On Dance

CHINA IS A LAND WITHOUT DANCE. Perhaps it existed in the past: I have seen
it in costume dramas and plays on historical themes in which elegant and accommodating silken sleeves are unhurriedly extended in courteous arcs, first to the left and then to the right. Dancing girls in ancient times were apparently possessed of the wise and saintly demeanor of our sages, as monotonous as that might seem. Yet there is also the line from the Tang poem, "we danced down the moon in the heart of the willow tower," which seems to imply a relatively pungent kind of gesture, capable of sweeping the moon from the sky.' Those days are distant from us now, however, and it is impossible to discover the actual steps of dances like Big Dangle Hands and Little Dangle Hands, let alone reconstruct them from nothing. Although song and dance were always mentioned in the same breath during the Ming and Qing dynasties, all that remains of the dances of that era are some of the characteristic movements and gestures of the Chinese opera. Even in the days when there was dance, people merely watched the performance, rather than actually participating in it. And so, in recent years, although countless people are working hard and on the move, there is no movement for the sake of movement, and nothing that might allow one to feel the soaring joy of limbs in flowing motion. (Except perhaps in
'Chang appears to be thinking of a Song dynasty song lyric by Yan Jidao (mid-eleventh—early twelfth century) to the tune "Zhegu tian" (Partridge weather).
 private places, which is why erotic paintings are so popular.) Such a vast and magnificent country, and yet its landscape lacks even the prospect of hands clapping in celebration. A fearful stasis has prevailed here for thousands of years, for countless generations. This is why the waists and buttocks of Chinese women are especially low-slung; seen from behind, Chinese women look like they are sitting, even when they're standing up.
Yet social dancing has become quite common among the Chinese in recent years. Some feel that it is improper, while others defend it as a form of art and decry the salacious minds of those who find it sexually suggestive. The truth is that your average social dance is in fact inevitably bound up with sexuality. How else can we explain the fact that the sight of two women dancing together tends to strike us as rather dull?
To dress in a presentable manner, congregate in a decent place, see others of one's own kind and be seen by them in turn: this is the essence of social interaction. If you talk too much at such gatherings, there is always the worry that your shortcomings will be exposed. And if all you can think to say is that the "weather is blah blah blah," devising something to substitute for the "blah blab blah" is in fact an onerous chore. In order to avoid exchanges of a similarly thoughtful nature, one must come up with various substitutes for conversation, such as games that allow one to converse with one's hands. Dancing is a conversation between feet, and its superiority to either mah-jongg or poker lies in the fact that it is the most elementary and the most harmless means of mixing between the sexes. But if there is an artistic aspect to dance, it exists only by way of negative example: people who can dance well lack the horrendous clumsiness of those who cannot and don't step on their partners' toes. That is all. It is because we insist on seeing an artful image in everything that our civilization has become so anemic.
Old-fashioned dancing in the West has yet to go that route and retains a profound sense of intimacy and feeling. There is a passage in a story by Chekhov that is the best piece of writing I have yet to encounter on dance:
She went on to dance the Mazurka with a tall military officer, whose movements were very slow, like a corpse with clothes on, his chest and neck shrunken, his feet stepping wearily across the floor. He was able to dance only with great effort, while she incited him with her loveliness and the bareness of her neck, titillating him; her eyes caught flirtatious fire, she moved with passion, while he became more and more indifferent and held his hands out to her as stiffly as a king.
The onlookers burst out into a cheer: "Bravo! Bravo!"
 But slowly the tall military officer grew more excited; his steps had more life, and, overcome by her beauty, he danced with extraordinary liveliness and grace, while she merely swayed her shoulders to and fro, glancing slyly in his direction, as if she were now the queen and he her vassal.2
These days the tango shares something of this atmosphere, but it is not quite the same. The tango comes from Spain.3 Spain is a poor country that, upon the discovery of their colonies in the Americas, was suddenly awash in wealth, wealth dazzling to the point of absurdity, arriving home from abroad in boatload after boatload of gold and precious stones. Yet this wealth was exhausted all too soon, and inevitably the glorious past became little more than a burdensome memory: black gauze veils and inlaid tortoiseshell combs worn by women, the little gold lame jackets above wide crimson sashes worn by men, poison, daggers, roses showered on heroic bull-fighting matadors—there is no romance here, only the rules of romance. Like a black cloth covered with shining gilt, this cruel and extravagant people got too rich too fast, and thus their wealth was always merely fantasmatic, a macabre and almost nightmarish episode, and the poverty they endured thereafter came to seem all the more inexplicable, doubling their sense of despair. Their dance has an intoxicated desolation, an emptiness at its heart; wine alone is no longer enough to make them drunk. Their movements are mostly mere formalities and careful flourishes. There is a dutiful playing out of this protocol of attack and retreat: a step conceded and a step taken, a position held and then released, in a protracted seesaw struggle, a polite promiscuity.
We moderns dislike this effusive quality, which is why the tango is not terribly popular here. In the dancehalls, one sometimes sees it performed by professionals, but only as window dressing.
At one time in the U.S., the entire country was mad about dancing the jitterbug (the word means something like our "sleeping insects awakened by spring").4 Everyone would move in a line like kindergarteners doing drills in a playground: a few steps forward, one hand lifted in the air, then
2 From Anton Chekhov's 1895 story "Anna on the Neck" ("Anna na shee"). In the interest of accuracy, I have translated Chang's translation rather than citing a preexisting version. For a full translation of the text, see Anton Chekhov, Later Short Stories: 1888-1903, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 304-317.
3Chang seems to be mistaken here. The tango has its origins in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 4Chang is playing on a phrase designating the third solar term in the traditional Chinese agricultural calendar, "the waking of the insects" (jing xie) from hibernation in the springtime.
 a great shout: "Hey!" With each shout, excitement would rise to a fever pitch, and they would abandon themselves to kicking their legs, dancing until they were so exhausted that they could dance no more. Jaded social flowers, businessmen, and housewives alike found a kind of liberation in the dance, a return to the fountain of youth. But simple-mindedness is not necessarily the same as childishness. The way children dance has very little in common with the jitterbug; in fact, it more closely resembles the free movement advocated by Isadora Duncan, which even when it has a pattern, retains a leisurely and unhurried feel.
There is a mad kind of dance in India that is different from the jitterbug in that the dancers shake violently on bended knees, seemingly shrunken to half their normal height. And yet their legs somehow manage to shimmy back and forth, as if they are dancing on a hot stove and can't bear to stand still. The music they dance to is the same, constantly tickling the ears with a high-pitched, shrill concatenation of sound. The singer seems to be trying to hold hot soup in his mouth as he sings, and his voice quavers constantly as a result. The virtue of a dance such as this is that it could be no other way: so perfectly is it in harmony with their habitat that it smacks of the eternal. The first creatures to come into being arose from the swamps. In that epoch, the swamp was everywhere, hot and damp the whole year round, treeless, choked with the giant fronds of water weeds. The sun poured mercilessly down on the black surface of the water, and the little creatures at the

bottom grew restless, set into a violent yet formless commotion, like vaporizing air. Filth is always a result of some sort of blockage, of partial death; places as full of vitality as the primeval swamp cannot be filthy. This Indian dance is much the same.
Even when civilized people want to be primitive, they cannot, for they have no fear of the primitive, and no respect for it either. They believe that when they have grown weary they can escape, seeking refuge among children and savages, but such an escape is impossible; only in ignorance can they find repose.
When I was in college in Hong Kong, a flock of little girls from a convent school came to live in our dormitory for the summer. The dining hall was suffused with the sour aroma of sweaty white uniforms and the damp smell of canvas shoes. Outside the dining hall was a garden laid out across the slope of a hill, traversed by cement pathways and enclosed inside iron railings. Beyond the railings, all there was to see most of the time was mist or misty rain and, beyond the mist, blue-green hills by the sea. When I was little, I ate from a little plate edged with gold, the center of which depicted just such a bay, surrounded by hills, complete with green water, and boats, and people. Gradually, everything but the blue-green of the hills was worn away. I remembered that little plate and a pair of red ivory chopsticks that went with it very clearly, and although these little girls annoyed me no end, I still felt an indifferent sort of sadness when I saw the difficulties they faced. They spent their days screaming and making a commotion just like any other children, but the moment they were called to order, they would disappear. It was as if they had been wiped clean from the face of the earth. And yet they refused to be wiped entirely clean, because the black-and-white tile floor of the empty dining hall was crisscrossed by the scuff marks of their rubber soles, and the damp stink of their canvas shoes still lingered in the air. They had a gramophone, too, which played the same record all day long, featuring the bright little voice of a girl singing:
My mother told me I can't go anymore to play in the forest with the Gypsies
Whatever made them happy was not allowed; nothing was allowed, and nothing permitted. With the doors of the dining hall thrown open and the gramophone blaring, rain would come in a sudden downpour, pattering across the cement paths, each drop a black mark. A Russian girl named
 Natalia sang along with the record, "My mother told me / I can't go any-more," arms stretched in the air, swaying back and forth in the music and the rain. The others all laughed and shouted, "Natalia! Wiggle your ears for us," because Natalia knew how to wiggle her ears. She and her sister, Maria, were orphans who had been adopted by an American lady and raised by her until they were five or six years old. When the adults moved back to the States, they left the children at the convent in Hong Kong. They had enjoyed a comfortable life at the home of their American foster parents and did not understand why they were now relegated to a miserable charitable institution where they were told to keep quiet, made to drink water from cups that smelt fishy and eat bread swabbed with a thin layer of pale red jam, forced to memorize passages from the Bible, and told to kneel down and pray before and after each and every lesson. Natalia had a long, pale face, and when she smiled, her lazy green eyes narrowed with a weary look. Like many lower-class Russians, she was warm-hearted and generous but also slovenly and was rewarded for these traits with beatings. Her older sister, Maria, was more sophisticated in the ways of the world and knew how to get on with her superiors, although you could sometimes see a flash of dull disdain in her big blue eyes. Maria had a pretty face that jumped right out at you, and it was said that when she had first arrived with a full head of golden curls that cascaded all the way down to her ankles, the nuns in the convent had promptly cut it all off because it would have been too much trouble to wash and comb.
On one occasion, a thief had come skulking through the dormitory. The next morning, when it was discovered what had happened, the girls ran breathlessly up and down the stairs in their excitement. This was more joy and freedom than they had enjoyed all summer long. They surged through the door of my room, brimming with expectation, "Miss Eileen, did you lose anything?" It was if they expected to see my room emptied. I could only somewhat sheepishly reply that I hadn't lost a thing.
There was also a Thai girl among them named Madeleine whose family lived in Bangkok. She could dance the traditional sacrificial dance of Thailand, with her slender brown wrists dangling behind her back as if they had somehow been disconnected from her arms. Thai temple dancers are usually just about her age, twelve or thirteen, with white powder slathered across their sharp yellow faces. Their faces look lifeless because of the powder, but each part of the body below-waist, legs, hands, and arms-seems to have a wholly independent life of its own, flipping upside down, twisting entirely around, coming to life in impossible ways, all in honor of the particular deity being propitiated by the dance. But the gilded brilliance of the
 deities of her home country were far away, and all Madeleine could do was take care of herself as best she could by becoming a sly little sycophant.
Apart from the little girls in the dormitory, there were also some of my own college classmates, including a few overseas Chinese girls from Malaya who had been educated for the most part in convent schools. Jintao (Golden Peach), who had a brown complexion and buckteeth, was spoiled in that regard. She had only been subjected to six months of Catholic schooling and had been spared thereby the usual consequences. Jintao showed every-one how the Malayans dance: boys and girls line up opposite one another and then undulate their bodies, choosing either to take mincing steps for-ward or just wiggle in place. The girls, who hold billowing handkerchiefs in their hands, wave them through the air, chanting: "Shayang ah! shayang ah!" "Shayang" is the word for one's lover, and it is the monotony of the song that makes it all the more lulling and lovely. The girls in Malaya wear either western fashions or Chinese-style jackets over silk pants. Only on grand public occasions do they wear the cheongsam. In the town where Jintao grew up, there was only one cinema. Jintao and all the other daughters of wealthy families would congregate there every night. If, on any given evening, she saw that one of her friends had come dressed in western style, she would run home without any further ado to change into a similar ensemble, returning just in time for the beginning of the picture show. The Malaya in which she lived was a domesticated little world, a tableau of civilization embroidered atop a sweltering background of savagery, a floral-print cotton quilt big enough to cover your head but not your feet.
There was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Malayan Chinese girl from another town called Yuena (Moon Girl) who was really quite lovely: a round, pure, pale face, large almond eyes, and a slim yet voluptuous figure. She had only recently arrived in Hong Kong when I first saw her. She was just coming out of the dormitory bathroom after taking a shower, smelling of prickly heat powder and wearing white floral-print pajamas. A silver cross dangled in front of her chest, and she smiled and made a polite little curtsy. She said, "It's great here! At the convent where I went to school before, everyone had to bathe together in a big cement pool, and they gave us big white smocks to wear in the pool, which looked like . . ." She covered her face, and broke into peals of laughter, and was seemingly at a loss as to how to describe them: ". . . You've never seen anything like it. There was a big seam at the back, and they were as wide as a mosquito net. You'd stand in the water and then secretly lift the edge above your knees so that you could rub some soap underneath. It was really . . ." There was often a bashful, almost pained expression on her face as she spoke, and her limpid phoenix‑
 shaped eyes would redden slightly at the edges. She went on to speak of the convent. The garden was full of coconut trees whose slender trunks shot seven or eight yards straight up into the air. The Malayan children would wrap themselves around the trunks and shimmy up to the top, gathering the fruit just like monkeys. As she told me about the trees and the children, that same bashful and somewhat pained look of disbelief drifted across her face.
Her father was a merchant who had made his fortune only after a great deal of difficulty and built himself a big new house. But almost as soon as he had moved in the whole family, he fell for a woman of ill repute and squandered his life savings.
"When we see her coming toward us on the street, we spit on the ground. Everyone knows that she does sorcery."
"Maybe. But she wouldn't necessarily need to know sorcery to do what she did," I suggested.
"No! It's sorcery for sure! It's not just that she's over thirty. She's not even pretty, either!"
"But even if she were already in her thirties and not very good-looking, she might. . ."
"No! It was sorcery for sure. Otherwise, how could my father have been so completely bewitched? Why would he come home from her just to beat and abuse his own family? Once when I still little he even grabbed me by my braid and knocked my head against the wall."
Of the Malays, who were also said to be proficient in sorcery, she knew only evil things: "The Malays are terrible. When you're riding your bike to school, they love to run after you and knock you down."
Her elder brother was going to school at Hong Kong University and hoped that he could one day arrange for Yuenu to enter the university as well. When the war broke out, he asked that my friend Yanying and I take special care of her, because "Yuenu is a very innocent girl." She was in fact terrified by the prospect of being raped and thought about it so much that her face was pale and puffy with worry. And yet when things were at their worst and no one else dared to show their faces outdoors, it was Yuenu who went out on the balcony to watch as column after column of troops marched just below. Then she cried out in alarm and called for all the other girls to come out and see what was happening.
Her mind was like a locked little room, with whitewashed walls stained with mildew, a vacant room at an inn on a cloudy day. Overseas Chinese have no intellectual home to which they can return. She was a simple-minded person living in a not-at-all-simple world, lacking any kind of cultivation, any tradition to which she might belong, and bereft of any dance she could call her own. Yuenti knew how to dance socially but would consent only to dance with either her father or her older brother.
Among the fashionable young ladies of Shanghai, ballet is considered an extremely high-class art form. Not a few of my friends have told me: "And the colors! You should go see the ballet, if only for the colors of the costumes and the backgrounds. Such brilliant colors. You're sure to love it!" But I did not like the colors, because they were in such perfect accord with my expectations. A thieves' lair in the depths of the forest, flooded with blue light; a pirate wearing a bright red bandanna; a damsel in distress decked out in a white gown; the bewitching wife of a Muslim prince, her silken blouse flashing with black sequins. None of these images were nearly as intimate or as memorable as the pictures on collectible cigarette cards, which, although cheaply made, still belong to us. "Spring Beauties in the Inner Palace" is one such tableau. As the curtain rises, a panoply of dancing girls hold a variety of poses, frozen in place, arrayed across a resplendent background. In that moment, they resemble an illustration from a medieval monk's hand-copied book, a precious illuminated manuscript, with flesh-pink people arrayed against a delicately incised background of gold, further embellished with bright red and powdery blue filigree. Another moment passes, the dancing girls begin to move, and the picture is transformed once again into a mere cigarette card. That is what I like so much about Chinese cigarette cards: they have about them a threadbare sort of luxury. The images are full of gilded beauties of every size and shape, like the famed Qiao sisters of the Three Kingdoms era, their faces caked with powder as they pose on clean, shiny tile floors next to vermilion lacquered columns, brocade hangings, and pearl-strung curtains. And yet this material abundance seems always to betray its origins in the minds of people living in the maw of poverty, which lends its own special kind of novelty. I like anticlimax. The creation of a lush ambience, followed by its sudden dissolution, lets one feel all the more acutely the humanity of legendary characters forced by circumstance into tears of anguish. But I cannot forgive the anticlimactic quality of ballet. Even from the back rows of the theater, I can see the grotesquely well-developed sinews and rounded thighs of the Russian dancers. Their hard and seemingly swollen white flesh makes me feel anxious for them. One false move as their feet hit the floor, and surely they'll come tumbling down with a resounding thud?
The ballet 11 Corsaro is based on Lord Byron's epic poem. To tell this story by way of movement seems particularly appropriate, for Byron's poem is full of howling winds and surging waves. But these operatic movements—
 rendered in a deliberately clear and comprehensible manner, yet lacking for that same reason any basis in the feeling of folk tradition-all flat. The kidnapped maiden seems like a bird in a cage, flailing wildly back and forth in the excess of her despair. Her body is always expressive, and each expression of emotion is scrupulously appropriate-and bland to the point that it smacks of nothing real. Reality is often inappropriate. This truth is laid bare by the portion of Dream of the Red Chamber completed by Gao E. Compared with the rest of the novel, it seems terribly barren, not because the Jia family has been demoralized by its decline but because Gao E writes poorly The problem is not, in other words, that Gao E's denouement doesn't make sense. It does make sense. What it lacks is sensibility; the feelings he portrays are merely sentiments, without a sense of verisimilitude.
The hero and heroine of II Corsaro go through a series of tribulations. The heroine is given to the king, and the queen, fearing that she will be replaced in his royal affections, chases her and her secret lover from the palace. Unfortunately, their boat capsizes in the ensuing storm. The final scene is very brief: one is confronted by a mechanical stage set, all crashing waves and clouds scudding toward the horizon, indicating the forward motion of the boat. The boat is packed with people, and even as they desperately confront the mortal danger in which they find themselves, there is somehow still enough time for a few dramatic gestures, performed on point, before they sink to their deaths. Such a hastily concluded tragedy strikes one as amusing more than anything else. The use of mechanized scenery almost always seems a bit contrived, with the possible exception of certain vaudeville comedies. When you are used to seeing storms and sinking ships, combat and conflagrations, on the movie screen, staged depictions lack the requisite realism. But that lack is precisely what Chinese audiences enjoy about such performances. The Chinese drama Haizang (Burial at sea) takes a page from the same playbook, except, in this version, the boat does not capsize. Instead, from among the crowds on deck, a pair of star-crossed souls leap to their deaths, landing on the stage below with a thud, only to be engulfed in "seas" that rage up to their waists. A few seconds later, they slump to the floor and out of view. The boat continues to row on ahead, and the audience, stirred to its very core, stands up and goes home to bed. I've been told that, without such scenes, it becomes difficult to send the audience packing. In the absence of a grand finale, the patrons will linger in the theater, waiting for the play to end.
I have seen Indian dance only once. The dancer, Indira Devi, actually wasn't Indian at all. She came from a small central European country—I'm not sure which one—but underwent rigorous training in India and has performed to great acclaim all over the world. The performance I saw was somewhat unorthodox in that the stage was too small and there was only an old stage curtain for a backdrop, but despite all that, this tiny woman sat on the stage with her palms clasped together, legs coiled under her body, feet wrapped around her knees, the folds of her robe quietly draped across the ground, resembling some sort of deity. For a long time, she did not move. Indian saris look a little like ancient Greek togas, but this woman lacked not only the grace of Greek statuary but also its classical proportions: her head was too big, her eyes were too large, and her hard, wrinkled mouth seemed to show her age. Even so, it would be hard to tell her age; from the way she sat onstage, she might as well have been several thousand years old. Gazing at that face left you with a cold sense of terror, which reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuselah, in which he posits that mankind will one day evolve to the point that babies will be delivered not from the womb but from the male testes. Childhood as a stage of human development will have been eliminated, and people will emerge from an egg as fully grown young men and women. These young men and women dance and play and make love and paint pictures and make sculptures for four whole years, until they grow so weary of material beauty that they venture forth on their own and contemplate the difficult depths of cosmic principle. In this way, they go on to live one hundred million years as purely sentient beings, having cast their bodies aside to weather the wind and sun alone. The men become indistinguishable from the women: dark, rail thin, loincloths hanging limply from their waists. The young men and women who have yet to turn four regard these creatures as oddities and refer to them as "the ancients." They are divided into two categories, male and female, but it hardly seems to matter. The research of the ancients into the principles of scientific knowledge have attained such an exalted level that they are able to transform their own bodies at will. If they choose to grow eight arms, they may do so; if they need to climb down a mountain, they simply lie flat on the ground, transform themselves into liquid, and flow downhill. And, indeed, that was the impression imparted by some of the more dynamic portions of Indira's performance. She would hold out one hand, with two of her fingers clasped together and the others fanning out in an altogether different direction, and proceed to alter the configurations of her fingers with incredible rapidity, until one could be forgiven for thinking that she had really grown eight arms. Apparently, each of these gestures has a mysterious symbolic meaning in traditional Brahmanism, but, as far as I could see, what was really being expressed was her superhuman mastery over her own body.
 For her second number, Indira changed into a lighter-colored shawl. She clapped her hands as she emerged, kicking open the red-and-yellow lining of her pleated skirt with each stride forward, the golden bracelets on her arms jangling against each other, entirely erasing the unfortunate impression she had given earlier of advanced age. With a flash of her big round eyes, she suddenly transformed herself into a beautiful maiden in ancient India, exultantly describing to anyone who would listen the beauty of her new lover: how tall he stands, how wide his shoulders, the shape of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, the mirror charm dangling from his neck, the sword hanging from his belt, how he looks when he smiles and when he's angry, and yet nothing seems to describe him exactly right, no matter how hard she tries to capture him in words. Look for yourself, then! He's on his way—he's coming now! She runs repeatedly to one side to see if he has arrived; she climbs a tree to gaze into the distance; she drizzles well water across her face, using a hairpin dipped in a dark decoction made of liquid bronze to lengthen her eyelashes. . . .
Indira also performed a piece she herself had choreographed called Mother, which, because of its pretense to realism, was very well received, although I myself found it quite annoying. A mother who has lost her child walks grief-stricken by a religious shrine, where she kneels to pray. She falls into a reverie, dreamily swinging her empty bassinet from side to side. Finally, she grows angry and pushes the shrine to the ground with a crash. Shocked by her own heresy, she quickly kneels back down and begs the forgiveness of the gods. There's nothing wrong with the subject matter, which describes the disease and disaster plaguing India as well as the stubborn superstitions of its women in a deeply tragic, if overly narrow, manner. But all that is really described here is motherly love: a "motherly love" that ought to come in parentheses. Motherly love is a huge topic and, like any such topic, has long since been freighted by far too many clichés. The people who advocate motherly love the most loudly are men: men who have been sons and who can never be mothers. Women, if they praise motherly love at all, do so only because they understand that they possess nothing else that will earn the respect of men, that they must play this role to the exclusion of all others. There are some emotions that, performed over and over again, come to seem like nothing more than performance—and no emotion more so than motherly love.
Whenever the Takarazuka Song and Dance Troupe is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the chorines featured in their advertisements, clad in short pants, wearing little heart-shaped hats worn at a rakish tilt. Truth be told, Takarazuka's western-style dancing is quite limited in scope. There is
 always the same chorus line, standing erect with their arms linked together. They look to the right in perfect unison, bend their knees, and kick their legs up and down until, at the sound of a cymbal, their heads suddenly switch direction, and they repeat the same steps a second time before changing their costumes and coming out for an identical encore. I am told that the reason they perform this western-style routine so frequently here is that Chinese audiences are unduly enamored of it. The only dance of theirs that I really like is entirely of their own making. The entire troupe takes the stage wearing lovely, brightly colored kimonos. They line up in single file, each dancer's hands resting on the back of the dancer in front of her, and then shuffle quickly across the stage, moving in lockstep as they rock their heads from side to side, their necks seemingly only loosely attached to the rest of their bodies, like bobble-head toys or dolls made of silk gauze. Likening real women to toys is perhaps insulting, but these toys seem to think they're fun, and they bob their heads from side to side with all the delight and wondrous sense of discovery with which a child bends one of her own toes back and forth.
For Japanese people, Japan is like a toy box with cardboard partitions. You clear a space and put the miniature teakettles and little toy soldiers inside, each in its own appointed enclosure. An individualist would naturally have trouble endorsing that sort of environment, but the fact is that the vast majority of people fit very nicely into their partitions, because very few of them really stand out. Even many of those who are considered exceptional, or at least consider themselves exceptional, are in fact quite unexceptional. The stylization of society, unlike its mechanization, is a natural process and has its benefits. Which leads me to the little figures who serve as embellishments to Japanese landscape paintings. They never resemble the ethereal sages and wizened old men leaning on walking sticks who populate Chinese paintings. They are, instead, everyday folks: those women walking across a bridge are probably on their way to pick up the kids from school. The colors in these pictures are solid and deep: blue pools and green willows, a pale ink-washed sky, tranquil times and complacent weather. And because of this complacency, everyone minds his own business. The women marry and serve their husbands and children, each wearing her hair in the same fashion as the rest and mouthing the same polite phrases. There is an oppressive quality to all of this, a kind of insubstantial and plaintive melancholy that has become one of the signal characteristics of Japanese art.
There's another Takarazuka dance number that left a deep impression on me called The Lions and the Butterflies. The lion onstage is played by a
 dancer, so there is naturally no pretense of realism. Chinese dancing lions and stone statues of lions look less like lions than Pekingese dogs because of their bulging eyes. That's why I have always suspected that the only lions Chinese people ever saw were sent to the court as tribute and were never examined with anything more than a cursory glance. And Chinese people seem to love to create strange beasts such as kirins and the like. If humanity must have its own creations, why not just make more houses, and pottery, and fabrics? Making beasts, in the end, doesn't seem to be our forte. The lion in the Japanese dance, in any case, was content to stand just like a man, except that he wore a mask. Brightly colored whiskers dangled down from his white face, and his head was fringed by a vermilion mane. A great unkempt red tail hung from behind, wagging back and forth whenever he was excited. As The Lions and the Butterflies begins, we are deep in the mountains. A group of butterflies dances through the air, while two lions sit quietly in their midst. With the crash of a cymbal, the lions suddenly rise to their feet, red tails swishing back and forth so vividly that you really feel you are in the presence of lions. The butterflies scatter in all directions, and the whole scene is like a vision glimpsed from the edge of a dream, filling you with a gorgeous, make-believe fright.
This kind of fright plays on the deepest childhood fears. The Japanese really understand children best, perhaps because they are children them-selves. Their finest moments come in the course of talking to children. The attitude Chinese people take toward children is almost never right. The already slightly antiquated way of dealing with children among westerners is through a polite and measured distance, as if parents and children have come together simply in order to fulfill a duty. With tepid decorum, parents will teach their children to say: "May I please have one more piece?" or "May I please take my teddy bear to bed with me?" The new way, on the other hand, dictates that parents read extensively in childhood psychology before they have even married. The more they research the topic, the more confused they become, and the result is a tendency toward overindulgence. They will plead with their children ("Darling, please don't destroy papa's book"), kiss them good morning, kiss them good night, kiss them before they go off to school, and kiss them after they are finished with their les-sons. The children's rhyme goes "What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice." But the world of the child is not all sweetness and delicacy and light, like the atmosphere of the popular song: "Come, children, clasp your hands together. . . ." There is a revolutionary art school in the United States that encourages children to paint as they like. One of the most memorable paintings was of a bad child with glasses and rotten
 teeth. Another painting was of a reddish purple sunset by a lake, across which flitted two shadowy phantoms with bulbous and distended heads. Another and truly frightening work was composed entirely of little hand-prints heaped atop one another.
There's a fairy girl in the Japanese movie Ligong gesheng (Songs in the fox fairy palace) who is the incarnation of an ancient white magnolia tree, wears flowing white robes, parts her hair in the middle, and has a small, almost excessively proper oval-shaped face. She has an extremely high and thin and monotonous voice, and during her longest monologue, as exquisite as she may have been supposed to sound, chills still ran up and down my spine. At least, you could tell that she was a fairy girl and not a ghost. Nor did she seem like a movie star, unlike the fairy in the cartoon version of Snow White, who looks like she should be starring in a commercial for raisins. Although a film like Ligong gesheng and Disney cartoons such as Snow White and The Adventures of Pinocchio are all fanciful and supernatural tales for children, I always feel that the Disney pictures are like an adult shamelessly stooping over to ingratiate himself with a child, whereas there was no trace of such pandering in the Japanese film.
For a time I went to see Japanese movies quite frequently. The two films with which I was most satisfied were Ligong gesheng (originally called Kogoden [The fairy palace] in Japanese) and Wu cheng mishi (The secret of the city of dance; Nami no Odori [Nami's dance] in Japanese). A Japanese acquaintance sneered when I mentioned these two titles; the former, he laughed, was made for children, and the latter for ignorant and uneducated young girls. But I remain unashamed. The virtue of The Secret of the City of Dance has nothing to do with its legendary story of love and hate. Certainly, aspects of the story are quite moving. When the father is compelled to sell the already engaged daughter to a powerful man as a concubine, he kneels stiffly in front of the ancestral tablet, holding back the tears in his eyes as he explains his plight with a trembling voice. His daughter kneels behind him, bowed and motionless. In that cold little hall, partitioned off with white rice-paper screens, one can feel the persistent grip of ancestral feeling. When the fiancé returns to take his revenge, an old servant takes the girl to see him, but she suddenly stops halfway, lowers her head, and turns in the opposite direction. Distressed, the servant calls out to her, "Miss! Miss!" But the girl merely continues to pace back and forth with her head bowed down. The servant urges her, "But he's waiting for you there." Only after several entreaties is the servant able to convince the girl to go reluctantly ahead. The fiancé, waiting for her on a sandy stretch of beach, has undergone countless trials and adventures in order to be by her side, and
 yet not one tender word falls from their lips when they finally meet. He merely walks to one side, wrapped in a mantle of self-absorption, passionately exclaiming that he "never dreamed that a day like this would arrive." She follows quietly behind him through the silvery gray mist of the seaside. Suddenly, he spins around to face her, and she, too, turns on her heel and walks swiftly back toward whence she came, head still bowed, as he follows in the distance. There was just such an endless scene of romantic entanglement in a recent Chinese play, in which one lover walks away and the other follows closely behind, both immersed in silence. Or perhaps it was two heroic fighters, one male and one female, marching forward with icy resolve. The cowardly villain, frightened out of his wits, takes an initial step backward, and when the heroes continue their triumphal progress unfazed, he backpedals in a manner resembling a dance.
At the center of The Secret of the City of Dance is a dance festival. The old and young of the whole town come out to dance in the dazzlingly white sun-shine, waving their arms, tapping their feet, and performing all manner of kicks and pirouettes as they chant: "Today is the festival of dance! Whoever doesn't dance is a dunce!" Perhaps the film was overexposed: the entire scene looks washed out. One can vaguely discern the joyous motion of heads and arms and limbs and bodies clad in floral-print blouses and checked cotton cloth, the glossy black of the women's hair, the bobbing gray hair of the elderly dancers, but everything is pallid, lacking in local color, less distinctly Japanese than merely human. Inside the throng, the hero grabs hold of his enemy, lifting him by his collar, and recites a litany of his many crimes. He seems to mouth phrases like "at last, you've fallen into my hands" several times in Japanese, so that the whole process takes far too much time. The dancers, not content to serve merely as a backdrop for these proceedings, act in a manner entirely unlike anything you'd see in a Hollywood musical (in which dancers are a forest of jade pale thighs entirely at the director's beck and call), surging across the frame and entirely engulfing both the hero and his mortal enemy. All you can see is dancing, dancing, dazzling white gyrations under a dazzlingly white sky. When the camera finally finds its way back to the hero, he is still talking with the villain, and then, somehow, the villain lies slain at his feet. To conclude such a legendary story with a scene like this is so disappointing that it seems almost funny—blame it on the dance.