Stephanie Chang | Ballet Routine for Hong Kong Protestors in Chater Garden | Poets Resist

Stephanie Chang is a high school senior from Vancouver, Canada. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Penn Review, Adroit Journal, diode poetry journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. She is the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Also by Stephanie Chang: saghorn factory Celestina Reflections in a T&T Supermarket

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Nobody (2002)

Poets Resist
Edited by Michael Carter
August 25, 2019

Stephanie Chang

Ballet Routine for Hong Kong Protestors in Chater Garden

I quit ballet when I was seven. The teacher wanted us to listen, fold legs into popsicle sticks. I listened. I played the swan politic, opened my chest like a clear umbrella. I listened. I licked expired tear gas off the umbrella’s canopy. I was both underside and over, tonguing plastic and counting taste buds. I listened. 60,000 lapped at red rain, chins tied perpetually to fourth position… The teacher said someone born on the wrong coast cannot call herself a civil servant. I argued a country belongs to her people even when that country thinks herself a product of another. She didn’t listen — first position starts… in Yuen Long, how it’s easy to lose one’s balance and find crowbars splitting one’s backside instead. How a black shirt is short for heroism, that kind of martyrdom the police avert their eyes from. Second position… the opposite of retreating. I pirouetted early, puked out a flag with five false stars. I held fifth position… nailed my hands to a romanized Konglish sign. The teacher clicked her teeth, called this revolution so soon, and I pretended to listen. There must be some airborne position… where plane engine becomes second nature. Hold this, and one learns birdhood, white petals for wings. One’s lifespan measured by the number of police on the safe end of a gun. The trigger Beijing fingers. The ratio to civilians on the victim side. On the last day, the teacher wept, deliberated the finale of such choreography. Surely this ends with liberation — rubber bullets flying onstage as dancers curtsy, accept them in place of flowers.