I have always danced. My first dance class was when I was three years old and could hardly speak properly, and there I was, in my dance teacher\u2019s studio, for my very first ballet class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(My age, it should be noted, was hardly unique: I was only one among thousands of chubby little middle-class toddler girls around the country bundled up in pink little tutus and sent to trip over their feet at the barre.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s not until these last two years that I\u2019ve become a dancer. True, I took a lesson a week for years on end, I performed annually in group dances and solos, and I don\u2019t remember a time when I couldn\u2019t do the splits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Of course, my memory is also notoriously terrible, so do take this with a grain of salt.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But back then, if you\u2019d asked me what I loved about dance, I would\u2019ve answered\u2026well, I don\u2019t know what I would have admitted to. Because really, the reason I liked dancing was that my teacher was nice and always told me I was good at it. (I wasn\u2019t, not really. Mediocre, at best.) Perhaps I would\u2019ve said that, too, because I cared so little. Or perhaps I would\u2019ve considered that a far too ignoble reason and bs\u2019d some response about art instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(That bs response, by and by, would\u2019ve likely gone something along the lines of \u201cbecause it\u2019s the purest form of expression and understandable across language and cultural barriers.\u201d I admit I\u2019ve never understood such reasoning, though. After all, though it\u2019s true, such a claim is made about music, fine art, and even math, so I don\u2019t know how much stock I really put into it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, I dance every day at home. I spend hours practicing my turns, going up and down on relev\u00e9 to improve my balance, standing with my foot poised above my head as I work on my homework in my attempts to stretch. I\u2019ve learned so many new forms of dance in my own time, beyond just the ballet and Chinese traditional dance that my teacher specializes in, from the Charleston dance to ballroom dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I still have difficulty answering that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do <\/em>I love about dance? I can hardly say \u201ceverything,\u201d for though that\u2019s true, it\u2019s terribly unhelpful. I love the feeling when I master four pirouettes after thousands of fails, not just the accomplishment but also the way I\u2019m so centered, so grounded<\/em>, when my foot drills into the dance floor. I love doing a layout, holding my body upside down in a moment of breath-stopping perfection. I love going on pointe because even though it\u2019s so damn painful, it\u2019s also so damn beautiful and I feel ever so tall. I love the Charleston dance because it never fails to make me smile from its inexorable jubilation and celebration. I love doing the windmill (\u7ffb\u8eab, which literally means \u201cflip body\u201d), which is a bit like cha\u00een\u00e9s where the dancer\u2019s body is sideways, because it feels like I\u2019m floating, barely suspended in midair. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But how am I supposed to explain any of that, much less all<\/em> of it? So when I\u2019m asked, all I can say is, \u201cIt\u2019s just fun. I just like it.\u201d What else can<\/em> I say?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"