The Girl who did a Strip-Dance, by Wang Bang, translated by Nicky Harman

 In this post, Nicky Harman translates an article by Wang Bang, a writer, film-maker and translator based in the UK and featured here in September 2020. Wang Bang says, ‘I agreed to write for Love Matters because I think it is all about the making of girls, daring, dashing unconventional girls, about how our girls break away from social norms, toxic masculinities and a rigid, patriarchal society. …The results have been great. Most of my articles have been well received, with some of them getting more than 3,000 likes.’

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The thing that completely changed my relationship with my body was not losing my virginity, but watching a private striptease. It happened one hot day during the summer holidays, when I met Star. We had a lot in common: we were both at the ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ age; and she, like me, had dark skin, and came from a single-parent family. From then on, I used to tell my mum that I was going to a classmate's home to do my homework and hang out with Star instead.

There was something particularly fascinating about her body. It seemed to be softer and lither than anyone else's. I remember we found a dress in the suitcase her mother had left behind – round-necked, with an A-line skirt – and took turns to try it on. I got it tangled around my neck and then my elbows got stuck, but she just wriggled like an eel and the woollen fabric, shrunk from the wash, slid down over her body.

That summer holiday, Star seemed obsessed with trying on clothes. It was as if she was desperately trying to find her grown-up self in this jumble of fabrics and fibres. One evening, she drew the curtains and whispered to me that she was going to show me something special. With a mischievous smile, she began to pull her shirt up, then stopped half-way, pouted, and made a pretence of pulling her shirt down again, all the time swaying her hips. Finally, she pulled it up to reveal her small, flat belly… And she danced her way through taking her clothes off. There was no soundtrack, but her body seemed to open and close rhythmically, the way a seashell does. It was its own musical box. There was no stage lighting, but countless beads of sweat at her hairline caught the light instead.

Her dancing was naughty and provocative. It seemed to me then that she had made it up herself, though thinking back now, it was a lot like the striptease in a black and white photo of the American burlesque dancer Mae Dix. Mae Dix wears a hat with sparkly tassels, and holds a slender wand between her fingertips. Her silky dress has fallen to her hips, showing her alabaster backbone, her pert, fleshy buttocks, shaped a bit like a French snail, and her bum crack. She wears a neat pair of dance shoes, with copper-plated soles designed for tip-tapping around the dance floor.

Mae Dix’s act became a sensation. In those days, few women even wore trousers, and hardly anyone had heard of ‘striptease’. Instead, the mainstream media dubbed her teasing, flirty dance moves ‘burlesque’. The male reporters sent to cover the shows practically mobbed the stage, even if afterwards, they wrote about it with scorn. 

As girls, Star and I were separated from Mae Dix by nearly a century, but the society in which we lived did not seem to have grown much more tolerant towards women. My space, growing up, felt flat, crude and rigid, like a cardboard straitjacket. After I developed physically, I seemed to lose any right to do anything with my body apart from gymnastics to the radio broadcasts, sprinting and skipping. We had to sit bolt upright, walk with our toes turned in, and wear skirts down over our knees. It was a sin to touch ourselves in private, let alone make a spectacle of ourselves in public. Only the beautiful were allowed to dance, because only they qualified to join the dance troupes that added glamour to every public celebration. And only bad girls combed their hair into giant quiffs, wore bat sleeves and jeans, and sneaked into pop-up discos in basement fire tunnels. Our bodies were controlled, as rigidly as if we were statues of women displayed on the square, by a hidden but highly effective mechanism which reached right down to the micro level, to our families.

‘You should stop showing off your body every time you go out, okay?’ my mother would say, casting a stern, anxious eye over the sleeveless top I liked to wear because it was hot. ‘You’re asking for some hoodlum to slash your back. Have you any idea how many perverts there are out there, just waiting to slash a girl who’s showing a bit of back?’ My mother tried to teach me that clothes fell into two categories: ordinary, workaday, old clothes, were one sort. The other sort were for special occasions, when it was permissible to wear something a bit prettier. Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal about her mother: ‘She had two sets of false teeth, matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for “best”.’ Every time I read this, I smile wryly.

If I hadn’t met Star, I would never have had the guts to stand in front of the mirror, examine my body, caress it, dance with it, go with it, let alone set off with it to cross continents and find my own way in life. No matter how critical other people are about my body, I have learned to accept it. I’m in love with all the ways it allows me to express myself. I think of it as a musical instrument, its every movement performing a dance. And I am the only person with the right to play it. 

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Wang Bang’s column was written for RNW Media, Netherlands radio station, Love Matters Chinese website