At the beginning of the world was the bamboo. In one of the most popular creation myths of the Philippines, bamboo carried the first set of humans.
According to the story, there was no land in the world--only the boundless expanse of the sky; the forceful, rushing waves of the sea; and a single eagle that soared amongst the clouds. When the eagle grew weary of flying, exhaustion weighing down the weight of its wings, it became a creator of chaos, stirring the sea until surges of water were thrown towards the sky. To calm the ocean, the sky showered the sea with islands, ordering the eagle to build its nest on one of them and to leave the sky and sea at peace.
While the eagle built its nest, the northeast and southwest wind had married, bearing one child: the bamboo. One day, the bamboo was floating, accidentally striking the eagle. The eagle became angry, pecking at the pole until it split. Out of the bamboo came the first man and woman, Malakas and Maganda, strong and beautiful.
At the beginning of college, I had felt the furthest from malakas or maganda. After my sister and mom had helped me move into my freshman dorm at Stanford University, they had quickly left for their flight back home, approximately 1,350 miles away from me in Colorado Springs. As I sat on my freshly made bed in my new room filled with pictures of my high school friends, plastered posters, and unopened notebooks and binders, I realized I was all alone for the first time in life. At least my first Filipino ancestors came out of the bamboo together. I, on the other hand, was a nervous freshman without my friends, family, or any idea of what the quintessential college life looked like, uncertain of what the next four years would hold. ______________________________________________________________________________
Bamboo is the fastest growing plant species in the entire world. Some species of bamboo can grow up to almost 3 feet per day, or 1.5 inches every hour. But, like most other plant species, the growth of the bamboo can begin from a single seed. That single seed eventually sprouts, develops roots, and transforms into a rhizome. The rhizome is used to establish more roots and will form a bud that can become shoots that can break through the top layers of the soil.
My interest in bamboo took root in the autumn of 2019. Within the first few days of stepping foot on campus, I had already yearned for a community to call my own. I visited Stanford’s central hub, White Plaza, to attend the university’s freshmen-only event, New Student Orientation Activities Fair, where a diverse array of school clubs like the Stanford Student Space Initiative, Stanford Taekwondo, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and many more set up individualized booths to lure and recruit bright-eyed freshmen to join their clubs. Countless lines of embellished tables with sign-up sheets, banners, stickers, and even candy packed White Plaza, an area split between manicured green lawns surrounding a large green fountain and black painted pavements for bicyclists to smoothly pass through.
Above the crowded heads of fellow freshmen, I spotted a long, thin bamboo pole, neatly decorated with black, blue, red, and yellow tape. The top of the pole connected to the Philippine flag which flourished through the cloudless sky but if angled at any angle greater than forty-five degrees, could also have easily become a batting ram for the heads of up-and-coming freshmen that were curious about Kayumanggi, the traditional Filipino dance troupe on campus.
I watched as a tall Filipino upperclassman, donned with a white t-shirt, yellow fringe earrings, and a sleek black haircut, waved the flag in front of the table for Kayumanggi. His laughter erupted into the air and could be heard across hundreds of the same conversations happening at every other table of “Hello? What’s your name? Have you heard about our X,Y, and Z club?”
From a few feet away, I watched as he and his other friends in Kayumanggi exchanged giggles as they whispered their inside jokes to one another and as they tried to impress newcomers by hopping in between two bamboo poles on the wet grass in front of their table. Later I realized they were dancing the national dance of the Philippines, Tinikling.
Intrigued, I approached their table, twiddling my fingers around the stack of papers I had haphazardly collected from the tens of tables I had visited beforehand. I learned that the tall upperclassman with the yellow fringe earrings was named Drew and his other friends in Kayumanggi were Ysabel and Kavita. They welcomed me with warm smiles and invited me to their first Tinikling workshop of the year. ______________________________________________________________________________
As the rhizome grows to become a shoot, it can grow in either one of two ways: horizontally or vertically. When the rhizome grows horizontally, it is called a running bamboo whereas when the rhizome grows vertically, it is known as a clumping bamboo.
Before even opening the door to the workshop, I already felt out of my element. I never had close Filipino, or even Asian, friends back in my high school in Colorado. Once, when researching the demographics of my school, there was not even a percentage for the Asian student population. Along with other races that were not Black, Latino, or White, I was categorized under the 12% as “Other.”
When I gazed through the clear glass doors to the workshop, there were more Filipinos my age than I had ever seen in one room. All the Filipinos in my high school I could count on a single hand. Will I fit in with these Filipino students? Would I be Filipino enough for these people in Kayumanggi? Kayumanggi, in Tagalog, literally means brown skinned. I inhaled a deep breath, grasped the metal door handle with my taut fingers, and stumbled in.
It did not help that the dance of Tinikling can be dangerous and daunting. Tinikling involves a group of at least four dancers and two bamboo poles. Two of the dancers, also known as clappers, kneel on the ground, clasping the smooth ends of the bamboo poles in the palms of their hands. The clappers tap the two poles on the ground while sliding them together to a certain cadence of and a 1, and a 2, and a 3. To the outside eye, the poles beat the ground in movements of tap tap slide, tap tap slide, tap tap slide. While tapping the two poles, the clappers watch the feet of the other two dancers glide with speed between the moving bamboo, hopping in, out, over, and across. With the beat of the sticks flooding their ears and puppeteering their entire body, from their head to the soles of their feet, the dancers gracefully avoid their ankles from being slammed by the thick, firm rods of the poles. In large groups of dancers and several sets of bamboo poles, Tinikling clappers have the ability to illustrate any constellation in the night sky, on the notion that the shape is built on straight lines. Notable formations include a pentagon, a star, a zigzag, and ladder.
When it was my turn to dance between the sticks, my forehead crinkled in compacted lines of sweat, and my eyes were glued to the tan, hardwood floors beneath the poles. I squealed in tiny shrills as I failed to jump on beat to a simple eight count. And a one, and a two, and a three, and a four, and a five, and a six, and a seven, and an eight. The two dancers on the floor watched me hop in hesitation, and in fear of bruising my ankles, they left a foot of space between the bamboo poles where it should have been slammed against each other.
When the rhizome grows horizontally, it literally “runs away” from the bamboo plant parallel to the ground, spreading outward over the landscape. When it grows vertically, rhizomes grow together in a community of “clumps,” growing upward and directly off of each other. Clumping bamboo generally can grow faster than running bamboo.
During one of the breaks, I slumped next to a pair of empty bamboo poles. I wiped the lines of sweat from my forehead. I huffed quietly, in hopes no one would notice. I reached and grabbed the bottoms of my feet. Perfectly healthy, working, and fine. And yet, they still acted as two left feet.
Despite having an Achilles’ heel in counting, Drew and Ysabel urged me to continue to practice alongside them. I returned to their weekly Tinikling practice the following Monday, Wednesday, and every week afterwards. ____________________________________________________________________________
Many species of bamboo are used as a material for the construction of houses, fences, boats, and even tents. Within recent years, Filipino peasant farmers have used bamboo to hold the structural integrity of the thin tarped tents they build outside the Department of Agrarian Reform in Tagum City, a city within the southern Mindanao region of the Philippines. These bamboo-lined tents contained necessary amenities such as hammocks, cooking utensils, and scattered piles of grocery boxes to sustain them for days-long protests as they advocate for titles for parcels of land that they have tilled on for multiple generations.
Stanford Kayumanggi is a smaller committee within the greater organization, Pilipino American Student Union (PASU). Every Sunday at 1:00PM, the committees would gather together in the Asian American Activities Center (A3C) couch room for one giant meeting called PASUnday.
My first PASUnday was only a couple days following the Tinikling workshop. I walked into the third floor of the A3C, met with a slide deck with a Filipino flag theme presented on the small TV at the head of the room and thirty unfamiliar beaming faces sitting side by side on a circle of comfortable crimson couches. I found an empty spot near the back and scanned the room for any familiar faces. None.
Each of us went in a round of answering the weekly check-in question and introducing ourselves with our name, class year, and position. Hundreds of thoughts raced in my mind. There are positions? What are positions? Do I have one? I tried to learn each person’s name, but by the end of the meeting, I had already forgotten all the ones I thought I had aptly stored away at the back of my mind.
Before young bamboo shoots grow to become robust and durable bamboo stalks, they arise from the roots of the soil. Young bamboo shoots are often protected by the older branches of the bamboo, flourishing in the shade provided by them.
It was now my turn. I gulped and looked around at all the inquisitive eyes awaiting my answer. “Hi, Mikaela, freshman. New member, I guess?” Loud cheers from each of the upperclassmen resonated in the room and repeated for each new and inexperienced freshman.
I listened as the two leading co-chairs of PASU explained the origins and tasks of each committee. There was Kababayan, the activism and political arm of PASU. Kapatid, high school outreach. Secretary, History, and Publicity Committee, designed to take meeting notes and create flyers and merch. There was also community service, treasury, and the social committee. But my ears tuned in to one particular committee: Kayumanggi, the dance and performing arts committee who perform each quarter and host a yearly cultural night during spring quarter.
For freshmen and any new members, we could apply and rank each of the committees to become interns and help plan and host events for the committee we were matched with. The instant the forms came out, I ranked Kayumanggi as first.
At the end of the meeting, the co-chairs had directed us into a circle for their regular ritual, Isang Bagsak. They had explained that only a few hours’ drive away from Stanford marked the landmark of another set of protests led by Filipino farmworkers: the Delano Grape Strikes. In 1965, a Filipino activist named Larry Itliong recruited over 2,000 Filipino farmworkers to march off their vineyards to protest against menial wages, cruel working conditions, and exposure to pesticides. He contacted Cesar Chavez so that Latino farmworkers could join in on the strike, which led to the United Farmworkers Movement. The United Farmworkers Movement, to this day, is still heeded as one of the most successful and important environmental and social justice movements within American history.
Isang Bagsak, translated to mean “One Down,” is a unity clap coined and created by Itliong to end a long day of work for Latino and Filipino farmworkers. This clap was a symbol of unified front and solidarity between the two communities. The members of PASU recall the history of the United Farmworkers Movement and do isang bagsak at the end of every PASU meeting, as a commemoration of the tireless labor, efforts, and activism of California Filipino and Latino farmworkers.
As I stood in the sardine-packed circle of Filipino students, my eyes kept panning up and down from scrutinizing the movements of the hands to the mouths of all the upperclassmen. I tentatively followed along, clapping softly with my palms, not knowing if there was a correct rhythm to be followed. The claps began as slow and scattered, each of us staring at each other for changes in tempo as intently as gamblers in a poker game, analyzing each twitch, hover, and facial expression. After every millisecond, everybody quickened their clapping nearly 20 beats per minute faster than the beat before, until it was a jumbled cacophony of claps. At the very last second, I looked as their mouths gaped to holler over the ovation, “IiiiiiiisssssssssssaaaaaaAAAANNNNNNGGGG BAGSAK!” On the BAGSAK!, a single, unanimous clap reverberated throughout the entire room. ______________________________________________________________________________
The etymological origin of bamboo is uncertain. One possible explanation is that it came from the Malay word semambu, which is a kind of wooden material used to create walking sticks. Dutch colonists adopted this word and instead coined the term bamboes within the late sixteenth century. The word “bamboo” itself is believed to have first been used sometime between 1590 and 1600.
Although both of my parents were born and raised in the Philippines--both as city people, with my dad raised in Mandaluyong within the center of Metro Manila and my mom hailing just northeast of him in Quezon City--they almost never spoke their native tongue Tagalog to me at home. Whenever they spoke Tagalog through the home landline to their relatives abroad, it just sounded like a puzzle of jumbled words and phrases that I could never quite piece together.
This caused me to draft a bucket list for my four years at Stanford. The very first goal? To learn, understand, and be able to respond to my parents in their native language. My young and naive high-school self was determined to become the ultimate expert of Tagalog -- or at least, to learn more than the standard phrases of oo (yes), hindi (no), salamat (thank you), mahal kita (I love you), and a string of curse words that would cause my sister and I to erupt in chuckles as our mom shouted and waved her index fingers in front of our faces to never repeat.
Before my first fall quarter, one of the first key words I typed in the search bar of Stanford’s online repository of classes was Filipino. After ten, drawn-out seconds, the website loaded with only two pages. Near the very top of the screen was a class listed in bold, black font as SPECLANG 144A: First-Year Filipino, First-Quarter, a class dedicated to learning the “grammatical structures, vocabulary, and sentence patterns through speaking, reading, writing, and listening of Filipino.”
As my eyes scanned the brief description of the class, my entire upper torso straightened as if someone had laid a wooden plank against the spine of my back, and my sweaty hands quickly gripped the roaring and reverberating bottom of my wearied laptop. I couldn’t help but let out a tiny squeal as I typed SPECLANG 144A into my Google spreadsheet of possible classes. First-Year Filipino was one of the first official classes of my college career that I had ever signed up for.
Just a few months later after this moment, I learned the word bamboo in Tagalog for the very first time. My professor, kindly referred to as Tita Chat, wrote on a white board a list of vocabulary words that referenced different types of materials that objects and houses were made out of. Bamboo was written in black expo marker as kawayan. ______________________________________________________________________________
Bamboo has a wide variety of uses within the Philippines and the broader Asian continent, including for spiritual, cultural, medicinal, and cooking uses. For instance, edible bamboo shoots, or labong in Tagalog, enhance the flavor of many Filipino dishes, such as adobong labong, ginataang labong, and dinengdeng na saluyot at labong. In early versions of the popular noodle dish, pancit Malabon, edible bamboo shoots were sprinkled on as vegetable toppings along with cabbage, garlic, and savory, smoked fish flakes.
I was not unfamiliar with the salty and peppery flavor of pancit, but I grew up with my mother’s version without the bamboo shoots, pancit bihon. A month would never pass by at home in which I would not whiff the soy and oyster sauces brewing from my mom’s quaint kitchen. These sauces were used to marinate and soften the fragile, translucent sticks to a warm mesh of noodles and often still ruminated in the air when the pancit was served on our plates. As a child, I would twirl the thin rice noodles around my fork into infinite loops, always with a small, stubborn piece hanging off, before I slurped them like a maniac. The thin noodles would glide across my tongue and into my throat in an instant, but my tongue would often curl in surprise when it touched the bits of cabbage, carrots, and green onions hiding between the thin strings of noodles. I guess these are my vegetables for the day! However, although my taste buds were tailored to the light bed of noodles, I had never learned to cook it by myself.
The Asian ethnic-themed dorm on campus, Okada, holds a participatory event for its dorm members called Taste of Okada, which funds students to prepare and cook a meal from their own culture. Unwillingly, I was roped into cooking pancit by a couple of friends who lived in Okada.
Cooking pancit for nearly a hundred students was a large undertaking. Not only did I have little, if any, experience making pancit for myself, but now I had a dorm full of empty stomachs to appease.
The beginning steps for preparation already had my fingers curled into the scalp of my head, wanting to tear bits of my hair out. A few days before the official cooking session, I carpooled to the nearest Asian market, Seafood City, with the same traitorous friends who had pressured me into this mess. I had never been to a Seafood City before, so I had to search through the never-ending maze of arranged aisles with salty snacks packaged with letters from different languages labeled on the front and a produce section with fruits and vegetables my eyes have never once laid upon in my life, such as the dragon fruit, a unique pink fruit with its protruding green leaves resembling a budding flower. On top of the discovery of these newfound treasures, the multiple dishes my friends and I had to cook had to fall below a budget of a hundred dollars. Three long hours were spent navigating the maze and calculating with our iPhones the cost assigned to each ingredient.
The day of the pancit cooking session, I was begrudging to begin. My short walk to Okada was marked with loud groans that could be heard by many passersby and long-winded rants of how I did not want to cook for a hundred people. The stress compounded when I had reached the dorm. All of us, with three different dishes, had to share a cramped, closet-sized kitchen and a long high-table for slicing and mincing. Before even combining the ingredients into a huge metal pot, my wrist was sore from washing and hacking into bowling-ball sized cabbages; peeling wrinkly, dry carrots; skinning and beating poor cloves of garlic; halving the tiny and sour calamansi fruit; and cutting green onions into mini rings. After slicing all the vegetables, my cheeks were battered with the steam from waiting impatiently over the boiling pot for the thin and translucent pancit noodles to be marinated in the oyster and soy sauce. We added each vegetable one-by-one, stirring after every two minutes and begging the noodles to cook faster during the everlasting waiting period. Within a few hours, we finally served the pancit into a glass rectangular bakeware and were generous in sprinkling the salt and grounded black pepper from the tips of our fingers.
If not harvested for food, bamboo shoots can thrive in nearly any environment. They remain standing during and after natural disasters. Many stands of bamboo did not break even after tumultuous storms such as Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Katrina. They can also survive in extreme environments. Bamboo shoots have grown in -20 degrees Celsius in the majestic mountain ranges of the Andes and Himalayas, creating green and lush canopies that seem to soar above the mountains.
Despite the maze that was Seafood City, the kid-sized kitchen, the sore wrists, and the steam-battered cheeks, I was gratified by the experience. At the final presentation of the pancit alongside other Filipino dishes, I watched as the students’ eyes sparkled with a mix of curiosity and hunger when they realized the lineup of freshly home-cooked Filipino food and as they crowded the serving area with shuffling feet and a paper plate gripped tightly in their hands. After retrieving their plate of Filipino delicacies, I witnessed some Okada residents slurp the noodles in the same way I did as a child and others murmur in satisfied hums as they tasted a dish that was near and dear to my heart. In that pancit, I shared a small piece of what I consider home, a small piece of me. ______________________________________________________________________________
Bamboo is widely known as the sole and integral prop to the national dance of the Philippines, Tinikling. However, it is argued among many Filipinos, both in the Philippines and in the diaspora, about the role that bamboo plays in the dance’s origins.
Though there are arguments about how bamboo became a part of Tinikling, the origin of the place of the dance has never wavered. It is generally believed that Tinikling came from Leyte, a small island within the greater region of the Visayas, a cluster of islands that sit comfortably at the central hub of the Philippine archipelago.
One story tells that the Visayan rice farmers used the bamboo to trap sly and mischievous tikling birds. In English, tikling birds are known as buff-banded rails, small chicken-sized terrestrial birds with black and white bands sketched on their bellies, a delicate white eyebrow, chestnut-colored nape and crown, and beady red eyes to scan the landscape for their next dinner. Unfortunately, for the farmers, this dinner was often served with the gritty green grains of their beloved rice paddies. When the farmers watched these tikling birds hop over the bamboo with their fragile, stick-like feet and evade their traps with wit and speed, the locals mimicked their hopping movement to form the foundation and inspiration for the name of our now national dance, Tinikling.
The other origin story of Tinikling is not quite as playful and light-hearted as mimicking a bird’s movements. During the Spanish colonization period of the Philippines, indigenous locals lost their land and were forced to slave away at haciendas, or plantations maintained and managed by Spanish landowners. When laborers were presumed to work too slowly or to disobey orders, they would be punished by standing in between two bamboo poles, waiting to have the poles slap against their tired ankles.
At the beginning of every Tinikling practice, the lead choreographer would always recount both of these stories, emphasizing how important it was to learn the history behind the dance that we practiced weekly and would only a few weeks later in the quarter perform in front of hundreds of curious eyes.
During one of these practices, I had a determined stare down with the hardwood floors of the ballroom of the A3C, one of our weekly practice spaces. I had repeated my fatal flaw once again: forgetting to hop out of the sticks on the correct count. One of the bamboo poles slammed against my unexpecting ankle and thudded against the hardwood. A spurt of blood stained the exposed bamboo between the colorful tapes of our two poles and puddled on the floor beneath us.
In that moment, I was returned to the haciendas that former Filipino laborers were bound to and the heavy bundles of rice stalks carried in their arms, the rows of rice paddies to wander through, the wet soil beneath their feet, the beams of scorching sunlight that beat down on their backs, and their bruised and bloody ankles after an act of disobedience.
I left practice that night with a brown bandage wrapped against my wounded ankle and a heavy heart. As I trudged home to my freshman dorm, thoughts swirled around my head about my injury and how it was nearly nothing compared to what Filipinos back in the homeland had to endure. I kept running through the same questions in my head: What does the blood beneath the bottoms of my feet represent, and whose history am I dancing for? Will the ground upon which I stained and the bamboo poles I hop between pay tribute to those who paved the way for me and so many other Filipinos? ___________________________________________________________________________
Filipinos often compare themselves to bamboo--as pliant, flexible, enduring, and strong. One source behind this comparison is from a popular Philippine folk tale about a mango tree and a bamboo tree:
Once upon a time, a mango tree and a bamboo tree kept disagreeing about who was stronger. They called upon the wind to settle the score. The mango tree did not sway in the throes of the wind. Rather, it believed itself to be too proud and refused to yield. Its arrogance caused the roots of the mango tree to give way and crash.
The bamboo tree, however, knew it was not as robust as the mango tree and danced and bent its head to the flow of the wind. When the wind finally was exhausted from blowing, the bamboo tree still never stumbled and stood in all of its beauty and grace.
The night before our large campus-wide, end-of-fall-quarter performance of Tinikling, Kayumanggi held a much-needed practice to allow for constant run-throughs and clean-ups of any choreography. We returned to the same patch of wet grass in White Plaza that I had initially met Drew, Ysabel, and Kavita tabling in during the New Student Orientation Activities Fair. Our practice began during a late November afternoon around 4:30PM with the sky above us fading into hues of yellow, orange, and dark blue and the sun falling slowly below the horizon. It felt as if we ran through the dance hundreds of times, our small blue speaker running out of battery, our breaths short and heavy, and our legs sore and wanting to collapse against the soft patches of grass. We danced continuously for one and a half hours under the waning sun.
In the last thirty minutes of practice, we had gained an audience of tipsy frat boys, armed with crumpled beer cans, shiny golf clubs, and a set of bright yellow tennis balls. As we practiced for our fifth time, shouts of “Oooohhhh!”, “What is that?,” and “Oh, wow, culture!” rang through the air. Tennis balls were putted carelessly in our direction with their clubheads as they sneered and pointed at us with their callous index fingers.
There was an unspoken agreement amongst all the dancers to ignore them, however unsettled we may have felt in the moment of jeers, jokes, and jostling of beer cans. We continued to finish the run of the dance, but through each and every shout, we shared awkward and uncomfortable looks with one another. As I clapped the pair of bamboo poles, I tried to drown out the frat boys by hitting the poles on the ground as if I was pounding a Whack-a-Mole machine. I watched as the dancer in my sticks grimaced and had all of the muscles in his torso tighten when he hopped through the poles.
To this day, I still do not know if silence was the right decision. Should we have confronted them? Were we right in staying silent? Were we strong for continuing to dance among the drunken calls of mockery and ridicule?
Bamboo is stronger than steel. Its fibers are some of the strongest natural fibers in the entire world. However, bamboo can still be chopped down. Mature bamboo stalks up to six inches in diameter can be sliced with a pruning saw or an electric hand saw and tumble to the ground, with all of its transcendent growth reduced to a muddled pile along the soil.
16 Filipinos may be flexible, pliant, enduring, and strong like the bamboo tree, but at what cost? How do we bend our heads and dance along the flows of the wind when that wind could be tumultuous, malicious, and waiting to point its fingers at us? ____________________________________________________________________________
When a bamboo shoot becomes fully developed and emerges from the ground, it is called a woody culm. This culm is characterized by a thick, segmented rod that can tower nearly fifty feet into the skyline.
After the culm is cut down, it does not die. Rather, if cut from the middle, it unfurls young, green leaves that can rejuvenate the roots of the cleaved bamboo, allowing it to sprout new bamboo shoots. If cut closely near the ground, the stalk will regrow from its very base and flourish into new stalks that can tower into the sky once again.
After eight arduous weeks of Tinikling practice in freshman year, Kayumanggi finally performed as the grand opener to the campus-wide fall quarter dance event, Breaking Ground. The series of bloody ankles, miscounting, and demanding weekly practices culminated in a four- minute performance before seven hundred pairs of eyes.
I stood behind the red velvet curtains, draining out the voice of the two emcees introducing our group. My heart pounded underneath the layers of the Tinikling costume, a pair of thin, flowy red pants, a white t-shirt, and a checkered red sash overlain on my left shoulder that resembled the pattern of a picnic blanket. I peeked around the corner of the curtains, finding myself facing a full house of eager students waiting at the edge of their seats. Ba-bum. Ba- bum.Ba-BUM! Breathe in. Breathe out. My mind ran through the choreography for seemingly the thousandth time before I was interrupted by the speakers above us blared our Tinikling folk song and the blinding, bright red stage lights adorning the stage backdrop. Ba-bum. Ba-BUM! Ba-BUM!
My arms switched swaying between right and left, as I avoided blocking the entrance of the bamboo poles into a staggered formation of three pairs of poles in the back and two towards the audience. A nervous, wide smile was plastered onto my face as I planted the soles of my feet near the bottom left of the bamboo sticks and peered at my dance partner, Trisha. Right, left, right hopped my feet over to the right side of the sticks. Left, right, left hopped my feet to the left side. I recited the choreography in my head to the pulse of the song. And a 1, and a 2, and a 3, and a 4 were replaced with our short and sweet, dubbed names for certain movements through the sticks. Leg ov-er, back and switch, reg-u-lar, dia-gon-al, reg-u-lar, dia-gon-al, reg-u-lar, turn to back. My feet hopped seamlessly through the bamboo poles, never once feeling the familiar CLAP! against my ankles.
We shifted between different formations, us dancers closely following the trail left by the beat of the bamboo poles. From two staggered lines, we hopped right, left, right then left, right, and finally, left, right, left, right to our next formation, the series of bamboo poles outlining five spokes to a star. The crowd roared as they witnessed the dangers of dancing through moving bamboo sticks. Little did they know, we were about to escalate the danger skill to the next level. Each clapper of the bamboo threw the bamboo pole in their right hand with dancers having to leap over the sliding pole to reach the next spoke in time. And a 1, and a 2, and a LEAP! And a 1, and a 2, and a LEAP! The clamors of the crowd crescendoed after the first leap.
After another change in formation, my part as a dancer had ended. I sighed in relief, as I made it out alive, somehow without completely falling face first into the poor people in the front row. I switched to the position of the clapper, holding the two bamboo poles and the safety of the two dancers in my sweaty hands. The palms of my hands gripped the black-taped ends of the bamboo poles, and my eyes fixated on the smooth black floor of the stage, concentrating on the pulse of the song. I dared not to look at the blinding stage lights above me or at the hundreds of judging eyes before me only a few feet away. And a 1, and a 2, and a 3 played on an infinite loop in my head. And a clap together, and a clap together, and a clap together. DON’T RUSH. This loop continued through two more changes of formations, an outline of a pentagon and five pairs of poles lined up to the T one after another in a ladder-like arrangement.
We finally returned to the original staggered formation for the last ten eight counts of the song. Three pairs of poles in the back, two in the front. I had watched the choreography of these dancers so many times that I knew it like the back of my hand. They had the most difficult part in the entirety of the dance: It was similar to the variation of moves my partner and I had done in the beginning but accelerated in tempo after every eight count. Our choreographers had lovingly called this portion the Speed Demon.
As we neared the end of the dance, my eyes zeroed in on the hopping feet of the dancers, trying my best to avoid causing the same pool of blood I had spilled on the practice floor just a few weeks ago. My ears perked as they honed into the ever-changing tempo of the song. Drops of sweat poured down from my forehead onto the tops of my hands. Before I knew it, we were at the last eight count of the dance. I watched as my dancers passed through the bamboo poles in a flash. At five times speed, they did reg-u-lar, reg-u-lar, jumping jack, jumping jack, reg-u-lar with sway-ing arms, reg-u-lar with sway-ing arms, reg-u-lar with swaying-arms, and POSE! Luckily, with no casualties left on stage, Trisha, the other clappers, and I formed our final pose by lifting our right hand to form an X with the bamboo poles while the dancers stood in front of them with wide smiles and their arms raised to the sky. Many members of the audience jumped out of their seats, shaking the entire theater with their deafening screams and resounding applause.
After a few seconds, the blinding stage lights dimmed to where we could only make out the outline of each other’s shadows. The cheers of the crowd faded into oblivion. As other dancers and clappers shuffled off stage, I pulled Trisha in a tight embrace, my entire costume drowning in sweat and my mind reeling in euphoria. With her on the other side, we carried the two bamboo poles and the weight of all of its history, culture, and the future memories I would make with them away in our arms.
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