Planting the Willow

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. It was not so much that anything was exceptionally painful or happy. Things presented themselves. I went along. I was being swept off by a wild wind that came from an unknown place. It was carrying me on to somewhere equally unknown.

My marriage took place at an office in the city hall. There was no ceremony: we swore that we were willing to be each other’s husband and wife. 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 poor noisy neighbourhood near the central military headquarters where he worked.

I was fortunate that my husband was, 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 and do laundry. He willingly did some of these chores so I could go to rehearsals, classes and performances. He taught me how to read, and he introduced me to the world of literature and poetry. 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. I was shocked at the confusion of lovemaking, at the suddenness and violence of how my body reacted. There was no part of my body or his that could be concealed or held back. We were thrown together, arms, mouths, skin, hairs, stomachs, backs, legs, hands, teeth, genitals, fluids, smells. There was no pattern. Sometimes it was pleasurable, but I felt lost. I am sure my husband did not feel this way. If he was disappointed, he never said. He was always very kind.

I entered a very physical sense of the world, not just sexually but in everything I had to do every day. 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. The movements lacked meaning. In most of my life until then, there had been a set distance established by decorum among the dancers and by convention between the performers and the audience. 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. I was weighed down with sadness.

Dance rehearsals and the performances continued but it was different, as if something had been lost forever. Even thinking, as I had before, that life now was part of the winter cycle did not really help. I often dreamt I was caught in a crowd of strangers on a ferryboat carrying me away from my homeland. The landscape passed by at a dizzying rate and became ever more unfamiliar. At the point I realised I would never return, I would wake up in tears. It was all the worse because my husband was always as kind as he could be. Comrade Chen was patient. My friends in the company went out of their way to comfort me despite their own many problems.

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. 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 was 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’. He was making it perfectly naturally. It made me smile as if I were seeing an old friend while lost in a strange town. After that I often noticed how people unconsciously made many of the gestures or standing in postures that came from the dance. 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. These were very difficult because the government changed and became even more radically communist. Court Dancers were publicly reviled as “palace whores”. 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 risk 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, but his friend persuaded him. We were forced to flee. We became refugees.

We lived in a refugee camp for about a year until, through the efforts of one of the relief organisations 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 saved enough to start our own business: a corner store, which caters to the small community of our former countrymen in the valley here.

This has been difficult, 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 my husband is an idealistic man. He became a communist because he wanted to free our people from oppression. 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 willing to endure the hardships that were necessary to accomplish this. Because he is idealistic, he continues to believe in that ideal even though the communists have committed such terrible slaughter in our land. Here, amongst the refugees, there are almost none who believe as he does. He finds it hard to be interested in living and working just so he can survive to have money and cars and other things. I cannot help him very much with this. I know how hard it is for him to live with nothing to believe in. I feel very close to his sadness.

Things are not so difficult for me. I began teaching dance a little in the refugee camp. It seemed to me that people should 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 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.

Here in this strange city 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 meaning because of their place in myth, story, and in a way of life. Now I see, even if all these meanings have been altered, or lost, or have never even been known, this dance itself is a living thing.

Douglas Penick was a research associate at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and a chef at Gordon Matta Clark’s Food. He studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism for more than 30 years, and has written and taught on Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian religion, history and culture. He is the author of three books deriving from the epic cycle on the life of King Gesar of Ling: ‘Crossings on a Bridge of Light’, ‘Warrior Song of King Gesar’ and ‘The Brilliance of Naked Mind’. His novel ‘A Journey of The North Star’ was brought out by Publerati this June.