Jean M. Wong

The founder of her eponymous School of Ballet, Jean M. Wong is a central figure in Hong Kong ballet. Over the years, she has nurtured and trained countless ballerinas. She tells Andrea Lo about remembering her students, helicopter parents, and addresses the rumors that she’s a strict teacher.

Reading Time:3 minutes

Published: 4:00pm, 12 Sep 2013Updated: 3:51pm, 19 Oct 2016

I was born in Shanghai. I moved to Hong Kong, then later on to London. I trained at the Royal Academy of Dance for three years.

I went to a convent school in Hong Kong, where we said the Hail Mary. I said, “How would Mary be in hell?” It took me a long time to realize what “Hail” was.

I was always interested in the arts. I actually started my contact with music first. I started with the piano and later on painted—Chinese painting and sketches. Ballet was the last form that I came into contact with.

My mother was very artistic. She would take us to operas and movies.

Fred Astaire, he really hooked me. The [1948] ballerina film “The Red Shoes” had a very deep, profound impact on me.

I grew up in a big family. I have five sisters and a brother. Somehow, I never got to have a whole chicken to myself. When I was studying in London, I bought a roast chicken for myself. I ate it, and it wasn’t great.

My father was a banker and my elder sister is a doctor. He was kind of hoping all his children would become doctors, but to his disappointment there is only one in the family.

I knew I wasn’t going to be a doctor. I’m not that kind of person.

I can’t recall exactly how many students I’ve taught—I must have taught thousands.

I remember the very bad ones and the very good ones. The ones in between? Honestly, I can’t remember them all.

Sometimes when I’m in the supermarket somebody comes up to me and says, “Hello Ms. Wong, do you remember me?” And I have to pretend I do know them.

Out of all the students that I had, I can say there are a few that I remember especially. One of them is Cheng Pei-pei, the Chinese kung fu actress. She was filming in Shaw Studios on Kowloon side. At that time, there was no Cross-Harbour Tunnel. She had to take the bus, then get across by ferry to come to my studio. She’s very down to earth and has no airs. She worked just as hard as everybody else. I admire her qualities very, very much. We’re still in contact.

The standard of ballet is going up all the time. In the old days the male dancers would turn three turns, now they’re doing six or seven. The technique is continually improving.

Discipline is the most useful thing that dancers gain from training in ballet.

The challenges that we face in running the school are the parents. Sometimes the students are so talented and they can go very far with it as a profession, but the parents will not let them go. They don’t see this as a real profession. That’s the saddest part.

I think it’s a Chinese way of thinking. Having a career means to be a lawyer, doctor or accountant. A dancer? They don’t think so.

Being a ballerina is not easy: imagine all your weight on your toes. All dancers train about six to eight hours a day—day after day. No profession works so hard.

You really have to love it so much that you have to dance and you want to dance. It’s an illusory profession. On the surface, everybody looks so beautiful. But they don’t understand the sweat and the blood behind it.

It’s not only the work. You have to have the right physique. If your neck is that little bit shorter, if you have short legs and a long body, if the shape of your foot is not right, you’re out. By the end, there are very few that are made to do ballet professionally.

If you’re doing it as an after-school activity, that’s fine. But if you want to be a serious dancer, you really have to have everything perfect.

I have been disappointed by students before. Some of them seem to have everything, but they don’t value what God has given them. It’s very rare when a student has the looks, the physique, the musicality and the willpower to do it.

Everybody seems to be spreading [the rumor] that I’m really strict. But in teaching ballet there’s no two ways about it. You have to be a very demanding teacher who demands 100 percent.

Some day you have to retire. If you retire, what do you do? In Chinese, the word for retirement is tui yau. Tui is “backwards,” and yau means you don’t do anything. That’s a horrifying thought. I haven’t come to that point yet.

I’m so much involved in dance, I can’t think of anything else that would substitute for this.

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