Planting the Willow in Front of The Master's Door

(This post is a short story rather longer than what has appeared here before. I won't be posting for a month, so I hope you who have been so kind as to follow this blog or those new to it, will find the greater length acceptable. It is part of a series of stories exploring how those who have had to live through the vast cultural and social displacements which shaped life in the 20th Century have managed to endure. Thank you- DJP)


I

The village I was born in was overrun in the early 50s as were many villages in Southeast Asia, and so my parents took my younger brother and me to the Capital where we lived with my mother's brother who worked there as a waiter in a restaurant. My father managed to find work as a porter and my mother took in washing so we were able to get by.
I was considered quite a pretty and agile little four year old. One day, my mother was delivering the things she had washed to an old lady who lived some blocks away. This lady, though she was quite poor, had a manner that was far more refined and aloof than her circumstances would have seemed to justify, and I think my mother was both intimidated and intrigued by her. So I suspect now that my mother took me along to distract the old lady. Anyhow, if that was her motive, things worked out far better than she could have wished. For me, it completely changed my life forever.
While the old lady checked the quality of my mother's work, I must have been playing in the courtyard. Anyhow, at some point, the lady began to observe me closely. I liked to mimic the dances I had seen during the village festivals, and I'm sure that my performances became more extravagant as I became aware of the old lady's attention. After a while she told my mother that while she had some reservations about my character, she could see that I was a natural dancer, and that if my mother wished, she would get an audition for me at the dance school which the King sponsored to train the dancers for the Royal dance company. My mother knew, of course, that this company was one of the most prestigious cultural and religious expressions of our nation, and that its history stretched back to the very first king of our land.
That King had united the nation, taught the methods of agriculture that are still used, fostered many traditions of art and craft that are still current, had been the first patron of the Buddhist way in Southeast Asia, and was the author of the laws which governed the land until recently. He had many wives and consorts and among them was a goddess who came down from Heaven to visit with him. It was she who showed him all the many cycles of dances and she told him that, as long as these dances were performed faithfully and beautifully, the country would remain harmonious and prosperous.
So it was a very important thing, and my mother was overwhelmed. It was as if someone had proposed that I could go and live in Heaven itself and become a goddess. It was simply unthinkable. My mother mumbled and I remember how still it all felt as I stood there motionless and somehow aware that something very important was about to happen. Everything seemed to stop in the hot yellow morning sun: the red dust in the air that had risen from the clay floor of the courtyard, two small green birds that had been flittering in the branches of a tree, a shout from the street. Everything stopped, and only continued as my mother, stammered out a whole list of my flaws and defects, my vanity, prissiness, superior airs, laziness, mean-spiritedness, and in fact more bad attributes than I had never known existed much less had. My mother summed it all up by saying that we were just poor people, could never afford such luxury, and were content with our lot. The old lady didn't seem to take any of this seriously, and when she explained that the school paid for the room and board as well as the tuition of the students, my mother began to think seriously about the possibility. I looked on idly as my fate was decided.
It seems that the old lady was not just a connoisseur of dancing, but that she had relatives who were very well placed in the school. She might even have once been a dancer herself. I never knew.
I don't have any particular memory about the audition, but the high open teak-floored room in which it took place was airy and had a kind of spacious luxury. The dance troupe and the school were housed in the palace grounds and next door to a large Buddhist temple. The air carried the smells of incense and many kinds of flowers. Indeed it was a kind of paradise, but soon enough I just thought of it as my natural environment, and took for granted the beauty of it as well as the princes, ministers, monks and attendants who wandered around there. When I visited home over the next fifteen years, the crampedness and smell and constant noisy bustle became entirely painful.
But as estranged as I became from my natural family, the more at home I was with my new one. The company consisted, of course, entirely of girls, and besides the long and arduous training and the obligation to perform whenever it was required, the only restriction was that one could have no intimate contact with men for as long as one wished to remain with the troupe. This had always been so, and it was part of the original instructions on how to maintain the purity which would fulfill the sacred intent of the dance. When we were young, we never even thought about it, but very occasionally, an older girl would be obliged to leave and this caused a kind of resigned sadness in the teachers and attendants and a giddy whispered nervousness in the older dancers.
For as long as I lived there as a dancer, I was entirely happy. We were well fed and pampered as a compensation for the rigors of our training. The girls were like sisters, the young ones looking up to the older ones and the older ones guiding the younger. There were many attendants, all women ranging in age from about twenty to sixty. They sang lullabies so we could sleep, hugged us, scolded gently, indulged us in little ways and listened to the endless outpourings of hopes, fears, petty jealousies, minor triumphs and daily chatter All these women made the best mother in the world, and it wasn't long before my own mother seemed oddly limited and awkward.
As for the training itself, while the older girls took some part in helping to train the younger ones, this was under very strict supervision by the ten or so senior teachers. These teachers in turn were under the direction of the dance master who, with the exception of the musicians and two singing teachers, was the only man present in the school.
The master was, as tradition dictated, a member of the royal family. In this way, one was constantly reminded of the origins of the dance and of the King's continuing patronage. During my time, the master was actually a royal prince. He was a slightly heavy set bachelor in his mid-forties with a vague melancholy air, but he had a remarkable love and understanding of dancing.
On the first day, it was he, dressed simply in white pants and shirt, standing in front of the assemblage of other teachers and musicians who welcomed me and seven other little girls who made up the newest class. He gave a short simple talk in which he told the history of the dance and explained the manner in which we would be trained. The first eight years were devoted to exercises that strengthened and limbered the face, neck, torso, arms, hands, hips, legs and feet. During that time, we would also learn the 108 horizontal and 108 vertical movements that formed the basic grammar of the dances. He explained that the horizontal movements represented the qualities of the earth and the vertical ones those of the Heavens; when done properly, one could act like a goddess, even if one was just a human, and this would make all those who saw us happy and confident to endure the hardships of life. So began my training.
The classes were long and arduous, but there was a definite pleasure in feeling the capacities of one's body develop and in mastering the movements which became increasingly subtle and complex. There was a feeling for all of us that we were participating in something both ancient and alive. It was a happy time and went by quickly. The master attended many of the classes and though he rarely said much, he watched each of us carefully.
I remember that I once asked one of the older girls, I must have been eight or nine at the time, why there was a man at the head of a completely female dance company. The girl, who must have been about seventeen, thought about it and said that it seemed while women could work together to develop a sense of beauty, it needed a man to say whether or not that beauty had the power to entice. While this stuck in my mind, I doubt that it meant very much to me, but afterward I watched the master more carefully, particularly on the rare occasions when he would actually demonstrate a posture or movement himself.
At the end of the first eight years, when we were about twelve years old, we began to learn roles in the dances themselves. There were four principal cycles which were performed according to the season, and each cycle had at least thirty or so episodes. In general, all contained scenes of battles, betrayals, true love, death, parting, clever ruses whereby the treachery of evildoers or demons was revealed, reunions of lost brothers, sisters, lovers, parents and children, all sorts of things like that. The heroes and heroines were sometimes deities, sometimes humans, and at least a portion of each cycle concerned the intervention of beings from one realm into the realm of the other . Nonetheless, the summer cycle was mainly devoted to humans, the winter cycle to gods, while the spring emphasized the birth of humankind from the god realm, while the fall dealt with the transgressions of humans and the temporary withdrawal of gods.
I don't mean to give the impression that all this was part of a seamless unity, but these were the themes that lay behind the twists and turns the stories took. It sounds like it was difficult to learn, but it was not really. There was a great deal of repetition of gestures and movement sequences. So, at first, the real challenge was to invest all those steps which we then knew by heart with the feelings of a real living being, be it god or hero.
All of this brought a new level of excitement. Up until then, it was as if we had been learning how to do a kind of human calligraphy, and we were proud of our new and wonderful ability to make all these remarkable shapes with our bodies. But then, all of a sudden, we were learning how to make phrases and sentences. No doubt this combined with the greater emotionality which comes at the onset of puberty, and our involvement with the varying intensities of the character felt so vivid that it was like discovering a whole new dimension of life. But when I think of it now, I wonder whether it was our raw state of feeling that made the roles seem so vivid or whether it was taking on these heroic and elevated roles which gave our states of feeling such intensity. It was a wonderful exalted kind of time and now it seems like a dream.
After three years of learning the parts, the time drew close when we would actually perform in public. It was then that the master became our principal teacher. He spoke quietly and simply about the real meaning of our art. The real function of the dance, he said, was not merely to provide an enchanting and inspiring spectacle, but really to purify the four directions of space and the four seasons of time. The earth could provide all that was necessary for life, and the seasons in their specific qualities and transformations made such sustenance possible and showed all the essential aspects of what beings will experience. Each season has its own wisdom and mode of expression. Each contains peace, richness, love and destruction though, in each, one of these predominates. So our gestures and movements should express not just the passions and desires of men and gods but should convey also a sense of what is timeless in such experience. Dancing in a way that was both vivid and timeless, we conformed to the greatest possible harmony, and as we performed, people could restore their own place in the heart of this world.
Finally, he told us that as performers we would be moving about in the world, even though we would continue to live as we had. And though we might feel nervous or over-excited about dancing in front of strangers and meeting with them, if we only kept in mind this true purpose of our lives as dancers, we would experience no problems.
We were taught in this way for a year more, and the effect of it was subtly to increase the precision we brought to our dance. All that emotional intensity was held within a larger feeling about things. It sounds odd, but it was profoundly relaxing. Each movement, each gestures, each pose would dissolve like a drop into a river and flow from sequence to sequence, and our moods and feelings did likewise.
So, at last we performed in the dance publicly. I was about sixteen then, and to say I liked it is less true than to say that I could imagine no other life. Each season we danced for eight weeks, and while, in the past, the dances had been performed at the four great royal residences, two of those cities had long since been annexed by neighboring countries, and one was an abandoned ruin. So we danced for the most part in the capitol, but each season, we traveled to various parts of the country to perform there.
And indeed we did meet all sorts of people. Young men would flirt with me, and less pleasantly, old ones would too. All of us had that experience. Some of the girls, particularly as they got older, found the desire to have a lover or a husband and a family, or just to have a so-called normal life a subject of considerable anguish, and eventually left for that purpose. I however, like many others, even thought I was almost twenty, did not. "Do you really want to remain a virgin all the rest of your life?" people would ask. But contained within my own body and my own life, I experienced everything that could be experienced, every passion, fury, regret, good, evil, heroism, death and I felt no need for anything else. Normal life as people called it, seemed merely a shadow play of what unfolded annually in my being, and I could see no purpose in falling into such ambiguous and murky realms.






II

It was a point of pride that the performances in the capitol were done with as much splendor as ever, but it was also becoming obvious that the grounds there were slightly less well kept and the buildings repainted and refurbished with less frequency. Living as I did, it is not surprising that I took very little interest in politics, but it was well-known that the wars in neighboring countries were spilling across our borders and that the tides of rebellion and communism were beginning to swirl around us. Even to me it was noticeable that the capitol was swamped with poor refugees, and that forays to the outlying provinces had been curtailed. And when we did go outside the capitol to perform, we could see that many villages were in ruins and had been abandoned and many fields lay fallow. Also, the people's faces seemed darker, more resentful, and afraid. Fewer and fewer little girls auditioned each year for a place in the company.
That it all changed as suddenly as it did was, however, extremely shocking. We had become accustomed to the sound of distant gunfire in the night and even to the departure of almost a third of the attendants and one of the senior teachers. We said to ourselves that it was just a bad time and that things soon would be set right. The master, though noticeably more drawn, said nothing about all this, but continued to coach us and teach the new students in his calm quiet way much as he had before.
But one morning, there were no attendants to wake us and bring us tea. We milled around in the dormitories and the halls wondering what ever could be the matter. We saw one of the oldest attendants shuffling across the lawn with all her possessions in a bundle on her back. "What," we called out to her, "is happening? Where is everybody?" "The King has fled the country," she called back, "You'll have to go home." Well, of course, we had no idea what to make of this, but it was obviously upsetting. But we were still creatures of long habit, and so we got dressed and went to the main hall, unchanged since my first day at the school and still as airy and splendid as ever. There the Master waited for us seated at the far end, dressed as he always was.
"My dear, dear friends," the Master's voice was very soft and we all had to lean forward to hear him. "As I think you know, the King has left. He may, of course, eventually return, but it is most likely that the communists will very soon be taking over. Their troops are within four miles of the city and there is very little to oppose them. The King's departure means not only that the world which we have known and functioned in has ended, but also that all our futures are now highly uncertain. I cannot insist in any way that any of you remain here. But since I have given my life to the sacred dance, I am not about to stop now. For those who wish to stay, I will make sure you continue to be fed and housed, and our work together will also go on. Things may be a bit improvised, but I am sure we can manage.
"Nonetheless, we should be under no illusions: things will eventually change, perhaps beyond recognition. It seems to me likely that even a communist government will continue to support this dance company, if only for reasons of cultural prestige and propaganda, but clearly, if that is so, your way of life will still be profoundly changed. So regardless of what happens, regardless of whether you feel you must stay or leave, I want to ask you to do one thing: please, whatever life you may end up leading, do not forget the true meaning of our dance. Do not let go of the deep harmony which it represents. This harmony is really true. It is the real basis and the real goal. Nothing can change that. Please hold to what you know and perpetuate it as you can.
"Other than this, I can only thank you for your long hard work, for your devotion, and for your many beautiful performances. No matter what happens to me, you have made my life meaningful. Thank you."
The Master walked quickly from the room, and, of course, we all cried. But the Master was as good as his word, and almost at once, food was delivered from some nearby restaurant. We had our breakfast and the teachers and a few musicians returned so that we could rehearse. Except for three older girls, everyone stayed.
It was hard to sleep that night and for the next week or so. There was always the sound of gun fire, sometimes near and sometimes far off, and the boom of cannons, and the roar of explosions. There were fires in parts of the city that lit up the sky, and often we could hear screams and shouting from crowds on the move. But we kept on practicing although with so little sleep we were like zombies and with such uncertainty we were very much on edge. Then there was silence, and somehow this was much more ominous, as if things had been settled but we were completely ignorant of the result.
The morning after the second night of silence, we awoke to see the palace grounds filled with rough groupings of ill-dressed and fierce looking soldiers. In the rehearsal hall, the Master stood in front of his seat. Beside him, a short slight man in clean battle fatigues with some kind of epaulets, and behind them three tired looking soldiers with machine guns. The officer introduced himself as major and said that he was now in charge of the people's dance collective under the authority of the ministry of art and culture, and that he was replacing our former Master. The Master nodded curtly, asked us to remember what he had said before and urged us to continue our work. The major nodded and he was escorted from the room by the soldiers. The major spoke sharply and told us to resume our work, and somehow we did.
For a few weeks, things went along much as they had since the King fled. The eldest of the teacher was the real acting head of the school, a task he carried out somewhat shamefacedly, but the major came every day and was often joined by other military people. Some watched with interest, some with peasant-like amazement, and some with scarcely concealed animosity. Towards the end of that time, the major was often accompanied by a tall stern Chinese woman, also in military dress. Soon enough, he announced to us that it was this woman who would be our future Master. He explained that our art, while undeniably remarkable, had been a tool of the King's oppression and mystification of the people. No blame attached to us in that, since mainly we were all children of workers and peasants. But now that a new era had begun, it was important that we re-educate ourselves and abandon our old royalist attitudes so that we could serve the people in their struggle for freedom. The major then introduced Comrade Chen as someone who had long been a people's artist and had long experience in working with many ethnic groups to help them transform their traditional dances into expressions of the people's revolution.
The comrade then addressed us. Speaking in a harsh stiff voice, she told us that there were two parts to reorienting our performances: first, we, who were ourselves unwitting objects and agents of oppression would have to purge ourselves of mystical thinking about our work and recognize its true nature; along with this any dance that glorified monarchy or the fictional deities which sanctioned it would have to be eliminated, and works expressing the aspirations of the people's liberation put in their place. We would, she said, begin the next day with the morning practice being replaced by re-education classes which she herself would lead. Otherwise, things would continue as before. Perhaps she sensed the depth of our discomfort and dismay for she concluded that those who were unwilling or unable to serve the people in this way would have to serve them as ordinary workers, and would have no place in the company.
Late at night, we discussed this prospect amongst ourselves. None of the older girls could feel much enthusiasm, but none of us had any ability to survive in any other way. We had no skills other than dancing. Perhaps, we naively hoped, the King would return soon at the head of some sort of army, and even if that were a year off, it would be best to continue. Thus all decided to stay on.
The new curriculum began relatively painlessly, although obviously we were all very nervous. For a few weeks, first thing in the morning after breakfast, we would be transported to the slums in the city, to hospitals, such as they were, to poor farm villages. At such place we would get out and various people came up to address us. Men, women and children, they told us about the extreme hardship of their lives. We heard how a woman lost a leg due to inadequate medical care, how children had died, how husbands and brothers had disappeared in prison, how sisters had been forced into prostitution. We came in this simple graphic way to understand the great hardship of the people's lives, and, if we knew about this from our memories of childhood, most of us had put it aside and none of us had realized the great extent of it. Then we spent the next week or so touring the royal palaces. We were of course familiar with the splendid gilded rooms in which we had performed, but we had never seen the great luxury of the private apartments, room after room filled with gold and silk. And the clothes in incredible quantity, and the shoes. These made a great impression. After that we were taken on similar tours of the temples where the simplicity of the monks we had met contrasted with lavish ostentation of the temples themselves. People had talked to us about the cruel burden of taxation which kept them on the edge of survival and now we saw where all that money was spent. We were told as well and shown documents, though few of us could make anything out of them, about the King and his family's huge overseas holdings in Swiss banks and European real estate.
Now all through that time, we continued to rehearse the traditional plays, but soon it was put to us: did we really think that we should go on glorifying such an exploitative, cruel and mercenary monarchy. Of course, we said no. We were sincere and confused, but also, we well knew that this was the answer that was desired. In truth, none of us knew what to think. At any rate we were then asked to review each and every segment of the four cycles for their suitability. Despite Comrade Chen's exhortation, we were all very reluctant to do this. Comrade Chen was irritated at our hesitation, but she was, in her way, quite an intelligent woman and a determined teacher. She saw that our scruples about this were, in a way, religious ones and did not stem from any very pronounced rebelliousness. Accordingly, she decided to teach us about the history of our dance.
She arrived next day with an armload of books. A soldier followed her in bearing two more cartons. "I don't want you to take what I say on trust, and so I have obtained history texts for each of you." We accepted the books respectfully and set them carefully on our laps. "Now please open them and begin to read." There was a certain air of embarrassment as we leafed through the pages. Comrade Chen watched us carefully, and in an unusually soft even sympathetic voice, she said: "None of you can read, can you?" And while most of us could make out letters and some words, that was, of course, the case. She might have been amazed at first, but she recovered quickly. "In that, you are not unlike most of the people who have been so brutally exploited." But she said we must repay the peoples' kindness in making books available to us by learning how to read, and that henceforth, we would spend the first two hours of the morning learning to read. In the second two hours, she would teach history.
So that is how it went for the next six months. Comrade Chen, in her history lectures, told how originally peasants banded together in villages so that they could irrigate, grow and harvest their crops, and as one became more skilled at one aspect of this and another more skilled at another, the division of labor ensued. Women originated the crafts traditions to provide cloth and pots for their homes. When defense of the village was required, they all banded together and fought, but out of this last necessity arose a warrior caste which came to predominate over society as a whole. The first Kings were simply the most powerful and persuasive leaders of these local groups. Later by conquest, only one King came to rule.
These early Kings and their cliques made use of all the pre-existing communal skills and institutions, claiming them as their own divine inspiration, and so they were able to extend their domain by conquest. By gaining control of larger and larger territories, they were able to implement large scale irrigation schemes, encourage increased specialization in crafts, increase trade by improving roads and waterways, and finally, to present themselves as the inventors of all this. The economic benefits from these projects this did not change in the least the people's standard of living which was and is still the same. Instead the rulers and their class were able to live in unparalleled luxury and idleness. The figures in animistic myths and legends which people had originally invoked to give themselves strength in hardship and which acted as exemplars of collective moral virtues were re deployed as endorsing the King and his rule. The end result was that the people were made to believe that the whole cosmos both in the Heaven and on Earth operated only by virtue of the King's existence. They became completely alienated from their own strength and intelligence which had created the entire society in the first place.
Needless to say, we discussed these astonishing teachings amongst ourselves. Or rather, I should say that I and maybe four or five other girls talked about them privately and late at night, for already there were different camps in the school. Some consisting mainly of new students, but with some older girls as well, found Comrade Chen's teachings inspiring. For these girls, a heightened sense of injustice and revolutionary ardor seemed the most promising and exciting way to deal with their own and others' hardships. For them, a new era of equality and prosperity was quite tangible and they could see nothing in the old ways of any benefit. For others, and I was part of this smaller group, there was obviously some truth in what Comrade Chen had to say, but we were less able to abandon what we felt to be true in what we had learned. Amongst us, there was no common opinion about how to resolve this conflict.
I should say that in all my year with the company, while petty disagreements, jealousies and irritations were not uncommon, we were really a family with one aim and one heart. We did not doubt each other. We appreciated each others' strengths and shortcomings, and we spoke freely amongst ourselves. But by the time I am speaking of, that had changed. Those who were not entirely in accord with Comrade Chen's thinking had to be very careful in how they spoke or acted lest they be reported by one of her partisans for deviating into negative reactionary ways. And amongst those of us who were uncertain, we all felt very differently and so even in such a gathering, one had to be ever so cautious. So in our late night whisperings, while we shared misgivings and anxieties, none of us dared to say what she truly in her heat felt. For myself, this was the first time in my entire life that I ever became aware that I had a personal opinion which might be distinct from that of anyone else. But what I came to think was that, just as in the winter dance cycle, we were in a period when the gods had withdrawn and men sought to control their own destinies. Painful as this might be, there was no more point in regretting it then in pining over a change of season. What others thought, I don't know, but half a dozen of the older performers managed to slip away at that time.
It was about then that Comrade Chen made her own selections from the old dance cycles and began to teach us two new pieces. From the old, she chose scenes in which brave heroes went to war with evil kings, lovers were forced to part, demons enslaved people, that sort of thing. The new pieces she introduced were modeled on Chinese dances: in one a young girl sacrificed her life to rally a beleaguered revolutionary battalion, and in the other a young school teacher encouraged peasants into resisting the demands of a greedy and lecherous tax collector. The Comrade was quite ingenious in adapting our mode of expression to these dances, and I suppose it all would have made a reasonable impression, but for me it was weirdly spiritless. I was always aware that gestures that had specific meanings, like an elongation of the arm, hand and finger which meant inner harmony of the earth was being used to tell the evil landlord to go away. In this way, the language of our dance was used in, what was for us, a nonsensical way. There was no particular quality that one felt from doing such a performance beyond the sheerly athletic one. I thought to myself: this is what it is like to do any ordinary kind of work.
But before we could ever put on these pieces in public, the company was changed in a manner that none of us, or certainly I, could ever have imagined, and though afterwards we put on dances, I should say that the company really ended at that time. Comrade Chen broke in on our afternoon rehearsal one day and called us all to a meeting in the main hall. She was disheveled and evidently quite upset. She began by saying that the people's liberation was always difficult and that one must always be prepared to make sacrifices. In our own country, the will of the people was, despite heroic efforts by the people's government, still meeting with opposition from reactionary and deviant groups. This meant, that more money was having to be allocated to military purposes than had first been anticipated and so, this meant that spending on other revolutionary activities was going to have to be temporarily cut back.
Here Comrade Chen stopped involuntarily and had to force herself to continue. Funding for the dance collective was to be cut back: we were to be paid, like all other workers for performances and rehearsals, but our room and board could no longer be subsidized. Then she looked at us with genuine concern. She saw that it was too large a change for many of us to assimilate and so, in as kind a voice as she had, she explained that we would have to move back in with our parents. For those of us whose parents were dead or could not be located, we should, if we were of marriageable age, find a husband, preferably a devoted servant of the revolution. Since the government recognized, even if it could not approve, that our way of life had been virtually monastic, a series of social gatherings would be arranged so that we might choose a mate. This would take place over the next month, and at the end of that time, we would have to make our own arrangements. Of course, all of us cried and cried and cried, and even our determined Comrade finally stopped trying to comfort us.
When, five days later, the first of these social gatherings took place, Comrade Chen, who understood that few of us had any idea of how to behave under such circumstances worked hard to make introductions and begin conversations between us dedicated virgins and the soldiers who were mostly junior officers and who were for different reasons almost as intimidated as we. For me, since I no longer had any idea where to find my parents and brother, it was a matter of some urgency that I succeed, but I was overcome with inertia and sadness, so that I could barely manage minimal greetings. Over the next few weeks, many of the girls seemed to begin to match up with some of the more dashing, young and handsome officers. I think that Comrade Chang must almost have given up on me, but she persisted, and made it a personal project to take me around to the new-comers and praise me to them. No amount of smiling however could overcome my listless sorrow.
One evening, I found myself at one of these painful gatherings sitting off to the side as usual. And, as it happened, I was sitting next to a soldier, older, stockier, more peasant-like than the rest. His left arm had been amputated above the elbow, and I suppose fairly recently for he was having some difficulty lighting his cigarette. I helped him and was relieved when it looked like he wasn't going to try to talk to me, but he suddenly changed his mind, and rather hesitantly began asking about my childhood, my upbringing, and so forth.
It was easy enough to tell him about all that, and then he told me about his own family. He was, as he looked, a farmer's child, but he had been educated at a French missionary school.
"You know how to read?" I asked him.
"Oh yes." For some reason I was surprised that he could read, but no more than he when he found out that I had only begun to learn. But then, as he said, he had no idea of what the life of a dancer was and in fact had only seen the dance once or twice long ago. So I told him about my training and he seemed to find it interesting.
He was easy to talk to, and he seemed to enjoy talking to me also. At the following social gatherings, our friendship continued, and he asked me out to dinner a few times. Under more ordinary circumstances, we might have remained acquaintances but, since the situation was what it was, we got married. Comrade Chen was very pleased.


III

It is very hard to convey my feelings of that time. It was as if I was dreaming and things just kept looming up and happening. And it was not so much that anything was exceptionally painful or happy, but things just presented themselves and I went along without it having much to do with me. I was being swept off by a wild wind that came from an unknown place and it was pressing me on to somewhere equally unknown.
My marriage happened very quickly, and it took place at an office in the city hall. There was not a lot of ceremony: we swore that we were willing to be each others' husband and wife, and we signed a paper There was a little reception at the school, and most of the girls cried. Then I moved into his apartment which was small and tidy though in a fairly poor noisy neighborhood near the central military headquarters where he worked.
I was fortunate in that my husband was indeed, as he had first seemed, a kind, patient, steady man. He had to teach me how to cook, clean, go to market, keep track of money, do laundry, and he willingly undertook a part of these chores so that I could go to rehearsals, classes, performances, and as the walk to the palace and back was three quarters of an hour, this took a lot of time. He also taught me really how to read, and he introduced me to the world of literature and poetry and we spent many wonderful evenings reading aloud to each other He also taught me French.
As to the physical part of our marriage, perhaps because of the way I was raised, I had no clear expectations or preoccupations, but I was actually quite shocked. The utter complete physical exposure involved, that there was no part of my body or his that could be concealed or held back, and that we were thrown together, arms, mouths, skin, hairs, stomachs, backs, legs, hands, teeth, genitals, fluids, smells, in this inescapable swirl. It was, in its way, pleasurable, but I always felt a suffocating claustrophobia in the sheer and total physicality of it. I am sure my husband did not feel the same way, but if he was disappointed, he never said and was always very kind.
So I was at that time introduced to a very physical sense of the world, not just sexually but in all the things I had to do every day. Of course, I was accustomed to strenuous daily exercise, but somehow to use my body for chores and endless household tasks in the midst of thousands of people who were doing likewise was painful and strange. In most of my life up til then, there had been a set distance established by decorum among the dancers and by convention between the performers and the audience. So to find myself rubbed up against, jostled, bumped, greeted or snarled at by strangers, to smell their bodies and breath, made it seem as if I had fallen into a denser, thicker, and darker world. So and I was often very sad.
Dance rehearsals and the performances continued but it all felt very different, as if something had been lost forever. Even thinking, as I had before, how this was simply part of the winter cycle and the real departure of the gods, did not really help. I often dreamt that I was caught in a crowd of strangers on a ferry boat which was carrying me downstream away from my homeland. The landscape passed by at a dizzying rate and became ever more unfamiliar, and, just at the point when I realized I would never return, I would wake up in tears.
Things went on like this for a year or so and it was all the worse because my husband was as kind as he could be, as were Comrade Chen and my friends in the dance company, despite their own many problems.
So I remember very well the day, even the moment when my state of mind began to change. I had gone to market to buy tea and vegetables and as I waited at the tea stall, I noticed a small boy across the road filling a white plastic pail of water from a spigot. Perhaps he didn't want to get water on his freshly clean clothes, but he held the pail out, his right arm horizontal to his body with a slight bend in the elbow. His thumb and first two fingers were curled around the handle, his fourth finger made a vertical and the little finger stuck straight out in a line with the hand. With a start I saw that he was making the gesture that is called 'continuing,' and he was making it with a kind of casual perfection. It made me smile as if I were seeing an old friend while lost in a strange forest. After that I would often notice how people were unconsciously making many of the gestures or standing in postures that came from the dance. So I became able to live in the world and take an interest in it.
This kind of experience gave me strength and sustained me through the next years which were very difficult because the government changed and became even more radically communist, forcing us to flee. The Court Dancers were publicly reviled as "palace whores," and, despite my husband's courageous war record, his French education made the government brand him a " capitalist back-roader". One of his colleagues was kind enough to take the risk of telling him that we were marked for arrest, that it was unlikely we could avoid being shot, and that we should leave the country at once. It was hard for my husband to believe this was true, but his friend persuaded him and so we became refugees.
We were in a refugee camp for about a year until, through the efforts of one of the relief organizations and through the sponsorship of one of my husband's cousins, we came to Los Angeles. This cousin of my husband's had a doughnut shop where we worked during the day, and where, by night, we slept. After about four years, we had saved enough to have our own business, a corner store which caters to the small community of our former countrymen in the valley here.
This has been a difficult time, but I think it has been far more painful for my husband than for me. Because he has only one arm, the physical work has been harder on him. Also, I should say that my husband is an idealistic man. He became a communist because he wanted to free our people from oppression, and he felt that even though there were many mistakes, the communists offered all the people the best chance for a fair and decent life. He was always willing to endure the hardships that were necessary to accomplish this. Because he is idealistic, he continues to believe in that ideal itself, even though, as the communists have committed such terrible slaughter in our land, he no longer knows how it can be put into practice. Here, amongst the refugees, there are almost none who believe as he does, and he finds it hard top be interested in living and working just so he can survive to have money and cars and other things. Even though I cannot help him very much with this, I know how hard it is for him to live with nothing to believe in, and I feel very close to his sadness.
For me, though, things are not so difficult. I had begun teaching dance a little bit even in the refugee camp. It seemed to me that people should be able to know some part, however small, of their heritage. None of my students, there or here will ever reach the level which people trained since infancy in the traditional way could attain, but I feel sure somehow, that if they can master some small element, no matter which one, and pass it on, perhaps, when the time is right, the whole tradition can be rediscovered.
For even here, in this strange city which is so full of all kinds of people, which sometimes feels so menacing, but which always seems so empty, I see people, sometimes in a store or a mall or waiting for a bus, and not just our people but ones from Africa and Russia, and Mexico, and Persia, expressing themselves unconsciously in the movements of our dance. They point their toe as they step off a curb, they jut their chin out as they start to shout something, they arch their back to stretch, they stick out their tongue, they beckon to a friend, they wink. So even though the meaning is changed or even not apparent at all, the movements of the dance are still present.
In my training, all of the movements of our dance had a certain meaning because of their place in a myth, in a story, and in a way of life. But now I see, even if all these meanings have been altered, or lost, or have never even been known, that this dance itself is a living thing. And this makes me think that perhaps this dance may have its real meaning, not in terms of our stories and ways of life, but according to a far more wide and deeper pulse which cannot be put into words at all or even thoughts.
And sometimes when I think like this, for some reason, just for a second, I feel that my life is part of some great act of love.