xiaoguo almost knocked over his stool. Pointing at me, he shouted, ‘Ms Duan, he’s not pretty! He hides crickets in his desk. He disturbs class discipline.’ She just laughed and patted Xiaoguo on the head. ‘You’re pretty and he’s pretty too. You’re both Red Children.’
At that moment, Xiaoguo had made me so angry I could’ve dragged him out and shot him dead – so what if his dad was some stupid chairman? But I knew I couldn’t thrash him in the office, because all the teachers watched out for him. In any case, Ms Duan soon had me doing a movement where I hopped up and down while pretending to wipe windows. I had to repeat this movement ad infinitum, but in the end she called for me to stop and said, ‘Excellent hopping; just like a Red Child.’ She fished out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off my face. ‘Tomorrow you and Xiaoguo will come and practice together, OK?’
I suddenly realized that the movement I had been doing was straight out of The Red Children. This was a dance for twelve, six boys and six girls, holding brooms, mops and rags, and making cleaning movements. It was always the finale of our school’s performance, but now the window-cleaning boy had changed schools, so Xiaoguo and I were being called in to substitute. Ms Duan said, ‘Now you two make certain you practise, and whoever dances better will be selected for the performance.’
Only many years later did I realize that what she had meant was for us to compete. I didn’t catch on at the time; back then all I knew was how much I hated Xiaoguo. I was just itching to ask Cat Head, Jia Lin and some of the others in the big kids’ gang to break his legs. No doubt Xiaoguo’s thoughts were equally truculent. ‘The east wind blows, the war drums boom, now we’ll see who’s scared of whom.’ There was a song that went like that.12
I was in fact only provisionally a member of the cultural propaganda team; not really so very glorious a position. The thirteen children of the cultural propaganda team gathered in the big classroom on Wednesdays and at weekends, and, at the sound of the music, began dancing around Ms Duan like chicks around an old hen. I mingled among them, filled with the kind of joy you don’t ever forget.
What I will relate next concerns the dancing of another child. She was an extraordinarily beautiful little girl and her name was Zhao Wenyan, which means swallow. Later, when I read about the art theorist Cai Yi’s ‘typical image’,13 I felt that he must have had someone like her in mind; no doubt this association was inspired by impressions of her back then. For me, she was an archetype.
And she was the Red Child who held the mop.
Wenyan’s mother had been a dancer, but afterwards, why I never knew, she kept trying to hang herself. This happened over and over again, but she never actually succeeded in taking her life. From what I heard, it was always Wenyan who found her and, screaming and wailing, would slide a chair under her mother’s feet. Her mother then had no choice but to resign herself once more to soldier on. I had seen her mother on the street before; she looked almost identical to Wenyan, except she was a little taller and a little older. She had two maroon stripes on her neck, groove-like scars, left from the noose.
Once Wenyan had her make-up on, she had the power of an angel to induce love and pity, but as soon as she came on stage she began to get nervous. And as soon as she was nervous, she squatted down and peed onstage. This is called urinary incontinence, and I’ve heard that many beautiful girls are afflicted with this peculiar illness in their childhood. That the propaganda team had not dropped Wenyan was in the first instance because of her extraordinary beauty and in the second because Ms Duan couldn’t bear to part with her. Ms Duan said, ‘She’s had so many frights, poor child.’
I’ve never met another girl like her; she was a little child of glass. Yes, exactly, a little child of glass, beautiful in her sorrow, glowing cautiously with some emerald light. She wore a little patterned dress, and when she ran to centre stage, radiating her innate beauty, she held her mop with such natural elegance that it might have been a bouquet of fresh flowers. But as soon as you saw her squat down, you knew that before long the cotton dress would be wet. Even someone who was only a little boy at the time could never have forgotten this archetypal image of her, and that’s all there was to it.
Then, on another enchanting spring afternoon, I fought with Xiaoguo. I made his little garlic-bulb nose bleed, while he kept trying to pull down my trousers and rip them. I had to cover up the seat of my pants with my school bag all the way home that day.
Analysis today would conclude that I lost. Xiaoguo was a wily old fox.
The east wind blows, the war drums boom. Spring passed very quickly.
Only seven or eight days before the performance, Ms Duan called me aside and whispered secretly into my ear, ‘Dance nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ That was precisely the whispering-in-your-ear kind of woman Ms Duan was, a rare kind of woman for this world. Her waist was more supple than an eight-year-old’s, her dance steps more graceful than the bending of a willow in the wind. She had danced that way since her youth and forgotten to get married or have children, so that she was an old maid.
That whisper was the last time she ever spoke to me. During the rehearsal that followed, something terrible happened. On that day Ms Duan’s cheeks were flushed; as always, she was leading the team in our dance like an old hen with her chicks: ‘Arms a little higher.’ And then, ‘Why do you always forget to smile? You must smile. Smile beautifully like little red flowers.’ I remember Ms Duan gripping Xiaoguo’s arm to prevent it stiffening, but Xiaoguo was a born nincompoop, and his arms kept flailing randomly in the air like wooden rods. Ms Duan leapt in and out of our dancing ring, hopping about and mimicking window-cleaning movements. I saw her as she suddenly stopped moving, and her two lovely arms hung in the air freeze-framed. During the space of that moment, the light in her eyes slackened, then I watched as her plumpish body fell backwards.
Wenyan was the first one to burst into tears; before the rest of us reacted, she cried out, ‘Ms Duan’s dead!’ and ran down to the office to fetch a teacher. After a spell of confusion, we thirteen children went along to see Ms Duan at the hospital.
It was called cerebral thrombosis
: a sudden attack brought on by high blood pressure. Given how much we understood of the workings of the world, we children were unable to comprehend the connection between haemorrhage and death. I had always assumed that school teachers were immortal; that if Ms Duan had passed on for a moment, she would return to life a second later. But the next day, as soon as I arrived at school, I heard that Ms Duan had died. Wenyan was bent over her desk, bawling her heart out. Her school bag was flung out on the desk, and inside was a pair of white running shoes – they had dropped off Ms Duan’s feet on the way to the hospital.
The concept of a connection between death and dancing was even harder to grasp. It was as if Ms Duan was leading us as we danced, but how was it that she suddenly had one foot in the Kingdom of the Dead?
People die all the time. Sometimes it comes heavy as a mountain, sometimes as light as a goose feather.
After Ms Duan’s death, I assumed the propaganda team had been disbanded because no one called me to practices. Those were enchanting spring afternoons – in simple stories, it is best to use phrases like ‘enchanting spring afternoon’ quite frequently in order to avoid complicating a simple matter. The redbud tree blossomed. Wenyan started to wear skirts. And that’s all there was to it.
One day, as I walked past the window of the big classroom, I discovered to my amazement that Wenyan, Xiaoguo and the others were rehearsing; the principal and a strange woman were conducting them. There were twelve children – six boys, six girls – but not me.
What about me? Hadn’t they said I would go on and Xiaoguo would go to hell? I leaned on the windowsill and peered in at them; I wanted to go in, but didn’t dare. I couldn’t understand how they could have dropped me and picked Xiaoguo, that champion nincompoop. It was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of loss. I was twelve at the time. A sense of loss at that age! And dance being to blame. First they say they’ll let you perform, then they suddenly don’t even want you at rehearsal; how could you not feel hurt?
On yet another enchanting spring afternoon, I fought Xiaoguo again. This time I held him down in the sandbox so he couldn’t rip my trousers. With superhuman strength, I began to fill Xiaoguo’s mouth with sand, then suddenly I remembered what Ms Duan had said, ‘Dance nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ So I let Xiaoguo go and instead broke into tears myself. I was facing a broken-down wall, and vaguely through my tears I saw that outside the wall was a rapeseed field filled with grieving golden flowers. This time I had won the fight, and yet incomprehensibly I was the one who had ended up in tears. It was the most embarrassing incident in all the historical records of my brilliant youth.
The east wind blows, the war drums boom. Spring passed very quickly.
The day I feared most finally arrived: the day of the performance. The venue was the school’s large assembly hall. On the day our school had a kind of orioles-singing-swallows-darting-one-hundred-flowers-contending-bunting-flattering-firecracker-popping atmosphere. The children, ignorant of worldly affairs, were scampering and scurrying all over the place, making so much merry noise that the heavens threatened to fall. I was the only heavy-hearted one, sitting straight-backed like an old man in the last row of the classroom, playing with a box of matches. I piled the matchsticks on top of one another and then took out a little mirror to reflect the light onto them. Slowly, the pile of matchsticks spluttered and caught fire. The smell of burning saltpetre surrounded me and drifted through the deserted classroom.
Would you have played such heartbroken games when you were twelve years old?
Carrying my stool, I fell into the back of the line of my team as we trooped into the assembly hall. Enchanting spring. No one wanted to know what was troubling me. Who ever wants to know what’s troubling you? Suddenly our group began to make a great hullabaloo as the six boys and girls – the twelve red children with their makeup on – processed past with their props. Xiaoguo, that nincompoop, was of course among them. His face was made up redder than any of them. I turned round in order to avoid looking at them, and then I heard the principal jog up to Wenyan and say, ‘Don’t be nervous, and whatever happens, you must hold it.’ I knew what the principal meant, but I reflected that if I were Wenyan I certainly would not hold it, I’d definitely pee, since they were blind enough to choose Xiaoguo and not me.
As you know, in the early seventies, the great masters of dance were, by default, children, and anyway, watching kids bounce around was better than watching nothing at all. So for the performance that day, all the old men and women in the street had brought along their stools and chairs and sat glowing happily at the back. I saw Xiaoguo’s grandma and Wenyan’s grandpa, both looking as joyous as if they were on the stage themselves. I felt like there was something pernicious about the merriness of the world that day.
Then it was the turn of the red children to begin their piece. The six boys and six girls danced in two rows, holding brooms, mops and rags, and started to clean. I saw how Wenyan’s eyebrows were knitted like an old woman’s; she made only a few dance moves and then squatted down. The principal, standing offstage, immediately covered his head and rolled his eyes at the sky.
Wenyan couldn’t hold it after all. She had peed again.
I bolted up, clapped and laughed out loud. The sound of my laugh was keen and resounding. The class teacher rushed at me from the front row and pushed me down onto my stool, but still I couldn’t stop myself, and I opened my mouth wide and carried on laughing. Then the class teacher slapped me in the face.
Would you have laughed like that when you were twelve?
And I guess that was the story I wanted to tell you about dancing.
I’ll need to tell you about what happened to the other two kids to round off the story. Before Wenyan even got to high school, she was selected for a dance school in Shanghai. From what I heard the selection committee took one look at her face and those two long legs and refused to part with her. She really was a born dance genius. Later, I was lucky enough to see her do the lotus dance, and let me tell you, it was a far cry from The Red Children. She moved you to tears with her beauty when she danced.
Once I was watching TV with a friend and I said, ‘She used to pee as soon as she got on stage.’ My friend laughed; he thought I was just talking rubbish.
‘I’m not kidding. I danced with her once. Why would I lie to you?’ And that’s all there was to it. In the first year that Wenyan danced in Shanghai, her mother hanged herself; now that Wenyan wasn’t at home, her suicide attempt had finally succeeded. I don’t know what it was she died for. In the end, it was as if Wenyan’s mum had a furrow in her neck. It was the mark left by a noose.
That leaves the nincompoop Xiaoguo. If I tell you what happened to Xiaoguo, you’ll really think I’m making things up. Xiaoguo’s the handicapped guy on our street who goes around in a wheelchair. One day, while he was working on a construction site putting up scaffolding, he fell ten metres through the air and broke both legs.
I think that’s called a tragic fate. A tragic fate is when you’ve only danced once in your life but you break your legs. And that’s all there was to it.
I often discuss dance with my wife. As it happens, my wife was one of the twelve red children back then. Remember? She was the one dancing with the broom. Now she hates it when I talk about dance with her. She says, ‘Men who like dancing disgust me.’ And when I think about it, she’s right. It’s not quite normal for men to like dancing.
Can you tell me what dance is all about? My wife asked me once, ‘When did you first fall in love with me?’ and I said, ‘When you were a kid in that Tibetan dance – you used to throw your sleeves back and forth; it was incredibly beautiful.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Did I do a Tibetan dance?’
I watched her expression carefully. It was totally blank and not at all like she was pretending. I could only conclude that she really had forgotten about her own dance.
And that’s all there was to it.
Can you tell me what dance is really
all about?
The Water Demon
The river flows east. The boat, filled with oil drums, floated wearily on the water’s surface. The rhythmic sweeping of the oars seemed hesitant, even shy. The oil boat passed under the arch of the bridge and emerged, leaving behind an oil trail of irregular width, its colour changing depending on the reflected light. The oil boat moved along on the open expanse of the river’s main current, and the girl on the bridge could see the seven colours of the rainbow glistening in its wake.
The girl stood on the bridge, and gradually saw off the oil boat with her gaze. She could just make out another bridge, and a bend in the river where the boat disappeared. By the bridge was a factory, which stood out because of its chimney stacks and a cylindrical tower. The girl didn’t know what the tower was for. Though it was far away, its discharge culvert was clearly visible where it met the water, and the girl used her glass prism to shine light on it. Just as she had expected, it was too far away and she failed to make a glare, so the tower was completely unaffected. The clouds in the western sky, floating across the water surface, began to redden, and the sky around the tower began to dim.
Yes, the sky began to dim. The girl saw her aunt walk past the bridgehead and quickly turned away, but she had already been spotted.
‘Look at you! Why don’t you stay at home instead of running around on a scorcher like this? What are you doing here, anyway?’
The girl said, ‘Nothing. My mum said I could go out.’
Her aunt said nothing more and turned to leave, but when she had walked off the bridge she turned back and yelled, ‘Don’t be home too late. If you’re going to stand there like a lemon, they’re bound to come and bully you again.’
