A Compendium of Dreams

This dream diary belongs to Li Kaili.

hey Kaili :3

you did amazing at ur dance recital

pls like this gift or ill die T_T

hope u have an awesome bday!!

—Yingyue 

“I saw a dream and it made me fearful.” —Daniel 4:5

i. the american dream

1999. When twelve-year-old Li Kaili stumbled off the plane at JFK, courtesy of EVA Air, clutching with white-knuckled fingers a battered brown suitcase in one hand and her passport and visa in the other, how excited was she to be in America, the fabled land of the free? After sleepless nights of rattling trains and connecting flights and FaceTime calls to her parents that went nowhere, she just wanted to coat her tongue with the scalding taste of xiǎo lóng bāo and skip hand-in-hand through the glittering, humid nights of the yèshì with Māma and Bàba again.

Aunty didn’t share the same sentiment. Kaili showed up at her doorstep, face covered with grime, clothes threadbare—drenched and soaking in the midsummer night’s rain. Aunty slammed the door in her face, grousing about Kaili’s cousins from two oceans away whom she housed as well. Too many lazy kids, kids who don’t work hard, kids who don’t appreciate everything we sacrificed to bring them here. So I greeted the waterlogged girl. I extended a hand to her. I pulled her to her feet.

What is your name? she asked me in thickly accented, broken English as thunder struck the sky like the rattle of shattering music boxes; the night was momentarily awash in a flare of gold. 

Kalliana. My name is Kalliana Li. 

I was the one who picked myself up that night, staggering onto Aunty’s porch. I was the one who stole her books from their creaking, ancient shelves and read them by candlelight, absorbing every word and turn of phrase. In the crackle of the tempest overhead, I forged my own deliverance.

Study. Learn. Rise above your station. Rise to the top.

Make Māma and Bàba proud. 

It was all I had anyway.

Serena stole my blankets, and Elizabeth dumped my dresses in the wrong laundry bin. My tears stained the papers strewn across my desk like petals—more petals upon more petals—math equations and parabolas haphazardly scrawled across them.

Bàba wrote to me. Told me that they were thriving. That mailing me off to America like I was a package had allowed them a new life.

Tendu to the right. Make that a deep plié in second position. Relevé through the balls of your feet onto pointe. I was walking on knives; my toes were on fire, bruised and reddened with oaken callouses, jutting bunions. The teacher barked harsher commands at me. I was alone in her disappointment because she wouldn’t yell at the other girls—the ones with cascading red hair and fair skin and freckles sprinkled across their noses. 

At home, I tripped across the dilapidated shack of my room and dug under the rotting floorboards until I could find the pink pills. I popped one in, swallowing it dry. It dragged me under the waves soon enough, and my head spilled onto the pillow.

I stopped responding to letters from Yingyue. I sold my last qipao for more ballet tights. You spend money like it grows on trees, shouted Aunty as she hurled a porcelain tea set—a gift from Māma on Chinese New Year—to the linoleum floor. 

At last, perhaps my salvation had arrived at the precocious age of fourteen. My pen hovered tremulously over the audition sign-up for ballet school in New York City, the flyer posted on the wire fence surrounding the compound. The city bustled behind me; a woman nearly bumped into me as she passed by, apologizing quickly.

Then I saw the fee.

Selfish, selfish girls, spending money like it grows on trees, raged Aunty.

Please, Aunty, I will never ask for anything again.

Get out of here, you ungrateful, ungrateful child! Come home with straight A’s on your report card before you dare request something of me.

It was never enough. I could never be enough, this ruined wretch of a foreign girl in a country that was not hers, that could never be hers, just like she could never be theirs. Not American enough, not Taiwanese enough, not good enough, not enough, not enough.

ii. i have a dream

Kalliana Li’s Résumé

Awards & Honors

1. American Teen Dancer of the Year ‘02

2. First Place, Regional Dance Competition, Jazz Category ’01

3. Outstanding Performer, State Dance Championship, Team Category ’03

4. Scholarship Recipient, National Dance Institute Summer Program ’03

Dance Experience

1. Lead Performer at Regional Studio ????? bc it was in taiwan

…

11. Participant of New York Ballet Company Summer Intensive

The first time Māma brought me kicking and squirming and crying—Wǒ yào huíqù, I want to go back, I screamed into her ear—down the empty, littered road to my dance studio… was the first time I found myself.

The instructor spoke in rapid-fast Mandarin, spittle flying from her mouth as she gestured excitedly to the girls situated at the barre around me, pink leg warmers rolled up to their knees. I didn’t fully understand her because she slurred native Taiwanese syllables into her sentences. None of the girls—all my age, maybe seven years old, younger—did. 

But then when I’d danced—the world melted away. When I spun and jumped and twirled… my surroundings faded; the silhouette of Māma watching at the window with glassy, hopeful eyes faded; the girls and their sweet smiles faded. And then it was just me and the music and the taste of living, like the coldness of fresh air that sinks into your lungs—like I could finally breathe. 

I was flying.

In the expanse of the studio in New York, junior year, every eye was on me. The black-haired girl who spoke with a Chinese accent; the straight-haired girl half their age who could bend her body like she had no bones. 

Look at her, look at her, the girls chimed around me, a symphony of fluttering swans. Look at her.

Look at her look at her look at her—

Our teacher—renowned for his Balanchine discipline, having played Prince Siegfried and Romeo and other such principal roles at the Royal Opera House—had us line up in B-plus. He sauntered down the queue, studied us one by one, keen and careful, black knifepoint eyes scanning us up and down. 

Overweight. A ballerina lurched back. Too lean. The girl’s face filled with abject horror. Not enough muscle. The male dancer covered his face. Skin and bones. Tears sat on her fine blond lashes. 

Then it was me.

Disproportionate arms. Short legs. 

He thought nothing about it. He said it in a flat tone, as if he were reading off a script and conducting a clinical observation on an inanimate object. I was just another girl in the line to be put down, to be walked all over.

My smile was so brittle it felt as if it could splinter into fragments at any moment.

You can do anything if you’re willing to fight for it. 

I’d been lying to myself. 

Aunty was aging. I could sometimes see the gray hairs streaking her immaculate bun. Serena had left us for MIT. Elizabeth was now the founder of an enterprising tech startup.

I was the only one who had stayed home, who had taken a gap year after high school—without a job, without a life.

All I had were those pink pills. I shut my eyes, bookended by stone walls and the drip drip of a leaking faucet. If I wished hard enough, could I envision a better world?

ii. the city of dreams

“And the role of Odette and Odile goes to… Kalli Li!” the director shouted through the microphone. 

My ears were ringing. For a moment, nothing was real. For a moment, I was a bird again, freedom tangible on my tongue.

Then my friends were clapping me on the back, and they were cheering for me, and I was stumbling onstage, hardly believing that I’d been offered the role of the prima ballerina—hardly believing that I’d done it. That I’d defied everyone who’d ever told me that I would never make it.

And even after that, I left ballet for other styles. Broadway, Hollywood… Like everyone else, they acclaimed me, welcomed me, and put me on their stage.

Waiting in the curtains, I’d stare at the ceiling, my heart thrumming with adrenaline. And yet after every show, I’d take the pink pills. I’d devour the box of donuts waiting in my apartment.

Dread seeped into me like a blanket of ice, an ocean of anxiety. Dread about every movement I executed in front of the audience; the lines of my legs, the graceful curl of my fingers. I’d long ceased to care about the other girls. The glances from the soloists. The talk behind my back, and the talk directly to my face.

Dance wasn’t supposed to feel this way. But I’d already come so far and done so much. 

I didn’t know how to matter without performing. 

When Kalliana Li appeared on every major dance channel, how excited was she to find her face broadcast in the bars, the plazas, even Times Square? When every company accepted her wherever she traveled. The lights, the crowd, the applause—in a childhood home, locked away in the slums of Taiwan, amidst a refulgent ballerina night lamp… that had all once been a little girl’s dream. 

But on wasted nights and under roiling skies, Kalli stood alone in the deserted parking lot, gripping her car keys, looking up at the black clouds that portended to rain.

Something splattered on her nose.

She blinked.

The empyrean parted, and the storm released itself upon her. 

In the end, when Kalli slid into her car and drove away amongst the splash of puddles, which droplets caught in her eyelashes were raindrops, and which were tears?

Stepping onto stage didn’t feel like stepping into a fantasy fulfilled, only a nightmare anew that I barely got through each time. Red carpets with cameras flashing on all sides, flanked by bodyguards, fans thrusting their hands out in a futile attempt for my autograph or attention. Was this the life the spotlight hailed?

At a lonely ice rink in the sweltering heat of July, lost within this forgotten, sleeping city, I balanced against the railing. 

Let go, Kalli.

I shoved off from the wall and skated shakily through the emptiness. A void without light, one that you could wade through forever and still never reach the end. That void engulfed me until I could no longer see beyond it.

I crashed into the side of the rink with a brutal thud. A wavering scream tore from my throat, shredding my vocal cords. I yanked the skates off my feet and threw them against the glass, trembling all over. My chest heaved; tears blurred my vision, dripping down my cheeks, warm and salty. I ran across the ice barefooted, unable to see, unable to feel. 

And then…

I was gliding.

My feet found a familiar rhythm. I was spinning. I was flying. Anger quaked in my movements, loosening from my muscles each second. I performed a pirouette; my foot skidded on landing, and my head snapped up with the thrill. A giddy laugh erupted from my chest. I tilted my chin. The dome above the rink was sown with silver, like stars embedded within a molten loam. 

There was no one but me, and I was dancing for myself again.

I could lose myself tonight. And tomorrow… Tomorrow was another day, another twenty-four hours for me to remember how to live again. 

I remembered empty flats and cracked wine bottles trashed in the corner. I remembered fear and fear and only fear.

But I also remembered this.

I know now that I’d destroy myself, do it all over again. I’d do it for that sliver of joy that comes from standing at the summit, hair tangled in the wind, laughter ringing in my ears. For that one moment in the curtains, waiting for my entrance. 

I’d sacrifice it all.

Foolish, foolish darling, Māma soothed. Destroying yourself like you mean nothing.

She was right.

“‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister; ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’… what a wonderful dream it had been.” ―Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland