My life: Faye Hung

F When I saw my first ballet - it was either Swan Lake or Giselle - I told my mom I wanted to be a prima ballerina. She enrolled me in (Hong Kong's) Jean M Wong School of Ballet. I liked the strictness that ballet has in the way things have to be done; there's a strict routine you have to follow, and everything is very technical. I learned ballet until I was 15 and then moved to Langley (a city near Vancouver, Canada) in 1993. I am disappointed in myself that I didn't finish the Royal Academy of Dance levels. I got up to advanced but then my parents moved. Where we lived, people liked dancing jazz and tap, but not ballet, so I started losing interest.

In 1996, I went to the University of British Columbia. My sister entered university a year before me and joined the UBC Dance Club. She met her boyfriend there and I thought it would be a good way for me to meet guys, too. But instead of finding a boyfriend I decided ballroom dancing was what I was going to do because I loved it. I found a serious partner and we started going to London to train - about six weeks each summer for a few years - with world-class teachers. We competed in Los Angeles, Seattle and Blackpool, England.

In 2003, my partner, who was a bit younger than me, decided he wanted to go back to school. I still wanted to dance, so I decided to try the international field. I posted a few partner requests on dance websites. I got a few replies, but it was disappointing because, in Europe, they start dancing when they are very young, so when they are in their mid-20s, they retire. I was 24 at the time and even my teacher thought I'd be lucky to find anybody, especially coming from North America, which is not known for producing dancers, and on top of that, being Asian. That summer, I visited a friend in Austria who was setting me up with a few potential dance partners. I decided to make a side trip to Italy, to see a dancer I met online. The partners in Austria were Latin dancers and I didn't want to do that because my body wasn't adaptable to that kind of dance. In Italy I met Pietro (Del Bello) and two of his teachers, who said we looked like a pretty good match; they look at height, size, looks. By October, I had moved to a small town called Lanciano (in the middle of Italy's "boot"). When I told my parents where I was going, they were OK with it.

Pietro started ballroom dancing when he was nine, so he's had a lot more experience than me. He chose to dance with me because, he said, dancers from Russia and other Eastern European countries expect him to pay all the expenses whereas I told him I would pay for half of everything. I lived with his parents. My mom says a partnership is like a marriage, and you really have to work at it. Over the years, Pietro and I have had lots of ups and downs; I hate him, I love him, and he is the same with me. We really understand each other - I can mumble something to him and then he'll do whatever I've just mumbled, whereas someone else would have no clue what I said. He has a wife and a son, and I'm really thankful his wife accepts me as his dance partner. It's hard because I'm not the girlfriend or wife, but we travel together and share the same hotel room.

We represented Italy from 2003 to 2005 and, in that time, I learned to dance in a more European style, which is more sport than art. You have to go running, go to the gym, (do) stretching and Pilates, whereas in Vancouver, it's more of a social scene. This is our job. In 2005, we began representing Hong Kong by winning a local competition here. From 2006 to 2009, the Hong Kong DanceSport Association nominated us to attend every Asian championship (in Southeast Asia) and Asia-Pacific championship, which includes Canada, the United States and Eastern European countries. In the latter, the competition field is much larger, and the Russians are in there, too, so the calibre is much higher. In the last world championships in which we competed as amateurs (in 2009), we finished 37th, out of 76 to 80 competitors. That was a big achievement, being an Asian competitor making the top 40 in the world, for ourselves and Hong Kong. There are a lot of politics. If you're from an Asian country, they'll look at you, but they've already decided you're not good enough. But we started dancing a lot better, and the judges took notice of us, so they began to start placing us for our dancing instead of the flag we represent.

In December 2010, we turned professional. I was 32. Because the (professional) field is so much smaller, we got ahead faster. In 2012, we were ranked 10th in the world. Last December, we competed in the world championships (in the "show dance standard" discipline) in Merano, Italy, and we tied for fourth place. This year, we started in the masters' category. With the age range 35 to 44, (there is) an even smaller number of dancers. With more categories opening up, people are (dancing competitively for) longer. If you can physically keep up your training, you can last another two, three years.