on/in mirrors
on the slipperiness of authenticity (and ego)
This essay is anthologized in SINOSTORIES, and was a finalist in Ploughshares’ 2021 Emerging Writer’s Contest.
1.
I remember saying I didn’t want to do ballet anymore. Every Saturday morning my mother and I sat in the backseat of the parked car, thirty minutes early to class. Tears smarted in our eyes — mine in pain, hers in frustration — as she tried to wrestle my frizzy hair into a smooth, hairsprayed bun, one that might hold up against the unforgiving gaze of my thin blonde teacher and the quiet disapproval of the other moms.
Hudie Dance Academy was different. On the first day we visited the studio, they were doing back flexibility exercises, snow angels in reverse: hyacinth leotards scattered across the floor. Fragments of loud gossip slipped under the door, no matter how loudly the teacher cranked the music.
I remember the piece we learned for my first recital at Hudie, Seagull; I remember being exhilarated by how different it was from the dry monotony of ballet. Our skinny legs weren’t quite ready for flight, our opening jetes onto the stage never quite extended. My classmates and I giggled backstage and in the wings, watching the older girls stretch, do their makeup, practice, perform.
2.
There comes a time in a child’s psychological development where she looks into a mirror, recognizes the image as herself and herself as the image — recognizes that there exists a distinct version of herself as perceived by others. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called this the mirror stage, a recognition that comes with an insatiable desire to know, understand, subsume the image in the mirror, to close the gap between self and reflection.
One sunny Sunday, my friend and I were walking back to rehearsal after a break. The voice came out of nowhere. Helloooo, Asian ladies.
Out of nowhere and it was everywhere, coiling itself into the pit of my stomach, seeping into my aching muscles, filling my pores. We had just gotten frozen yogurt. We had been careful to pull jeans and sweatshirts over our leotards. We walked faster and said nothing. We were eleven years old.
According to Lacan, the impossibility of ever wholly controlling or even comprehending the image, even as she burns to do so, gives rise to an unresolvable tension, one that lingers, festers, then defines the child in the years to come.
3.
Mirrors are useful things in dance. If you forget the combination, as I have many times, you can choose someone else to look at in the mirror. You can follow their body with your own, map their movements through your muscles. For the same reason, it’s easiest to learn choreography through a mirror.
In fact, the only way to evaluate yourself is through the mirror. When dancing, you can’t look down to determine if you’re doing it right.
My teachers told me that my legs, arch, flexibility made not doing pointe a waste of talent. Afterward, I fixated on the shape of my feet in the mirrors. Were those arches worthy of pointe shoes?
4.
If movement is speech, then dance is a language. If English is the Western world’s default written and verbal language, then ballet is its default language of movement. There are different dialects, to be sure — Russian, Balanchine, British. But while there might be slight variation in articulation, the building blocks of the language remain the same: an impossible turnout, a rigid spine, straight legs, pointed feet.
In ballet we had first position, second position, third, fourth, fifth. We had ballet hands, ballet fingers. Core tight, back tall. Ballet felt straightforward and familiar, even if it wasn’t easy. There’s a correctness to it, without which everything falls apart: we learned the hard way that it’s hopeless to hold an arabesque en pointe without getting all the way over the box, without stabilizing the ankle through the knee, without holding the working leg and upper body up up up, like an autonomous marionette, puppet and puppeteer at once.
Not ballet was something else entirely, a second language of movement. As we grew older, we learned more about this language, its vocabulary and its grammars: how to conjugate one movement into another, how to shape coherent phrases. Instead of ballet hands and ballet fingers, we had lanhuazi, fingers that bloomed like orchids; instead of numbered positions, we had poses named for flight and eagles and swordplay. We learned how fans could be delicate as a breeze and sharp as a knife, how to use the weight of watersleeves as extensions of our fingertips and our hearts, how to think about cycles of movement and cycles of breath. And we learned the characteristics that defined the dialects of folk dance: the shaking shoulders of Mongolia, the limber backs of Xinjiang, the wide-open chests of Tibet, the sinuous silhouettes of the Yunnan Dai.
Most of all, not ballet was as joyful as it was serious. Not ballet required not just focused concentration but also jingshen, a sort of spirit, vitality. Thousands of years of history, after all, required gravity.
5.
People often think dance is about leaping up, said Tang Shiyi, a principal dancer at the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, in an interview posted online. But I would say the most difficult thing is actually sinking down.
Chenxiaqu: to sink down — to work with and not against the floor. Chen: heavy, as in weight, as in seriousness.
She continues: For China, a country with five thousand years of traditional culture, the discovery and inheritance of culture is critical….Dance is the most direct expression of cultural depth and emotional dimension; through one piece of dance at a time, we can remove the barriers built by the distance of thousands of years.
6.
I didn’t mind pain, even embraced it. Pain meant growth and improvement, meant going from falling over on double pirouettes to smooth triples in months, meant bigger jumps, meant more expressive movement through space. I relished the unique, glorious hell of dancing en pointe: my toenails were broken and bruised, but what a beautiful, delicate image I made.
If I could not control how others saw my body, at least I could aspire to full control over what I would see when I met my own eyes in the mirror, over what my body did within the four walls of the studio.
Pain was part of the process. We all have injuries here…. It’s just the reality of what’s necessary to shape our bodies into vessels for art. Tang Shiyi again.
7.
Looking back at those years, what I remember the most strongly is how much the studio felt like home. Other than the vague, omnipresent danger inherent to existing in my body in this country, I was never too concerned with what exactly it meant to be Chinese American. I never had a “lunchbox moment,” never felt “caught between worlds.” Dance was a grounding rod for any identity-related anxiety. After all, I had shaped myself into a vessel for art, or, perhaps even more than that, a vessel for (Chinese) culture: I had literally embodied it, absorbed the choreography into my bones, where it has settled — where, as muscle memory, it lives to this day.
If I’m honest with myself, my semi-conscious recognition of dance as a source of stability mediating my relationship to the broader world also meant that I put up semi-willful walls of ignorance around questions I was uncomfortable with. As I got older, I began to think about the folk dances we’d learned—Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan. I knew that the ethnic groups in several of these regions, the Uyghurs and the Tibetans especially, were regularly mistreated by the Chinese Communist Party. It was one thing to be doing ethnic (Chinese) dance in the US, as Chinese Americans; it was another to be doing dances that were considered ethnic, even in China. I placated myself with unsatisfactory answers: Western news media was known to be unreliable, especially when it came to China; more importantly, the traditional movements we were learning now must have predated contemporary politics, by far.
Right?
In recent months, I’ve found myself revisiting this period of my life, watching myself grow up in those studios like a video in fast-forward, relitigating those conversations in my head. While I am loath to overintellectualize lived experience, I felt that only academic scholarship could deliver the history I was looking for. To the search box of Google Scholar I sent “chinese dance” and held my breath.
8.
Dai Ailian is widely celebrated as the “Mother of Chinese Dance.” Like me and the other Hudie girls, she was a member of the Chinese diaspora: she was born Eileen Isaac in Trinidad, 1916. Her Chinese last name, Dai, wasn’t chosen until much later, after a nickname given to her father.
She studied ballet and modern dance in London, where her professional prospects were unsurprisingly constrained by her race. It wasn’t until she saw other ethnic dances there — Indian, Japanese, Indonesian — that she wondered about Chinese dance. In 1941, speaking not a syllable of the language, she headed for the recently formed Republic of China. She’d stay there for the rest of her life: a homecoming to a foreign land.
She spoke no Chinese, and yet she could dance. At the time, China had paid little attention to dance as an art form, and most of the dance being done was highly localized, with styles unique to each region. In the decades following her arrival, she traveled, learning and collecting the dances performed by ethnic groups around the country. Beyond this catalogue, she also decided to develop classical Chinese dance from scratch: a uniquely Chinese movement vocabulary, inspired by yet distinct from existing dance styles. It would be an entirely new construction, even as it was informed by historical research — poetry, painting, martial arts, calligraphy.
9.
What a revelation: that Chinese dance was a recent development, not a tradition passed down through centuries. What a revelation: that Chinese dance was the product of one dancer’s commitment to building a cultural home for her existence as an artist, of one dancer’s identification with her ethnic identity despite being generations removed from the nation itself. Culture is produced, as the academics say; in the case of Chinese dance, it was quite literally created — if not from scratch, then from aesthetic fragments that became something new.
10.
This bothered me, though I could not quite articulate why. I felt cheated of something I didn’t think I could truly lay claim to, of something I hadn’t realized I was trying to lay claim to. I had been prepared to think about appropriation and geopolitics and state sanctioned violence, state sanitized art. I had not expected this.
11.
It’s impossible to know, of course. But I can’t help but wonder what it was that propelled her; what she was thinking; what she was feeling. Why the impulse to collect, categorize, and standardize dances from such disparate ethnic groups? Was it to define Chineseness for herself? What did it mean to define a Chinese aesthetic filtered by her upbringing in the West? What did she see in the London conservatory mirrors, and what images were she trying to create now, in Chongqing, Sichuan, Beijing? Are these my projections, or is it impossible to have done what she did without answering these questions? How wide is the gap between my imagination of her, and her imagination of herself?
Dai Ailian, formerly Eileen Isaac, became the first principal of the Beijing Dance Academy, the school from which Hudie’s teachers graduated years later.
12.
The Dai in Dai Ailian happens to be the same character Dai as in my name. As far as I know, this is the surname that’s been passed down through my father’s branch of the family. But one of the other characters in my Chinese name was chosen just as arbitrarily as Dai Ailian’s last name: my given name for most of childhood was Jiarui. When, in sixth grade, I asked my mom how to spell the characters so that I could put it on my name tag for Chinese class, she decided she liked Jiayün better. So just like that, Dai Jiarui became Dai Jiayün. Even so, it didn’t really matter: with family, I mostly went by the pet name Jiajia.
13.
Ailian, in case it is not phonetically obvious, is the reverse-Anglicization of Eileen. Reverse- Anglicization, of course, is an inherently vague term. Anglicization is a process which maps non-English words to syllables intelligible to the English language, a flattening of foreignness: a function that’s many-to-one. Consequently, there’s no clear inverse. Any number of languages might be Anglicized. Reverse-Anglicization is a function that’s one-to-many; nothing about this process requires that Mandarin pops out the other end.
I had thought there might be an analogous term for the phonetic conversion of words to Chinese. Sinicization? But as it turns out, Sinicization is not to Mandarin Chinese as Anglicization is to English. Instead, Sinicization is a term of art used in China studies and East Asian studies that describes the process by which the non-Chinese becomes Chinese, not just in language but in culture. Cultural assimilation and (violent) cultural imperialism are two sides of the same coin, especially in a hugely diverse country contained by sprawling and somewhat arbitrary borders.
Dai Ailian’s project of cataloging ethnic folk dances, therefore, was also a project of Sinicization. It would be unfair and imprecise to suggest that she had been intending to erase or commodify the cultures of Uyghurs, the Tibetans, or any of the other ethnic groups; in fact, her process was one which strived for faithful, respectful representation, one which understood and even exalted the unique value of distinctness. But understanding China through dance, this journey of (self-?)discovery, nevertheless made ethnic minorities legible through the lens of Chineseness, and defined them as a subset of yet distinct from what constituted China. At the same time: would it not be a greater erasure to exclude them from the canon of Chinese dance altogether?
I’ve always viewed the line between appropriation and appreciation to be drawn by care and respect, by the willingness to explore nuance, by the conscious concession of ownership. But performance steamrollers nuance, and there’s something about the embodiment of choreography on a physical level that feels dangerously close to impersonation. At the same time, the teaching and learning of ethnic dances, at least in my experience, has always been done with care for stylistic precision, for the genuine, transcendent joy that these distinct dance vocabularies make possible. I know this, because I’ve felt it. It feels reductive to suggest that Chinese dance should answer to the actions of the modern-day CCP by disavowing ethnic dance entirely, especially when classical Chinese dance is itself less a historical artifact than a modern construct with a life of its own.
Still, I don’t know if this is my call to make.
14.
There is a limit to translation. My senior solo was titled xiangchouwubian, translated in the program notes as Boundless (wubian) Nostalgia (xiangchou). But xiangchou, translated as nostalgia, more accurately means homesickness. More specifically, xiang tends to refer to hometown, home village, a reference to the rural roots of a rapidly urbanizing country.
Think about this city, my teachers said as we rehearsed the piece. Won’t you miss it after graduation? But I knew it wasn’t quite the same. My city, my suburb playing dressup, was no xiang. Xiang was my parents’ home villages, to which my emotional attachment has always felt more like the awareness of an absence than anything solid on which I might anchor a performance.
15.
There is a limit, therefore, to language as a metaphor for movement. There are some boundaries that letters, characters, consonants, strokes, vowels, tones will never cross. The body, on the other hand, is fluid. The body does not forget, but unlike the tongue it can translate itself into anything, like liquid taking the shape of its vessel. The body can masquerade; the body can pretend; the body can perform.
16.
As a dancer, the vast majority of your time is spent staring at yourself (or others) in the studio. The mirror falls away only during performances, and it can be disorienting at first: when you’ve become used to marking your movements against your reflection, standing in front of an auditorium feels vulnerable, naked.
Onstage, the lights beat down and the air is hazy with dust. The pressure of a hundred eyes.
Onstage, you inhabit a story that is not your own, like you pulled on a second skin along with your costume. Your power lies in becoming someone else, a magic trick made possible only by the presence of an audience to fool. Performance is intoxicating. Freed from the constraints of your own image, all that’s left is the dance.
Onstage, you can no longer seek or receive validation from yourself. Instead, you make demands of the audience: see me. Recognize me.
They see you — this version of you, at least.
17.
One of Judith Butler’s famous lines. Performativity has to do with repetition... the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify.
18.
The body does not forget. I still remember the core phrases of Seagull, and of almost every subsequent dance I performed at Hudie. I remember the smiles we painted on our faces to match the choreography: sweet and innocent, dark and mysterious. Performance pushes characters to the extreme, and I often found myself occupying tropes of the Asian woman in America: quiet, delicate, charming.
Alluring.
In dance, though, I was doing this because I wanted to, because I could, because every onstage metamorphosis was a reassertion of agency. Many of our recitals were for family and friends, but sometimes we’d dance for the general public at cultural festivals or in parades. I dare you to say the word exotic.
Negotiating the terms of gender and race: another Hudie dance my body will not forget.
19.
Once, Hudie decided to enter a competition, one that a “white” dance studio might regularly attend, one with category distinctions like contemporary/ tap/ jazz/ lyrical. These competitions reward a certain sort of technique: leggy oversplits, long extensions, quintuple pirouettes, rolling on the floor as an expression for yearning. In a room full of spandex booty shorts and sequined bra tops, we wore floor-length empire-waist skirts with beaded hairpins that looked like chopsticks. Your costumes are gorgeous, dance moms called at us as we walked past their makeup stations. Gorgeous as in different. Gorgeous as in what is this?
What it was: In English, we called it Korean in reference to the Chaoxian ethnic group of northeastern China, but of course, attempting such a distinction at this competition was futile. We were Asian girls from a Chinese dance studio doing a Korean dance. It was all the same anyway. In front of the white judging panel we smiled demurely, softened our wrists and elbows, and performed.
Helloooo, Asian ladies.
We won our age division despite our lack of “technical” difficulty, despite a couple of stumbles and mistakes. I suspect the judges had no idea where to even begin with critiques; in the broadly liberal greater Seattle area, they probably wondered if any negative commentary might have been racist.
Judith Butler again. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.
20.
I can’t claim to be the “Mother” of an entire genre of dance, but in a way, I think Dai Ailian and I may have been doing the same thing. The irony is not lost on me, that even as my discombobulation at discovering the history of Chinese dance hinged on this unsettling of what Chineseness really was, I myself had staked my identity on the production, embodiment, and performance of Chineseness. Even as I was hypercognizant of the ways in which society as a whole might reduce me, my body, to stereotype, I had been just as guilty of a static perception of culture, and a perception of static culture. No different, perhaps, from the judges and parents at that competition. In retrospect, it feels a bit absurd to have expected that Chinese dance — influenced by even as it was distinct from ballet — had simply been passed down through five thousand years. Culture develops over time, but there’s no reason to assume it’s a smooth, linear process, and no reason the recency of its construction meant that Chinese dance wasn’t genuine. Even today, it continues to evolve.
21.
What I’ve really been dancing around this whole time, then, is authenticity: its slipperiness, its empty temptation.
22.
The trouble with mirrors: By the time you match your body to the teacher’s in the mirror you are already behind; as soon as you appear legible you have already become something else. No single image can capture the movement that comes in the moments after, that continuous process of transformation, the truth of always-becoming.
Through dance I have (figuratively) gone through the mirror stage again and again and again, in class and on stage, trying to pin down what it was that others saw, what it was that I saw. Maybe I should have known that it was impossible. After all, the mirror, in a physical sense, is itself merely a trick of the light.
The best we can do, then, even as we hunger for more: to satisfy ourselves with this eternally partial knowledge, with the fleeting images of an inevitably incomplete picture.
This essay is printed in SINOSTORIES along with many gorgeous pieces from other Chinese diaspora writers — the physical copy is very nice and I encourage you to get one so you can read the other essays 🫶
postscript
This is where the ego part of the subtitle comes in.
I’ve been sitting on this piece for a year and a half at this point, playing sort of submission roulette. In spring/summer 2021 I submitted this to that year’s Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest, and to my surprise, in September I found out I was a finalist, one on the shortlist they sent to the guest judge. And then I submitted to a bunch of other journals/ lit mags, got the “nice” (as opposed to form) rejection letters from a few other places. I remember feeling the writing, and the proceeding year or so of waiting for responses, as intensely emotional. This thing that I had dug up, excavated, that I didn’t even realize I had in me.
I don’t like that it was the external validation from fairly prestigious outlets that made me really take it seriously. It being this essay, it being my writing more broadly. Of course I cared about the piece when I was first drafting it in a class at Brown (hi MHS), but I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit that the Ploughshares thing made a difference, that once I saw it was possible for my work to be “legitimate” I suddenly wanted so badly to be published in a “real” lit mag — even though it’s not something I wanted before, and even though I knew this whole time that, at its core, this essay was and has always been a letter to a past self, a letter to all the girls I danced with and sweated with and watched in the mirror, to all the girls I grew up with. A letter to my friends, if you will, and to be honest, I don’t think I’m ever really writing for anyone else.
And so my point is — SINOSTORIES ultimately feels like the right home for this piece, feels like a gathering of friends come to share stories and love for its own sake rather than anything resembling prestige or institutional legitimacy. I’m so honored to have my contribution be printed alongside the rest, and truly so grateful for the time and care and generosity of Helen and the rest of the SINOSTORIES team. (And again, if you would like to support the project, and get to read the rest of the pieces, you can get the print anthology here.)
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This was SO beautiful and eloquent, a genuine joy to read. Thank you for sharing!!
My favorite part:
"If movement is speech, then dance is a language. If English is the Western world’s default written and verbal language, then ballet is its default language of movement. There are different dialects, to be sure — Russian, Balanchine, British. But while there might be slight variation in articulation, the building blocks of the language remain the same: an impossible turnout, a rigid spine, straight legs, pointed feet."
love this!!!