Although Teacher Xiao's own turning ability was poor, he was determined to help his students perfect their turns, so he embarked on months of turning classes. We would complete our barre work within fifteen minutes and the rest of the two hours would be all pirouettes. The first thing he wanted to tackle was our fear of turning. Sometimes I felt the whole universe spinning around me when I walked out of these classes. Many nights I dreamt about doing multiple pirouettes and the feeling was incredibly exhilarating. It was like a "millet dream", I thought. There was a well-cited fable in China which Teacher Xiao repeated to us many times:

A poor Chinese scholar, on his way to the capital to attend the Emperor's annual scholars' competition, suddenly ran out of money. He was still far from Beijing, and now he had no money to hire a horse. He was hungry and tired and as he passed a small, run-down home he smelled a wonderful fragrance coming from within. He knocked on the door and an old lady stood in front of him. He begged her for some food but she was so poor she only had millet soup to offer him. He thanked her and sat in a corner to rest while the soup cooked. He immediately fell asleep and dreamt that he had won the competition and that he would live a wealthy and happy life with many wives, concubines and children. When he woke up from his dream he believed this was his fate, until he glanced at the millet soup cooking in the wok, and realised that he was in truth just an ordinary man and the things he had dreamt were too good to be true.

"Great things don't come easily!" Teacher Xiao insisted and I thought of his unattainable pirouettes. We worked on three consecutive turns for over a year. It seemed impossible to master. The perfect balance on a high demi-pointe, the shape of the hands, the crisp spotting with our heads, the turn-out of both legs, straight back, pressed-down shoulders-the coordination of all these elements together. So many things to remember! For a long time, it seemed that we would never achieve more than three pirouettes but still Teacher Xiao worked us tirelessly, day in and day out.

Teacher Xiao didn't seem to notice me much in the first two classes. I was shy and physically underdeveloped. He seemed to think I was the one with the least interesting face and couldn't understand why I had been chosen in the first place. But during our third class he apparently noticed something unusual about my eyes. He began to try to find out what kind of boy I was. The more he found out, the more interested he became. He discovered that I remembered every word he said, as long as I was interested. So he made me interested in ballet, and quickly realised that I didn't cope well with forceful shouting, which was common practice among the teachers at the Beijing Dance Academy. Instead I responded well to gentle encouragement. He noticed every subtle improvement I made. He made sure that I knew he'd noticed. He gently and gradually led me into the intricacies of ballet, nurtured me, dealt with my self-doubt and inadequacies with encouragement, and slowly moved me from the back of the class to the front.

Apart from more and more ballet, we also started geography and history classes that year. We spent very little time on international geography. Our teacher tried hard to mention America as little as possible and no one took his class seriously, but I wanted to know about the other countries, even though I had to hide my interest. Our history class also dwelt mainly on China, but here I found the rise and fall of the different Chinese dynasties fascinating, especially the Tang and Ming dynasties with their great art, crafts, porcelain, medicine and splendid poetry.

We had a new teacher for our politics class too that term, Chen Shulian, but we really only studied communist history and Mao's political ideas. We were starved of knowledge from anywhere outside of China. We learnt a little about Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but only as a backdrop to Mao's great political achievements. "Our Chairman Mao is the one who has brought Marx's communist philosophy to life!" Chen Shulian told us one day. "He is leading us to the first stage of communism."

"Are we in the first stage of communism now?" a student asked.

"Yes, but this is a long road. We have to work hard at it."

Another hand was raised. "What is the final stage of communism like?"

"Oh, it is the ultimate wonderland! There is no starvation, no class distinction, no need to work long hours. There will be total equality. Everyone will work willingly and share equally. There will be no greed or laziness, no cheating or unfairness. We will have the best of everything! It will be total happiness!"

Chen Shulian's vision was like morphine for the sick. It gave us a reason to bear our present harsh conditions. She portrayed Chairman Mao as the greatest political strategist ever, a man who could out-manoeuvre all his political enemies. She rigidly followed the textbooks. It was uninspiring to me but I felt this was an important class all the same if I wanted to become a true communist of tomorrow. Chen Shulian must have impressed her superiors though, because she became the head teacher of our group the following year.

Our Chinese folk dance class became my favourite class that year. I liked Teacher Chen Yuen's jokes. Sometimes he took students to catch frogs in the rice fields, or cicadas at night with our flashlights. On weekends, we would fry the frogs' legs and cicadas in his room on a small electric burner. His hobby was photography and he often invited some of the students to help him.

But during the first half of that year, Chen Yuen's personality suddenly changed. He joked less. He stopped organising out-of- school activities. He stopped his photography and became withdrawn and sad. I didn't understand and asked if there was anything wrong. His answer was always the same. "Nothing is wrong." Then one day, suddenly, he disappeared. Later we heard that he had been discovered engaging in homosexual activities. He was sent to a pig farm in the countryside to cleanse his filthy mind. Homosexuality in Mao's China was a serious criminal offence.

A year later, just as suddenly, Chen Yuen returned to the school as a carpenter. He had lost his reputation, his teaching job, his wife and his position in society. Most significantly, he had lost face. His association with dance had come to an end. He was now in the lowest class of people in China, and his every move was monitored. He had to write a weekly self-criticism and progress report to the Communist Party Monitoring Committee in our academy. I never saw him smile again.

But Chen Yuen's misfortunes went from bad to worse. One Sunday he was using the big machine saw and lost three of his fingers. There was no compensation and he had to pay all his medical expenses. He couldn't use a saw after that and he ended up cleaning the toilets. His loss of dignity was unbearable to watch, even for a young boy like me.

Chen Yuen's replacement was his former teacher, Ma Lixie. Small, thin and animated, he had an unusually loud voice and a habit of rubbing his palms together at furious speed before demonstrating an exercise, as though this gave him courage or inspiration. I learned so much from Ma Lixie. His demonstrations were of perfection. He taught us a Korean crane dance, encouraged us to learn the essence of the dance, every subtle eye and even hair movement to feel like the bird's feathers. He dared us to think the unthinkable and explore the unexplorable. He dared us to be better than him. "Qi//ng c//hu yu lan e//r s//he//ng yu lan," he would say: the colour green comes from the colour blue, but it is the stronger of the two. He challenged us to be the colour green.

That year I also met a new student, Chong Xiongjun, a tall boy with a spotty face, from one of the outer suburbs of Beijing. He was two years older than me. After lunch one day, he asked me if I'd like to spend one Sunday with his family.