Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fireside Magazine, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Hollowed (Thirty West, 2022) and Absorption (Harbor Review, 2022).
“‘Like a Tree Stump’ is a response to dance and ballet as an art form and a means of shaping Asian identity and sexuality. In particular, it responds to Shanghai Ballet’s 2014 production 梁祝 (Liang Zhu; The Butterfly Lovers), which is a combination of traditional European ballet and Chinese acrobatics/dance. To me, it represents both a clashing and a harmony of the two dance styles.”
Maria was a professional ballerina, so they expected me to be one too: get into Mariinsky and the whole shebang just because my feet arched the same way Maria’s did. My feet were all I had, was what they didn’t say. The rest of my body stuttered like a poorly oiled sewing machine, and my limbs and hip and neck looked more stodgy than gazelle-esque. I’d seen the real dancers in the Mariinsky: tall, thin shish kebab sticks strong enough to stab through chunks of lamb, but as soon as you bend them across their length, they splinter and snap and all the meat comes sliding off. At least, that was what I imagined happening when the dancers left for months on injury leave. Maria retired, but only because she wanted to go into teaching, she claimed. Not because, as most would’ve guessed, she slept with a sponsor and it somehow made the news. I never probed her about it and she never explained. Eventually, I convinced myself I didn’t care about the truth and Maria could do whatever she wanted.
I took ballet lessons three times a week, and once a week, the girls joined us for pas de deux. I dreaded those classes. We all did. Before class, the other guys would train for hours at the gym even though that amount of crash-lifting did nothing to improve their strength. I didn’t worry much about dropping my partner and making her feel like a whale—the instructors could tell we weren’t ready even though the other guys would whisper “we’re going to have to lift them this class, I just know it” every week.
So we’d put our hands around our partners’ waists, watch them twirl, caress their hands, support their promenade. I always felt like an oaf walking around my partner—the giant who accidentally crushed a nest of phoenix eggs stomping in a circle while my partner held her leg up high and noble.
I quit ballet when Maria was hired as an instructor at my dance school. I told her she could’ve started her own dance studio or gone to a more prestigious place. Maria claimed she wanted to move back home, even though she got into fights with mom constantly. “You’re cooking with too much oil.” “At least use peanut oil instead of olive oil.” “Why do you have to add dark soy sauce. That stuff has added sugar.” Mom never listened though. “My house, my rules.” But she still switched to using peanut oil, and she began to measure the oil out in teaspoons before sautéing pea shoots and garlic. Maria stopped accusing mom of fat-drenching our food, but that only meant she could move on to new points of contention: mom washing her leotard incorrectly, buying the wrong anti-inflammatory cream, misplacing her extensive assortment of leg warmers.
“Maybe your sanity would be better off if you moved out,” I told Maria.
“Hah, I’m not going to abandon you there,” she said. Maria believed mom was going to ruin my ballet career even though there was no future to begin with.
After I quit, Maria wouldn’t speak to me for the first week. I spent most of my time holed up in my room, trying on different leotards I’d worn in the past. I remembered my partners in the pas de deux classes: how their waists curved inward, softly, as though coaxed to slide in waves. I poked my sides, like a log, bounded by straight edges, all roughness like wood rather than skin. I looked down at my hands, my protruding knuckles, my uneven fingers. These hands, when drawn up and outward, produced robot contours rather than prince silhouettes, made all the more conspicuous when I danced with my partner. I tried my best to support her; she did her best to make me look like a troll. Maria was lucky she had such delicate fingers, such a long neck that never bulked, such a narrow waist you could wrap your hands around her. I tried on her old tutus when she left for work. The same tutus that seemed to shrink Maria’s waist to a pinprick made my waist look like an old tree stump.
Despite these truths, I continued to tug on my tights and leotard every night, standing in front of my mirror and holding the desk’s edge as a bar, watching my leg loop around for a rond de jambe, wondering, if I moved fast enough, whether the extra muscle protrusions smooth out and evaporate away. “Don’t jump and run so much, that’ll build calf muscles where you don’t want them,” Maria advised. Her advice didn’t help. I only performed worse in class.
Mom insisted I go into medical school after I quit ballet. She liked to mention every day how I was lucky I got out early, before I wasted years on a fleeting career that’d end in bad press, bad knees, and some form of over-sexualization mom claimed ballet embodied.
“Good, become a doctor. That way I can just talk to you when I have health problems,” she said.
“I don’t want to deal with bodies,” I told her.
She laughed and said that was normal, everyone is squeamish, but you get over it once handling bodies becomes routine.
I consulted Maria, who guffawed at my future doctor prospects. “You can’t even put your hands around a girl’s waist properly. In a leotard at that! How are you supposed to handle skin-to-skin contact?” I didn’t know.
“What else do you think I’d be good at?” I asked. Maria didn’t know either. She tried to convince me to rejoin ballet classes while I figured out my existential rut, though her efforts failed. I hid all of my ballet attire and slippers deep in my closet, buried behind the sweaters I no longer wore and the trash bag of stuffed animals mom gathered when she decided my room was too cluttered, too hard to clean. I stopped dancing privately in my room and instead scrolled through the Instagram feeds of other dancers, comparing their turnouts and extensions. I counted how many chest bones I could see from where their leotards came to a stop below their necks, how long their necks reached, how small their heads were—dots on a needle.
During dinner one weekend, mom stir-fried rice cakes with ground pork—not the lean ground pork but the type used in dumpling filling, fatty and speckled with equal parts white and pink and red. Maria stared and took one rice cake at a time with her chopsticks, smearing it along the sides of the dish and all over the surface of her place until the sauce and oil had been rubbed off. Then she placed that single rice cake into her mouth and chewed for an eternity. I counted her chews while she wasn’t watching, focused on dabbing sauce and oil off her lips. She reminded me of a princess paranoid of tea poisoning: elegant, desperate, unbreakable, and yet.
“Are you going to teach ballet forever? You’ve got to think about your future, starting a family, earning a respectable income,” mom said. A classic meal conversation topic these days, even though mom used to brag about Maria to her Tai Chi group of friends all the time: “Look at what my daughter can do,” she’d smile, waving around her phone with a clip of Maria’s pirouette or arabesque. None of mom’s friends’ kids danced: they were either in grad school, big tech, or banks.
Maria swallowed after fifty chews. “I’ll do what I feel like doing,” she said.
“The older you get, the harder it’ll be for you to have children,” mom lectured.
“Oh god, it sucks to be of the child-bearing sex. Whatever will I do.” Maria rolled her eyes. I held back a giggle. Mom began to go on and on about all the responsibilities she had to bear while Maria slouched in her seat and stared at her long, shiny nails, reflecting light like water. I looked at my nails: short and stubby. I wondered if this was also because I was born wrong.
