"Dancing Lets Me Escape the Place Where I'm Different from Everyone Else" | What Is She Thinking at 22? (Twenty)

"For me, I'll dance for the rest of my life, no matter how much money it makes."

Editor's note: On June 20 we launched the "QDaily Big Survey: College Students" series. Across dozens of articles we look at what college students spend, whom they love, how they work, what confuses them, and how they feel about the virtual world. A large part of it is the individual stories of the 50 students we interviewed. This is the twentieth. Her life, moving steadily forward, has twice been cut off by force.

When I called Xiao Yao at ten o'clock on the night of July 5, she had just gotten home from tutoring someone in English. She spoke slowly, in a soft voice.

Xiao Yao is a first-year graduate student in the English department at Inner Mongolia University, born and raised in Hohhot, with both parents working at state-owned enterprises. She did well in school from the start and got into the best middle school in the area.

Then, the summer before her final year of high school, Xiao Yao suddenly fell seriously ill and had to take a year off because of it. At the time she was not yet afraid. Only after she started college did she slowly grasp that a "bug" was living inside her body, gnawing at her without stopping, and that she was "different" from everyone else. Soon after that she was forced into a second leave of absence, and forced to transfer from Tianjin back to Inner Mongolia.

Her life, she felt, had been moving along fine and then was "cut off by force, twice."

During the second leave, Xiao Yao did not want to watch the time drain away, so she chose to dance. She wanted to use that time, she said, to throw herself at something she loved without holding back.

We've recorded Xiao Yao's story as an oral account, so you can meet her more directly.

I only started graduate school with the 2015 intake. I lost a year in between.

For college I tested into Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, but my health wasn't good. After my first year, the president told me I could take a leave of absence — there's a national policy for it, and you can transfer to an equivalent program. Since I was at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, I transferred back to Inner Mongolia University of Finance and Economics and did my second, third and fourth years there. After I graduated I didn't want to sit the graduate entrance exam, so I taught dance classes instead.

I've actually taken two leaves of absence. It's like you're walking forward down a road and you get cut off by force — twice. That's how it felt. Because I came down with diabetes the summer before my final year of high school. It runs in my family, though. I didn't bring it on myself.

That year I really did nothing at all. Maybe because I was young, I wasn't especially frightened. My mom and dad were terrified — half my father's hair went white overnight. For some reason my own state of mind was fine. I spent the next six months or so shuttling between hospitals in Beijing, hooked up to all kinds of machines to draw blood, and it hurt a lot, but I honestly wasn't very scared.

It was only after high school that I really felt fear. Around then my grandfather died, and I'd been in the hospital many times myself and seen other diabetics. Both my grandparents had diabetes. My grandfather first had a limb amputated — he thought he could keep living — and then his eyes stopped moving, and then he had a brain hemorrhage. The hospital's pamphlets talked about the complications of diabetes, and that's when I understood that I could still move around only because I was young and my body was still developing. But I kept thinking: what about the day I'm old?

The second time I was cut off was when my state of mind was at its worst. In Tianjin, maybe because the surroundings had changed and my parents weren't around, I started having psychological problems too. That's when I began to see how frightening diabetes is.

First I found that I had money and couldn't spend it. At the supermarket I discovered that nearly everything listed white sugar, or corn starch, or potato starch in the ingredients — things I couldn't eat. I felt so hard done by: I had money and didn't know what to buy, because there was nothing I could buy.

Later, when I ate out with classmates, at first I didn't want them to know I was sick. But they'd put food on my plate, and I couldn't say I wouldn't eat it, and I couldn't say why not. It was awkward, so I stopped wanting to go out with people. When I first started going to the cafeteria, I'd rinse the starch off my food with water, and if I could, I'd slip off to the bathroom to give myself a shot. Everyone had to wait for me, which felt terrible, so in the end I ate alone. But then it all started to feel like too much trouble — why do I have to do this every single time — and after that I stopped taking my shots on schedule.

By then I understood it: like a little bug inside my body, gnawing at me without stopping. I wouldn't know when, but one day it might chew through something that mattered, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

At first I'd hide to give myself the shots, but sometimes I couldn't keep the secret and people found out. Once they knew, it was public. My father had already given the teachers a heads-up, so everyone went out of their way to look after me, and that left me feeling I owed them something.

You might watch TV and eat some chips or whatever — I want that too. But when something tells you flatly that you can't have it, that if you do your blood sugar will keep climbing and you'll end up in the hospital, my instinct is to want it more. I'll badly want a mouthful of Coke. I don't know if you can understand this, but I really can't control it. And after I eat it I feel guilty: why didn't I hold back just now? The next time I still can't control the craving. The thing is, I can never eat my fill either. It's a very complicated project.

One binge could leave me in a sickly state for the next week or two, and that's what caused my second leave of absence. After a binge I'd feel so much self-blame that I'd skip a meal or two, sometimes a whole day of meals, to punish myself. That one time I took it too far: an apple in the morning, nothing for lunch or dinner, and the next morning my blood sugar crashed. My roommates went to class and assumed I was cutting that day, so they didn't wake me, but I'd already passed out. When the teacher saw I wasn't there, he knew about my health and sent classmates back to check on me. By then I knew nothing, and they took me to the hospital.

That got the attention of the school leadership, and afterward my father came over from Inner Mongolia. My roommates' parents also said that these were all first-year kids and that handling a patient like me was genuinely hard. Everyone was probably scared — they didn't even dare eat in front of me — and if it happened again with no one able to deal with it, it would weigh heavily on my roommates. So they raised it with the school.

That year was the 2010 Summer Davos, and our whole Business English program went to volunteer. But I was ill at the time, so I didn't stay to the end; I went straight home. Not until I went back to register for the next school year did the school leadership ask me whether my parents could come and live with me while I studied. I'd spent the whole summer thinking it was an ordinary vacation; I only learned all this when I returned the next year. But both my parents had steady jobs back home, so the school said I should take a leave of absence instead — there was a policy that let me transfer back — and they processed the paperwork for me.

My major in my first year was Business English: English pronunciation and intonation, spoken English, intensive and extensive reading, English writing, diplomatic etiquette, plus math and English grammar. It broke English into separate parts and drilled each one. But afterward I ended up in English Literature, because the finance university had no Business English major. The difference felt enormous, and the curriculum there was a bit of a mess.

By the time all the paperwork went through it was nearly October, which created another problem: because I'd missed the start of term, Inner Mongolia University of Finance and Economics decided I couldn't catch up and required me to take a year off.

Physically I wasn't that ill by then. My state of mind was the biggest illness I had. I'd gone to the best middle school around here and my exam scores were good; it was as if a life just opening up in front of me had been broken off by something absurd that I hadn't caused. My ambitions were still high. I felt there was no need for a full year off, because recovering physically takes six months at the outside. Once your body is completely fine you can study and work normally — the only obstacle is that there's no school to go to.

I wasn't in school, but I didn't want to sit at home and I didn't want to watch time drain away, so I went and danced. Ordinarily you never get that much time, free of any restraint, to give to one thing.

I studied belly dance intensively for eight or nine months — most afternoons I was at the studio. The package I signed up for was 45 sessions with an instructor for 4,800 yuan, two hours each, and during those 45 sessions I could take any of the member classes too.

Belly dance isn't that strenuous, and it doesn't put much strain on my body or much risk of injury. They suggested yoga, but I couldn't sit still — I wanted to move — and belly dance combined the two. Also, I'd always liked dancing, and being among people who were all dancing made me feel I could still live a normal life, that I didn't have to tread carefully around everything.

It seemed to let me escape the place where I was different from everyone else.

I think I'm the type who sticks with things. For about six months I stayed in a hungry, eager state of learning. Over the next three months, once I could dance decently, I started performing. There's a big public square where we live, and our group — a Mongolian studio, more or less — would perform there. It never paid. It was for fun.

It wasn't until early 2013 that I began filling in for my boss, teaching free for about six months. I felt that if I didn't dance well enough myself I wouldn't dare teach — it would be like leading students astray. At first I charged 60 yuan an hour, then 80, and now 100 an hour. At the start I made a few hundred yuan a month, maybe 300 or 400; now it's around 2,000. It depends how many weeks are in the month, since I don't teach many classes, just four or five a week.

In my first year of college my direction was narrow and clear. I knew what I wanted to do, and there were plenty of internships. I liked using spoken English; I liked Business English. A language is for using, I think, not for exams. There aren't many chances to speak English here in Inner Mongolia, and the listening score on the college entrance exam doesn't count toward the total here, so students never build listening and speaking skills. We may test brilliantly on paper, but our speaking and listening lag far behind. I'd rather have more internships that get me out into the world.

When we graduated our teacher required an internship, so I went to the Sheraton hotel and worked the front desk. Interns made 1,600 yuan a month then. Maybe because there aren't many foreigners in this part of Inner Mongolia, the front desk badly needed English speakers, but there was no fixed post for you — you came in when there was work to do. And we rotated shifts, days and nights reversed, which my body couldn't take.

I didn't feel any urgency about finding a job, though. Maybe I'm slow to react. I'd been dancing all through college, and it did give me an income, even if it wasn't much.

My family wanted me to have a stable career; they wanted me to become a civil servant. But I didn't like that environment. You'd just be marking time until retirement there, and that would be my whole life. I did sit the civil-service exam once, for a post at a prison in Hohhot. Then I skipped the interview and flew to Chengdu to dance.

I spent nearly two months in Chengdu. It was meant to be a 40-day belly-dance instructor course, but I stayed almost two months, renting a short-term room for 900 yuan a month. It was exhausting: classes Monday through Friday, seven or eight hours of dancing a day.

My family has also suggested I make dance my career, but I don't want to tie what I love that tightly to money. I can make money with English, and belly dance is for when I'm happy — I get some exercise, dance a bit, earn some pocket money. Once running a studio stops being about something pure, it stops being fun. For me, whatever happens, I'll dance for the rest of my life, no matter how much money it makes.

They wanted me to be a teacher, but I didn't train as one, and even with English I'd only be so-so. They thought I had no competitive edge, so they said I should do a master's — that it might put me a bit ahead of others. So I sat the exam for Inner Mongolia University: it's close to home, which puts my family at ease, and it really wasn't hard to get into.

If every kind of job produces some kind of product, the product a teacher makes is the most worthwhile, because it's people they're producing — though that's an idealistic way to think about it. If I could pass my values to children whose thinking is still forming, at least what I produced wouldn't be a consumable that's gone once it's used up. It would mean something. That's how I see it. But the bar for teaching is high. Maybe I won't get one of the official public-school posts, but that's fine — I can do English tutoring instead.

As for where I am now, I'd call it contented. Other people have things I don't, but they're probably not things I really need or care much about, so having them would be fine and not having them doesn't affect me much. And maybe I have things others don't — relationships, friendships — things I can be quietly pleased about for a long time.

But if you ask about satisfied: first, I'm not in a stable or secure position right now; I can't fully pay for a life of my own. Second, there's my ability. I honestly don't know how much potential I have, because I haven't tried many things yet.

What I'd like to change is probably a defensive frame of mind. Take teaching. I only went out and taught once I felt I was ready, and that took three years. It's the same now — I'm always in a stage of preparing. I know the state of preparing is one you never finish, and that confuses me. I want to change, but I don't know how.

(At the interviewee's request, the name in this article is a pseudonym.)

Cover image from: Visual China Group