Jean Wong 'Follow all the little girls in pink,' instructed Jean Wong down the telephone as I was trying to grapple with the directions to her new-ish (eight months) headquarters in North Point. Needless to say, at the appointed hour, all pink little girls had been mysteriously zapped from the street and the security guard in a nearby block had no idea who I wanted. Desperate measures occurred: I haven't done a pirouette since I was about seven and, let me tell you, it was a one-off performance. But he got the message. Once he'd stopped guffawing.
Everyone in Hong Kong knows that Jean Wong teaches ballet. It's an immutable fact like humidity or the beginning of the school year. She's been doing it since the summer of 1959, and when she goes shopping in Central - and, indeed, occasionally in New York - past pupils instinctively straighten their spines or, quite possibly, hurl themselves into convenient doorways until she passes. Wong herself is aware of this effect. 'One boy that I taught, he's an accountant now, he says that he quakes at the knees when he sees me coming. In my young days, I was absolutely a tyrant. But I've softened.' Still, you certainly find yourself scrubbing your fingernails before you go to pay a call on Wong; she is the sort of woman who would make the Queen Mother look slovenly. I've seen her at a distance at plenty of functions and she always stands out, partly because she's so tall (1.75m) and partly because she has a singularly commanding air. I suspect that if you are used to playing God in the eyes of pre-pubescent females then the graded rings of the Hong Kong cocktail circuit are a matter of proper indifference.
This interview coincided with intense rehearsals for Stars of Tomorrow, an annual gala which took place last weekend and featured more than 700 pupils. Wong strode between her office and a studio, wearing the sort of microphone-headset much favoured by pop stars on world tours. Her own oft-quoted description of this extravaganza is that it is a 'Cecil B. de Mille production'. She means the sheer scale, of course, but as the fledgling stars parted before us in awe, it was possible to view her as a sort of Charlton Heston figure bringing down the Commandments of dance from lofty heights to the untutored masses.
Wong, who grew up in Shanghai with five sisters and one brother, had a childhood of positively Jane Austen-like gentility. She still has a picture on her office wall of two fish she painted in that pre-revolutionary era. She had piano lessons, she went to see Betty Grable and Esther Williams at the cinema, there were dancing parties at home. Then, when she was 11, the family came to Hong Kong where ballet was, naturally, the preserve of the colonials. She began to take lessons with Carol Bateman at the Helena May, an institution which did not permit Chinese members.
'I used to feel so deprived, all I wanted was toast and tea.' She hesitated. 'And I couldn't ... I felt so Chinese then. I remember Miss Bateman having her tea, the waiters with white Mandarin tops and black trousers, and I felt that I hungered for that tea and toast.' Years later, she had her tea, in London, where she went to train as a teacher at the Royal Academy of Dancing. 'A butler used to bring it in to us during breaks. I must have put on a stone in two months - I've never been so fat. I have nightmares, even now, about those days in London - dark at 3 pm, the floorboards creaked, there were cold sardines on Sundays because it was cook's day off.' She trained as a ballet teacher because the United States Government refused to grant her a visa to study biology in the US, and because she knew she'd never make it as a dancer. 'I was not very good at it, I knew that I would not excel and that I'd never be satisfied. I'm far better at teaching, I know that.' What did her father, a banker, say? 'Deep down, I'm sure he thought it a frivolous thing to do but he never said 'no'.' In the same way, later she said of her husband, Peter Chen: 'Deep down, I'm sure he wanted a traditional Chinese wife to bring him his slippers.' Won't he mind reading that quote in this magazine? 'I don't let him read things about me. I shield him. It's difficult for him ...' No matter what the men in her life might have thought, however, she kept going. A year after she returned to Hong Kong, she started her own school with eight pupils, the piano from home and some of her uncle's chairs. 'I was totally ruthless. Daring. Very foolish. I presumed the money would be there. Now I go back and forth all the time, talking to the accountant.' I asked her to guess how many little girls (and the occasional lad) have since passed through her expert hands and she said she couldn't, but she rattled off a list of names ('She's on TVB ... she married that boy from Kowloon Motor Bus ... Flora [Cheong-leen], of course'), all of them Chinese.
These days, it seems, just about anyone goes: she runs six studios apart from the North Point nerve-centre. She is aware she represents a mini-sociological phenomenon. 'It's a reflection of how people are more affluent. When I started, most ordinary families wouldn't send a daughter to ballet. I couldn't have done it without that - it's not me, it's Hong Kong's achievement.' No parent, however, is fey enough to think that ballet might be a career. Isn't that depressing? 'Oh, I've seen the other end of the scale abroad, those parents who push their children on stage with no talent.' She has two children - Liat, who is an architect and designed the North Point office, and Alan, who works in computers for Goldman Sachs. They both live in the country which refused to give their mother a visa 40 years ago. Liat (the name comes from South Pacific), of course, was once a Jean Wong pupil. 'I didn't give her praise, I sometimes ignored her,' said Wong, thoughtfully. 'Maybe it was difficult for her with her very critical mum.' Some time later, I asked about her regrets. As usual, a squad of tiny pink girls was gathering for class beyond her office door but she barely paused: 'I'd like to have had more children. I didn't know then that you could have the luxury of a career and children. I could never balance it properly. At the end, the children are more fulfilling in many ways.'
