I couldn’t yet tie my shoes, but I sparkled when I danced.

Laolao told me this. When I pranced across the backyard, hoisting my arms up like I’d seen ballerinas do on TV, I sparkled.  My socked feet caught in the grooves between the tiles, hands swinging behind me like the little metal pieces on a windchime. The ones that glitter in the sunlight and sing with the crickets in the evening. Laolao would narrow her eyes, shake her head, and tell me there was something special about it, what I became. It forced new air down down down my throat into my stomach. I knew everything, was everything. With a swish of my fingers, I could carve out a piece of my soul and give it a new name, one that flashed and cried through the pupils of my eyes, followed the line of an outstretched leg, and Laolao finally told my mom to sign me up for a real dance class.

She took me. Not a ballet class as I’d hoped, but a Chinese dance class. I peered through the clear glass door and stubbornly squatted next to the entrance, intimidated by the mesmerizing sight. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The teacher was giving a demonstration with changxio, “long sleeves.” She leapt like a bird in flight, every movement a graceful line, and as she swept a circle with her forearms, long swathes of cloth trailed just a beat behind. She jumped, they formed patterns in the air — lingering, yearning to be for a second longer — and she twirled them back in a flurry. In her eyes blazed a regal confidence.

I came back for class the next day, then cried because we weren’t using the pretty sleeves. We did barre exercises, then floor exercises, then combinations. Standing in staggered rows, we lengthened the lines of our backs to our shoulders up up up to the stars and then down, two, three, four. I loved it, but something felt strange. I was not really a ballerina, and Ms. Lu was not really a ballerina.

I would stand in front of the green room mirror minutes before showtime and pull at my skin, wanting willowier, smoother, lighter. A slender neck like the Russian girls in the magazine cutouts. Laolao loves my eyes, but I always thought they looked just like the moles on her time-weathered arms, slashed by too many years under the rays of Taiwan's glaring sun. Dull, blackish, something to scratch out with sharp fingernails. I wanted to scratch them out. Did they really sparkle like she said? Did I? 

It’s not bitter, but it's something like jealousy. An itch deep inside your palm that you can’t reach. Sometimes it itches, and I want to writhe all the way back into the center of myself, to know and be everything, to give part of me a name that can answer when classmates ask me what type of dance I do, that can stare back at people who gawk at my costumes, umbrellas and swords. 

It’s competition day. The mumbling of the audience is a roaring cacophony in my head, and then my hands shake as I walk on stage in the pitch-dark. Spotlights snap on, and suddenly everything is brighter than white. Then my too-brown eyes adjust, my not-pale-enough skin glows, and it’s just me. I carve a new name from the beat, in the lines, through the silk details on my chest. 

I spin with a red fan in one hand and kick out with my pointe shoes. There’s an inferno in my mouth from how hard I’m grinding my teeth, but I’m grinning. I end with a flourish, and everyone’s watching.