dance like...the chairman is watching?

I’ve been dancing. There’s this Swedish art gallery/café downtown where many of my girlfriends take class on Wednesday nights. Most of them are talented, and I watch with envy as the music transforms their lithe bodies. I am not. I haven’t taken a dance class since third grade, when I gave up on ballet because, although the shoes were pretty, my pathetic attempts at a pirouette were not. I am heinously uncoordinated, and have almost no memory for dance steps. Luckily for me, this class is more of a modern/freestyle class, and there’s no scary instructor giving me the evil eye as I topple over time and time again. In China, I’ve been making a concerted effort to do things that I’m terrible at: if not here, then where? I am awkard and ungaingly.But increasingly, I am okay with that.

Yesterday’s class was an experience I won’t forget. We gathered in the studio around 7:00, this group of girls who share little in common except temporary residence in Kunming and a flare for movement. Though, there’s something about people who live in foreign places, I’ve realized. Perhaps by virtue of choosing to leave their lives and move halfway around the world, most everyone I’ve met has been warm and welcoming. They almost always have an interesting story: how did you get here? No one has the same answer, and many of these tales are far richer and wonderful than something I could ever create. In any case, these girls have taken me in, despite my paltry Chinese, utter uncoordination…and, at best, unsavory appearance.

See, we dance barefoot. My feet, unfortunately, are absolutely hideous. First of all, Kunming is a dirty city, and we’re forever weaving our way through grimy alleys and leaping over puddles. Secondly, the Chinese have tiny feet. In an attempt to prevent the layer of dirt that has sprouted over my feet like a second skin, I decided to purchase a pair of sneakers. They’re cheap here, and shoe stores abundant, so no big deal I thought. Wrong. As it turns out, very few stores carry my size (an 8 in the States, nothing unusual), and when I ask for my size in women’s shoes, the clerks usually laugh uproariously and steer me towards the men’s section. The other day, however, I discovered a pair of cute purple Converse for about 60 RMB, or about $10 USD—a steal, I thought. But of course, they only have the shoes in a size 7. Tired of the dirt, and also of feeling enormous, I decided to buy them anyway. Wrong move. This is not the first time I’ve gone to war with a pair of shoes—like any woman, I’ve spent weeks battling precarious stilettos or unrelenting sandals. But these Converse are made of rubber, and after wearing them for one day, I limped home from Chinese class certain that their purple canvass would be stained red from the bloody stumps that were now attached to my ankles. So anyway, I show up to class with no fewer than five Band-aids on each foot, already dismissing any illusion of grace I might have conjured.

But we danced for hours, and as the night wore on, I was able to forget more and more the inhibitions that weigh so heavily: the foot wounds, my clumsiness, the perpetual anxiety that’s wracked my brain and body since early last September. After a few hours, a few friends joined us. They wheeled out a piano, some bongos, and someone brought a saxophone. As their music filled the gallery, we danced- both sound and music improvised to some unspoken theme. Dancing on that light-filled stage, in a gallery filled with beautiful paintings of the Kunming skyline, giving and taking with friends I’ve known for two weeks and also a lifetime: catharsis. Suddenly, there’s nothing but me, and music, and movement.

Although, as it turns out, that’s not entirely true. Just below the stage, under a glass cover, lay a starkly white sculpture of an old, naked man, his disproportionately small penis glinting under the lights. The scene was eerily reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty: expectant somehow in his repose, I kept expecting someone to bend down, kiss him, and awaken him to the music. Yet, after class, reading the tag underneath the sculpture, I’m glad no one did. The man, as it turns out, was Chairman Mao. I left unsure of whether his strangely small man-parts were an artistic error or a comment on communism, but certain of one thing: though I finally learned to “dance like no one is watching” as the cliché goes, often, in China, someone is.