Next we were led, in line, to the canteen, a large square room with many tables and chairs in it. By the time we arrived, there were over a hundred students from the opera and music academies already sitting at their tables. It was unbelievably noisy.

We were told we were to have slightly better food than other academy students, because of the physical demands of our training. I saw two big bowls full of steaming food on each table, and on each side of the canteen were several larger tables for bread rolls, rice and soup. We were each given two metal rice bowls plus a small soup bowl, a pair of chopsticks and a soup spoon. Everyone had exactly the same bowls. Easy to get them mixed up, I thought.

We sat down, eight of us to a table, and divided the food evenly between us. On my table, only one girl and one boy looked familiar: I'd seen them on our train trip to Beijing. The others were all from Shanghai and although they talked a lot I didn't understand a thing they said because they only spoke Shanghai dialect. The boy next to me, who was as small as I was, turned and said something to me-I looked at the two Shandong students to see if they'd understood, but they just shook their heads and when I tried to tell him, in my Qingdao accent, that I couldn't understand, he just smiled.

The food looked inviting and it smelt delicious, but I had no appetite. My stomach felt like a twisted knot. I looked out the windows. I could see that it was already dark outside, and the darkness cast a sadness in my heart. The sadness began to creep up and overwhelm me. I forced myself to eat a few mouthfuls of rice but it was tasteless, so I quickly rinsed my bowls, chopsticks and spoon and quietly left the canteen before anyone noticed.

It was cold outside. The grounds were deserted. I could see only a few dim lights between the canteen and our dormitory. I looked up at the distant moon, and a few far-away stars in the night sky. I was afraid to go back to the dormitory alone in this unfamiliar darkness. I looked at the steamed-up windows of the canteen and knew that I couldn't go back there either: they would surely laugh at me. I had to keep going. I thought of my parents and all my brothers back home, and with each step towards our dormitory building, I fought my fear and growing loneliness.

The building was pitch black. All the lights were turned off. With shaking hands I searched for the light switches, but I couldn't find any. Slowly I felt my way up the stairs and eventually found a switch at the top. I got to my room, but I had no desire to turn on the lights there. Instead I groped my way to my bed, dived onto it and grabbed the precious quilt my niang had made for me. I plunged my face into it and wept.

I remember that first night alone so well. I was adrift. My niang's quilt was like a life-saving rope in the middle of an ocean of sadness. I couldn't stop the tears from welling in my eyes and I couldn't stop thinking of my family back home. It would be their evening playtime now: my dia's simple stories, my niang's sewing and my brothers' game of finding words in the wallpaper. I tried to tell myself to stop thinking like this, but I couldn't. I couldn't stop feeling the quilt and smelling its familiar smell. I couldn't stop this unbearable homesickness, like a merciless dark ocean, and me, left in the middle of it, without a lifeline. The rope I was clutching onto wasn't enough. I was drowning, deeper and deeper, and it would be for many nights in those first few months that I would cry myself to sleep.

That was the first night I had ever slept on my own, yet all I wanted to do was transform myself into a bird and fly home to sleep with my family again, in my parents' bed, next to my younger brother's smelly feet, even for just one night. My misery was so intense that I was only vaguely aware of my classmates returning from their supper. To hide my tears, I pretended to be asleep and buried my head under my niang's quilt.

The next morning, I was jolted back to reality. The familiar smell of the smoke as my niang cooked breakfast and her loving voice were not there. Instead there was the harsh sound of the wake-up bell. I was not back home, I was here, alone, somewhere foreign. I looked around the room and remembered every detail of the night before.

There seemed to be loud bells for everything that morning. Speed and efficiency were all important. Strict orders, schedules and rules had to be rigidly observed. And it was still so early-we'd been woken at half past five. We rolled our blankets military- style, and brushed our teeth (a completely new, strangely uncomfortable experience-I had to watch the others to see how they did it). Then we washed our faces and the bell rang again within five minutes to call us outside onto the still dark sportsground.

We soon discovered that every morning would be the same. Each class captain would report that all students were accounted for and we'd jog for half an hour around the open fields, half asleep, every day of the year. I loved the fresh air in the mornings, but at first I found it hard to wake up so early. Breakfast was at seven-fifteen: rice porridge, steamed bread and salty pickled turnips. Never dried yams. Sometimes we even had eggs if we were lucky.

That first morning after breakfast we went to try on our ballet and Chinese folk dance shoes, our white vests, dark blue shorts and royal blue cotton tracksuits. These were all we would need for the next six years, we were told. The ballet shoes had small strips of leather wrapped around the toes and the heels, so only the worn-out leather strips would need to be replaced and the whole shoe would last a long time. The dark blue shorts had elastic on the waist and around each leg. They felt very strange.

Then we were introduced to Chiu Ho, the head ballet mistress, who took us to the shoe workshop for our ballet shoe fittings. It was the moment I had been dreading.

Chiu Ho, we soon learned, was considered one of the most knowledgeable ballet teachers in China. She had been trained by the visiting Russian teachers in the 1950//s, and despite her diminutive size, she was the teacher we would learn to fear most.

In the shoe workshop, Chiu Ho told us to choose the tightest ballet shoes possible because, she said, they would eventually stretch. We were then greeted by a short hunchbacked man who looked so strange that he terrified us, but he was supposed to be the best maker of ballet shoes in China. His workshop wasn't big, but it had racks and racks of ballet shoes, including pointe shoes. There were stacks of leather and cotton fabrics too, and buckets full of shoe glue which had splattered everywhere. A few old sewing machines sat on the workbenches against the walls. It was very crowded, and my eyes immediately fixed on the rows of pointe shoes, for I feared these the most: the time would come when I would have to squeeze my feet into these tiny, tiny shoes.

"Boys first!" Chiu Ho barked. One by one we tried on the ballet shoes. They were so small they cramped my long toes. I couldn't imagine how uncomfortable the hard pointe shoes would be.

"Okay, boys are done! You can all get out of here!" Chiu Ho bellowed.

"What about the pointe shoes?" I asked.

"What about them?" she frowned.

"Don't we have to try them on?" I asked.

She looked at me, then she and the shoemaker roared with laughter. "No, only girls wear pointe shoes!" Chiu Ho chuckled.

I felt like collapsing with relief! I wouldn't have to walk like my na-na after all! But I didn't realise that even the small flat shoes Chiu Ho had given me to wear would be enough to cause permanent damage to my toes.

We spent the rest of that day preparing for the official start of our training the following day. The Beijing Dance Academy, due to Madame Mao's involvement, was, we were told, regarded as the most prestigious dance school in the whole of China and the only one to offer full scholarships which would pay for our food, our board, our tuition and our training clothes. Our parents would have to provide our everyday clothes, blankets and spending money, and a tiny little shop within the academy grounds sold other essentials such as soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and sweets. Madame Mao's military officers would head key departments of the university. These were the "political heads" we had already encountered and we soon learned to be terrified of them too. Even our teachers seemed to show them an unusual amount of respect. They had absolute power and would become our political and ideological mentors.