By Douglas J. Penick
I
Like almost everywhere in Southeast Asia, the village where I was born was first overrun by insurgents then by loyalists and finally destroyed in the early 50s. 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 survived.
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. My mother was both intimidated and intrigued by her. I suspect 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. It changed my life forever.
While the old lady checked the quality of my mother’s work, I played in the courtyard. At some point, the lady began to observe me closely. I liked to mimic the dances I had seen during the village festivals. I’m sure my performances became more extravagant as I became aware of the old lady’s attention. After a while she told my mother that she had some reservations about my character, but could see that I was a natural dancer. If my mother wished, she would get an audition for me at the dance school 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. 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, and had been the first patron of the Buddhist way in Southeast Asia. He 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 him. It was she who showed him all the many cycles of dances. She told him that as long as these dances were performed faithfully and beautifully, the country would remain harmonious and prosperous.
So the royal dance company was very important. My mother was overwhelmed. It was unthinkable. It was as if someone proposed that I become a goddess and live in Heaven. I still remember that moment. I knew something very serious was about to happen. Nothing moved 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 when my mother stammered out a long list of my flaws and defects: vanity, prissiness, superior airs, laziness, mean-spiritedness; more bad attributes than I had ever known existed, much less had. My mother summed it up, saying we were just poor people who could never afford such luxury and were content with our lot. The old lady ignored her protests. She explained that the school paid for the room and board as well as the tuition of the students. Then my mother began to think seriously about the possibility. I looked on as my fate was decided.
The old lady was not just a connoisseur of dancing. She had relatives who were very well placed in the school. She might even have once been a dancer herself. I never knew.
The dance troupe and the school were housed in the palace grounds next to a large Buddhist temple.
The company consisted entirely of girls. We were well fed and pampered as a compensation for the rigors of our training. We 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 20 to 60. 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. Collectively, all these women made the best mother in the world. By contrast, my own mother came to seem clumsy and awkward. Over the next 15 years when I visited home, the smells, the constant noise and the cramped dark rooms, were painful. I became estranged from my natural family. Dance became my life.
The senior teachers, who were all former dancers, supervised our training. They were responsible to the dance master. He, the musicians and two singing teachers, were the only males allowed in the school.
The dance master was, as tradition dictated, a member of the royal family. In this way, we were constantly reminded of the origins of the dance and of the King’s continuing patronage. During my time, the master was a royal prince. He was a heavy-set bachelor in his mid-forties with a vague melancholy air, but his love and deep understanding of dancing made a great impression on all of us.
On the first day, he, dressed simply in white pants and shirt, stood in front of the assembled teachers and musicians, welcoming me and seven other little girls who made up the newest class. He gave a simple talk and told the history of the dance. He explained how 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. This would make all who saw us happy, and give them confidence to endure the hardships of life. So began my training.
Our days were strictly regulated. The classes were long and arduous. Slowly all the elements of the royal dance became natural. Repeated exercises of increasing complexity transformed our bodies and habits of movement. Even when we walked, we became less and less like normal people. In all this, I felt real pleasure as the capacities of my body developed and I mastered increasingly subtle and complex movements. We all felt 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. He rarely said much. He watched us carefully.
I remember once, when I was about eight years old, I asked an older girl why there was a man at the head of a completely female dance company. The girl was about seventeen. She said it seemed that 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. Afterwards I watched the Master more carefully, particularly on the rare occasions when he demonstrated a posture or movement himself.
Sometimes princes, ministers, courtiers and high officials came to watch us rehearse. They were kept at a distance since we could not have intimate contact with men if we wished to remain with the troupe. This had always been so. It was part of the original instructions that enabled dancers to fulfil the sacred intent of the dance. As young girls, we never even thought about it, but very occasionally, an older girl would be obliged to leave. This caused resigned sadness in the teachers and attendants and provoked giddy nervous whispers among the older dancers.
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 and these were performed according to the season. 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. Some stories told of their interaction. The summer cycle was mainly devoted to humans, the winter cycle to gods, while the spring emphasised the birth of humankind from the god realm. The autumn cycle dealt with the transgressions of humans and the temporary withdrawal of gods. These themes lay beneath all the twists and turns the stories took, and so the dances were not as difficult to learn as it seemed at first. There was a great deal of repetition in gestures and movement sequences. The real challenge was to devote to all those steps, that by then we knew by heart, feelings of real living beings.
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. Then, all of a sudden, we were learning how to make phrases and sentences. This combined with the greater emotional intensity of puberty. Our involvement with the characters was vivid. It was like discovering a new dimension of life. When I think of it now, I wonder whether it was our raw state of feeling that made the roles seem so alive or whether these elevated and heroic roles sharpened our states of feeling. My life was wonderfully exalted. Now it seems far more a dream than a real memory.
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 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. They should convey 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. As we performed, people could restore their own place in the heart of this world.
Finally, he told us that even though we would continue to live as we had, we would be performers moving about in the world. We might have felt nervous or over-excited about dancing in front of strangers and meeting with them. But if we kept in mind the true purpose of our lives as dancers, we would experience no problems.
We were taught in this way for another year, and the effect was subtly to increase the precision we brought to our dance. All that emotional intensity was held within a larger feeling. It sounds odd, but it was profoundly relaxing. Each movement, each gesture, each pose, would dissolve like a drop into a river and flow from sequence to sequence. Our moods and feelings did likewise.
So at last we performed in the dance publicly. I was about sixteen then. To say I enjoyed 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 neighbouring countries and one was an abandoned ruin. We danced for the most part in the capitol, but each season, we travelled to various parts of the country and performed 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, were troubled by their desire to have a lover or a husband and a family, or just to have a normal life. Eventually they left. I however, like many others, even though 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 and death. 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. I could see no purpose in falling into more ambiguous and murky realms.
II
It was a point of pride that the performances in the capital were done with as much splendour as ever, but it was becoming obvious that the grounds there were 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 neighbouring 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 capital was swamped with poor refugees. Our performances in outlying provinces had been curtailed. When we did go outside the capital 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 so suddenly was, however, 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. Soon things would be set right. The Master was drawn and tired. He said nothing about all this. He continued to coach us and teach the new students in his calm quiet way.
But one morning, there were no attendants to wake us and bring us tea. We milled around in the dormitories and halls wondering what 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. We called out to her:Â “What is happening? Where is everybody?”
“The King has fled the country,” she called back. “You’ll have to go home.” We were upset, but didn’t know what to do. We were creatures of deeply ingrained habit. We got dressed and went to the main hall. It was 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 in his white shirt and trousers.
“My dear, dear friends,” the Master’s voice was very soft. We 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. There is very little to oppose them. The King’s departure means that the world that we have known and functioned in has ended. Our futures are now highly uncertain. I cannot insist that any of you remain here. But I have given my life to our 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. Our work together will go on. We may have to improvise a bit, but I am sure we can manage.
“Nonetheless, we should be under no illusions. Things will change, perhaps beyond recognition. It seems likely to me that even a communist government will continue to support this dance company, if only for reasons of cultural prestige and propaganda. Even so, your way of life will be profoundly changed. But 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 we all cried. But the Master was as good as his word. Almost at once, food was delivered from some nearby restaurant. We had our breakfast. Teachers and a few musicians returned. We rehearsed. Except for three older girls, everyone stayed.
It was hard to sleep that night and for the next few weeks.
The morning after the second night of silence, we awoke to see the palace grounds filled with groups of ill-dressed and fierce-looking soldiers. In the rehearsal hall, the Master stood in front of his seat. Beside him stood a short slight man in a clean uniform with epaulets. Behind them were 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. 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. The soldiers escorted our master from the room. We were in a state of shock. The Major spoke sharply and told us to resume our work. Somehow we did.
The eldest teacher was made acting head of the school. He could not look any of us in the eye. The Major came every day. Other military people often accompanied him. Some watched with interest, some with peasant-like amazement and some with unconcealed animosity. After a few weeks, the Major was joined by a tall stern Chinese woman, also in military dress. Soon he announced that this woman was our new master. He explained that our art, while remarkable, had been a tool of the King’s oppression and mystification of the people. We were not to blame since we were children of workers and peasants. But now a new era had begun. It was necessary that we re-educate ourselves. We had to abandon old royalist attitudes. It was now our duty to serve the people in their struggle for freedom. He bowed to the tall woman and went on. Comrade Chen had long been a people’s artist. She was experienced in working with ethnic groups. She would help us transform our traditional dances into expressions of the people’s revolution.
Comrade Chen addressed us in a harsh stiff voice. She told us we had to re-educate ourselves in two ways. First, we had to recognize we had been unwitting objects and agents of oppression. We had to purge ourselves of mystical thinking about our work and recognise its true nature. Second, dances that glorified monarchy or the fictional deities that sanctioned it would be eliminated. Works expressing the aspirations of the people’s liberation would take their place. We would learn these new dances and perform them to encourage the people.
Starting next day, she said, our morning practice would be replaced by re-education classes. She herself would teach us. Otherwise, things would continue as before. Perhaps Comrade Chen sensed the depth of our discomfort. She looked at us with a hard glance. She said that those unwilling or unable to serve the people in this way would have to serve them as ordinary workers. They would have no place in the company.
We discussed all this amongst ourselves until late at night. None of us older girls liked what we heard, but we didn’t know how to survive any other way. We had no skills other than dancing. Perhaps we hoped the King would return soon at the head of some sort of army. Even if that were a year off, it would be best to continue. We stayed on.
We were all nervous, but the new curriculum began relatively painlessly. For a few weeks, first thing after breakfast, trucks would take us to slums in the city, to hospitals, to poor farm villages. We would get out, and people would come 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 to understand the great hardship of the people’s lives. If we knew about this from our memories of childhood, most of us had put it aside. None of us had realized the great extent of suffering and injustice.
We spent the next week or so touring the royal palaces and the abandoned mansions of rich people. 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 met contrasted with the lavish ostentation of the temples themselves. Poor people had told us about the cruel burden of taxation that kept them on the edge of survival. 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.
All through that time, we continued to rehearse the traditional plays. 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, but also, we knew what answer was desired. In truth, none of us knew what to think. We were then asked to review each segment of the four cycles for their suitability. Despite Comrade Chen’s exhortations, we were all very reluctant to do this. Comrade Chen was angered by our hesitation, but she was 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 rebelliousness. She decided to teach us about the history of our dance.
She arrived next day with an armload of books. A soldier followed her, bearing two more cartons.
“I don’t want you to take what I say on trust. 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?”
Most of us could make out letters and some words, but we were otherwise illiterate. Comrade Chen recovered quickly. “In that, you are not unlike most of the people who have been so brutally exploited.” She said we must repay the peoples’ kindness in making books available to us. 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 us how originally peasants banded together in villages so that they could irrigate, grow and harvest their crops. As one became more skilled at one aspect and another more skilled at another, the division of labour ensued. Women originated the crafts traditions to provide cloth and pots for their homes. When defence of the village was required, they all banded together and fought. 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. They extended their domain by conquest. By gaining control of larger and larger territories, they were able to implement larger irrigation schemes, encourage increased specialisation 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 did not improve the people’s standard of living. This 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 redeployed 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 that had created the entire society in the first place.
Some of the other older girls and I discussed these astonishing teachings late into the night. Already there were different camps in the school. Most new students and a few older girls found Comrade Chen’s teachings inspiring. For these girls, a heightened sense of injustice and revolutionary ardour 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. They could see nothing good in the old ways. I was part of a smaller group who thought there was truth in what Comrade Chen had to say, but we also believed the traditions we had learned before. In what the Comrade taught, we were victims of history. Even if this were true, in what we’d learned before our lives were part of something even larger. We couldn’t see how to settle the conflict in our hearts.
While petty disagreements, jealousies and irritations were not uncommon in all my years with the company; we were a family with one aim and one heart. We did not doubt each other. We appreciated each other’s strengths and shortcomings. We spoke freely amongst ourselves. But by the time I am speaking of, that had changed. Those not completely in accord with Comrade Chen’s thinking had to be very careful in how they spoke or acted. Otherwise they would be reported by one of the comrade’s converts for falling back into negative reactionary ways. And amongst those of us who were uncertain, we all felt very differently and so even in such a gathering, each became cautious. So in our late night whisperings, while we shared misgivings and anxieties, none of us dared to say what she truly felt in her heart. For myself, for the first time in my entire life, I became aware that I had a personal opinion 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 than 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, landlords forced lovers to part, demons enslaved people, that sort of thing. The new pieces she introduced were modelled on Chinese dances: in one a young girl sacrificed her life to rally a beleaguered revolutionary battalion, and in the other a young schoolteacher encouraged peasants to resist the demands of a greedy and lecherous tax collector. The Comrade was quite ingenious in adapting our modes of expression to these dances. I suppose it all would have made a reasonable impression, but for me it was weirdly spiritless.
I was always aware that a gesture that had a specific traditional meaning, like an elongation of the arm, hand and finger, which invoked the inner harmony of the earth, was now being used merely to tell the evil landlord to depart. 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 athletic. I thought to myself: this is what it is like to do any ordinary kind of work.
But before we could ever put these pieces on in public, the company was changed in a manner that none of us, or certainly I, could ever have imagined. Though afterwards we put on dances, 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 dishevelled 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 had to be allocated to military purposes than had first been anticipated. Spending on other revolutionary activities was going to have to be temporarily reduced.
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. In as kind a voice as she had, she explained 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 recognised, 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. Even our determined Comrade finally stopped trying to comfort us.
Five days later, the first of these social gatherings took place. Comrade Chen understood that few of us had any idea of how to behave under such circumstances. She worked hard to make introductions and begin conversations between us dedicated virgins and the soldiers, who were mostly junior officers and who were 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. 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 Chen must almost have given up on me, but she persisted. She made it a personal project to take me around to the newcomers 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. Suddenly he changed his mind. Hesitantly he 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.” I was surprised, but no more than he when he found out I had only just begun to learn. He said he had no idea about the life of a dancer. He had only seen the dance once a very long time ago. I told him about my training. 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. 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 whoresâ€. 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.
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.Â
