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