Choose either the sweat above my eyebrows or the tears below my eyelashes; I had no other choices.

In mid August, 2013, thanks to my teacher’s recommendation, I came to Xinghe Dancing Training Center. It was built on an island that was quite far from the cityc enter, with the surroundings of an expanded university town, where over 16 campuses are located. And my top dream university, Southern China Normal University, is one of them.

This was my first time living alone far away from home. When I showed up at the entrance of Xinghe with my big backpack and my 24-inch-long suitcase, all of my new classmates were so shocked, ”You got here all alone?!” Not until then did I realize that everyone had come here with friends or parents driving along with a variety of luggage. My home was on Hainai Island so moving wasn’t as convenient for me compared with those students who came from Canton. I had to take an airplane so the smaller the suitcase the better. My mom did ask my dad to accompany me but I refused. It was just a dancing training camp, so why worry?

When I was a little girl I admired beautiful dancers decked out in fabulous costumes and doing fancy dance moves under the spotlight — how free and how elegant! Later, after I began learning it, I got to know the meaning of “three minutes on stage means 10 years behind the scenes,” as an old Chinese saying goes. I got up at 5 a.m. every day, and I was the first one arriving at the rehearsal room, opening the windows to let some fresh air in to replace the weird smell of the mixture of sweat and wood floors. Even before I came to the camp, I got up on time every day to do the training on the outdoor playground at my school. I guess the wood floor was better, simply because it felt more painful falling on the real ground. Getting injured is a common thing. Once you became a dance student, you had to live with pain. Many of my friends envied the slim body of a dancer, but they would never have a chance to know that under the glamorous clothing there were only bruises and plasters.

On many occasions, even if you were hurt, if you thought you could handle it, you must continue training. At the same time, all the students who were preparing for the professional dancing exam worked really hard in different dancing camps. The biggest issue in dancing training was to fix our body flexibility. It really hurts. Many students started to gain an over-reaction to concentrated flexibility training so that every time when it came to leg pressing they began to cry out loud. There were a couple of weeks some neighbors nearby constantly dropping by the training center because they heard those teenagers crying on the fifth floor due to the practice. Olivia Pei, the center owners’ daughter who was living on the fourth floor, once told me that our crying was like an alarm clock, always on time at 7 in the morning.

Series of stretching exercise would last nearly two hours and we had breakfast at 9 a.m. After a short break we received ballet training in order to adjust our breathing and shape till noon. There was a Chinese traditional dance class in the afternoon followed by endurance exercise in the evening. Our sweat was like coming from the opened water tap then falling on the wood floor, tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac... The towels were wet after dry, dried after wet.

None of us thought it was easy to stay in the dancing camp at first, but after thinking over it carefully, we came to the conclusion that the teachers suffered more than us. Some of the teachers came from famous colleges with years of teaching experience. One was holding a master’s degree of modern dance and studied in France, and one was the assistant director of the Youth Olympic Games. They were all very young and we almost could treat them as our own elder brothers and elder sisters. Though they were young, they all had reached the professional standard and mastered top useful measures of teaching, and they were very responsible.

Some teachers who were in charge of the morning exercise would also get up on time every morning and wake the students up. After that both the teacher and the students would run a circuit around the university town.

We were crossing the empty streets in morning campus every day, sometimes we started singing popular songs while running, and saying hello to the grandpas and grandmas who were also doing morning exercise outdoors.