Wei Wei, principal dancer of Hong Kong Ballet, discovered his love for dance as a child and hasn’t stopped moving since

Strange place: I was born in 1981 in Shenyang, northeast China. My father is an engineer and my mother a housewife. I’m an only child. Shenyang is very cold in winter. It can fall to minus 30 degrees Celsius, and it snows. Winter was always a happy time as a child. My grandfather made a wooden sledge and I’d slide down the mountain and onto the frozen lake. It was so much fun. We’d eat hotpot and I remember my parents drinking strong white wine to keep them warm.

As a child, I loved to move and dance. I was really interested in the beat of music. Disco was very popular at that time. I wasn’t shy at all and when people danced in the park, I joined them. My mother realised that I enjoyed dancing and had a good sense of rhythm, so she sent me to learn ethnic minorities dance. It was just something I did for fun.

One day she saw an advertisement calling for kids to audition for a professional ballet school. I went along to the audition knowing nothing about ballet, I just knew it was a dance audition. So, that was how I was accepted to the Shenyang Conservatory of Music. It was a boarding school. I was 12 years old and had just finished primary school when I started ballet training.

For ballet people, I was late to start training. Kids usually start when they are eight or nine. It was a real shock when my parents left me at the school – it was the first time I’d been separated from them and I wanted to go home. The school felt like a strange place and I was so sad. I missed my mum and dad.

Dance class: After a few months, I began to enjoy life at the school and living with my classmates. The day began at 8am and finished at 4.30pm. We began every morning with 90 minutes of dancing and then 90 minutes of cultural studies and after lunch we had more dance training and cultural studies. Our world was small – we moved between the dormitory, the cafeteria and the classrooms.