 and I am so happy to have my guest today to talk. You know, let me just back up and say that I thought I was the only Wonder Woman around. And then I came to this exercise class, this Pilates class here in Hong Kong. And lo and behold, this amazing instructor like was just cracking the whip and just pushing us to our limits and just the voice and power and energy just put me to shame. And so I needed to bring her here to talk about what it means to push boundaries. What does it mean to deal with an aging body and go past that and strength and beauty and all these things that are embodied in this person? So without further ado, let me introduce my wonderful guest, Beth Narain. Welcome to our show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. That's so nice. So Beth, I know I'm gonna let you talk out your background but just to give our audience at Think Tech a little gist of who you are. You were originally from South Africa and you had won a scholarship to go to the Royal Ballet in London. And then you were also was a choreographer, I'm gonna let you tell us about how you got to Hong Kong but just to tell people that you were a choreographer for dances here in a TV station here called TVB in Hong Kong. And you were Hong Kong's first lady DJ, amazing at the Peninsula Hotel, iconic, iconic. And you were the first, you created the first woman's exercise studio here in Hong Kong. So that's just like a couple of your groundbreaking moments as a female, especially an ex-pat female at the time in this post-colonial city. So let's talk about this. How did you end up in Hong Kong? So when you grew up in South Africa, you trained in ballet, obviously. And tell us where it took you and how it took you out of- Started training at the age of five years old and then continued in South Africa with my ballet. And then we immigrated to London. And that's when I managed to get into the senior Royal Ballet School in London and got a bursary to continue there. After that, I danced in Europe in France and then in Italy. And I had an older brother living in Hong Kong. He'd been living in Hong Kong for many years. He was actually the brains behind the rugby sevens in Hong Kong. He started up, yeah. So I was in between contracts and he said, oh, I'll buy you a ticket to Hong Kong, come for a couple of months and see if you like it. And so I came and I didn't really- What year was that? 1966. Whoa, okay. 1966. Tell us what Hong Kong was like in 1966 because I had interviewed somebody who was the ex-governor of Hawaii who had spent time here around that era talking about the Suzie Wong era when he went in Wanchai where there were all the sailors that were coming in. That's the vision, that's the image of Hong Kong at the time. What was it like for you? It was, well, it was very colonial at that time. And it wasn't, I just come from Italy. I'd been working in Italy and it was very, it wasn't my sort of- Cup of tea? Yeah, my cup of tea, exactly. But then what happened was the peninsula opened up the first discotheque in Hong Kong called The Scene. And I got a job as a DJ and then later on as the manager rest of the scene. How did you get the job? Were you in music at the time? You know- I just, I actually went to the opening party and I was dressed in silver B-butt clothes from the B-butt boutique in London. Love it. Mom, head to toe and you know, nobody else was dressed like that at that time. It was really the 1960s look. And the guy said to me, so all the girl that was running the place at that time said to me, I would you be interested in being a DJ? And I said, sure, why not? So I was used to working at night because I've been dancing for many years, working at night. So anyway, I started working as the DJ and then took over as manager rest a little while later. That was during the Vietnam War. Wow. So what type of clientele were coming in at that time? Oh, it was very kind of, they were much older group. They were coming down from the Gaddies restaurant and there was restrictions on code, dress codes. So they had to wear color and tie and a jacket and tie, I should say. But mostly Western, European, European. Yeah, a lot of Westerns. Yeah, a lot of expatriates at that time. Because what I understand, and a lot of people still don't know, the image of Hong Kong as cosmopolitan and multicultural it is today, back in the days, like you said, the colonial times was mostly British expats filled through these spaces, whereas the local Chinese were kind of kept in a very local kind of a life in their own places. Yes, yes, that's true. So it was very expatriate and it was a beautiful discotheque and yeah, slowly, slowly it started to change and we got more relaxed with the dress code and younger people came in and then of course, a lot of people, yeah, sorry. Yeah, you know, I'm just imagining you in some funky outfit, gorgeous, blonde, spinning. And so people see you as this exotic being there. I mean, that's kind of like the presentation of a place. You provide this image of the club, right? How did you feel about that? Did you feel like you were kind of objectified or did you feel like this is brilliant? This is my time, they take advantage of that, but you also took advantage of this for your own experience in Hong Kong. Yeah, I wasn't blonde at that. Oh, what color was your hair? Black. Okay, funny. But no, I didn't feel objectified at all. It was fun, it was wonderful. It actually was the happiest time of my, one of the happiest times of my life and it's what kept me in Hong Kong. Okay. So it was that job. I was also working for television at the same time. I was choreographing for a TV show, pop show called The Starship. Was kind of like top of the pops, you know, in the sixties. And so I worked till two o'clock in the morning and then I worked from 11 till about three in the afternoon. I was working pretty hard at that time. I was also teaching ballet at the same time in the afternoon, we're a ballet school. So yeah. So at that time, how old were you? 19. Wow. Oh my goodness, okay. So as a 19 year old, fresh out, doing all these things that come to you and your body is, you know, Wonder Woman, right? You're on the top of your game. You have a limitless amount of energy and possibilities with your body, right? So you can manage all these things. And I'm just gonna kind of zip through how I met you through the fitness class and it's amazing that you are a grandmother, you've had over 52 years of experience in kind of dance fitness and everything. And you look back at your body back then at a 19 year old you, how do you think that that shaped the way you took care of your body today? 100% it shaped. You know, from my ballet training, the talking about pushing your boundaries. I mean, you do five classes a day at the Royal Ballet School, you know? You work very, very hard because there's a lot of competition. So you have to push your boundaries all the time. There's no hanging back or I feel tired or maybe I've got my period or I can't do my class today or any of that kind of thing. You do it and you push your body to the maximum. And I think that's probably instilled in me. And, you know, I don't think I get a cold or I feel a bit fluid. It doesn't stop me from going and teaching my classes. Wow. So it's, you just carry on. And I think that that's what makes the body a lot stronger. So do you think it's more mental? Mental and I think it's physical. But you have to have that mental capacity to say I'm going to push myself even though I want to rest. Right. Yeah. You have to have that. I see a lot of people a little bit too precious today. You know, they're a little bit too worried about are they going to catch a cold? And of course COVID hasn't helped that situation. Or, you know, are they going to get sick? Or, you know, better not do it because I feel a little bit tired. I mean, you know, you do it. Yeah. You know, you push your body and you find that from pushing your body that little bit harder, you get that little bit stronger. So just when you think that you've tapped out or you've reached your so-called maximum, you push it a little further. Yes. You need to do that, right? You need to do that. You need to do that, yeah. You need to do that. With some, yeah. I think, well, for me, I definitely need to do that. I mean, there are many days when I go to work and I think, oh, God, really don't feel like teaching today. You know, I'm not tired or didn't have a good sleep or something like that. But I have to do it. And I do it. I probably do it because I have to do it, but then once I do it, I realize that I could have done it anyway. You know, it's not that difficult. It isn't- But do you think you set the boundaries for yourself so that you have to get that? So you purposely find jobs like you're working at this fitness center and you're teaching Pilates. You do it to set the parameters so that you have to go in. Because if you didn't, you could easily have enjoyed your retirement life, being grandma, doing just, you know, sitting back, but you are still teaching. And so is that what pushes you? Like, do you create these setups to continue to push? Maybe. Maybe I do, but, well, it's my career. That's the thing. It's what I do. But most people your age will not keep doing it. If you're able to do it, I don't see why you shouldn't do it. In anything, I mean, not just this, in any kind of work. If you're able to work, I don't particularly feel that one needs to retire. Yes. Yes. No, exactly. But again, how did you develop that sense of inner strength? Is it, did you ever have some life-changing experience that made you feel like you really need to kind of stay on track in a certain way? Or have you ever gotten off track where you realize that that's not the way to go in order to kind of fully kind of commit to the ways you strengthen your body? Surely you were a reckless young woman at some point and doing things that were not necessarily good for your body. Sure. Yeah, I used to go out at night, stay out till three o'clock in the morning. Yeah, at the time. Teacher, nine o'clock class, you know? Yeah. Was the hangover. I did that many times, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I also was sick one time in Thailand. I actually had a blood clot and I was in the hospital and I had to stay in the hospital for about 10 days while they dissolved this blood clot. And there was this woman sharing the room with me. I never forget, she could hardly, well, she was paralyzed from the same thing, blood clot went to the brain. And she was completely, well, she was paralyzed. All she could do was slap her leg in order to get her daughter's attention who was staying in the room with her. Anyway, this woman was taken in a wheelchair every day down to physio to do her exercise. And she would pass me as I was lying in the bed and she was so excited to be going down to do her physio exercise. You know, her face was beaming and she was like smiling and her daughter would say to me, she's so happy she's going down to do her physio. And I thought, oh my God, you know, here I can do this every day of my life. I can work out. And I thought, how grateful we should be to be able to really exercise and to use our bodies every day. And you know, why think about, oh, I'm tired today, I don't feel like doing anything or I've got a headache. I don't think I'll go to class or, you know, you can. You can push yourself. And you need to really be grateful that you can move your body. It's true. And even my 18 year old son reminds me that movement is medicine. Sometimes I say, I'm tired. He says, mom, movement is medicine. It's like, yeah, you're right, you're right. So can I talk about that? Let's talk about movement because again, going back to your class and I hope that we can share that one little clip that I managed to steal of you teaching. But that was a Pilates class. That was a bar class. But in your cardiopilates class which I wish I had a clip, you were doing these routines where we had to not just do the movement that we had to use our brains because you had these choreographic ways to navigate the ball between the left arm and the right leg. And, you know, so it's not just exercise. There's more to it. You know, we have to follow. And you're strict. You're telling people, listen to the beat. You know, you're cracking that whip. And some people are tone deaf. So I'm like, okay, well, that's hard on them. But you are just hardcore. I've never had a trainer like you who takes the time to tweak people and to make comments that might just make a huge difference on the way they feel that muscle. Yeah? That comes from my ballet training. Yeah. I mean, as a ballet dancer, as a ballet teacher, technique and staying on the beat with music is very important to me. And that makes you use your brain. So you're not just, you know, zooming out on while you're doing the exercise and watching yourself in the mirror. But you really have to concentrate. You have to concentrate on a little bit of choreography that I give and listening to the music because that's what the music is telling you what to do with your body. But some people just don't follow the beat. They have a different sense of timing, right? Yeah. You don't have two left feet. And then what do you do? They have, I think everybody has the sense of timing. I think people just, they don't concentrate. They're looking in the mirror or they're looking at themselves or they're not being present. If they're being present, they can hear the music. They can follow. I'm doing it in front of them. They can follow me. I think that's a very good point. Being present is something we often dismiss. Yes. Especially when we have routines, you know, we just fall into it without thinking about it. Not thinking about it, right? Yeah. And that's how 45 minutes that they spend there, it's a kind of meditation in a way because they can really get into that 45 minutes. They can get into the music. They can get into the choreography. They can get into everything that I'm giving them, the energy that I'm giving them in that class. Yeah. You know what I noticed in your class that there are more men than I expected, especially when people associate Pilates or bars as always more of a female thing. So do you feel like that's more catered to women or is that something that's just been misinformed and how do you think men take Pilates differently from women? I think men, there are quite a lot of men doing Pilates. I don't know about bar classes, but they're very hard. Yeah. The technique is very hard, very difficult to get those small muscles engaged. Men are so used to using the big muscle. They like to get into the big movement. So when they have to work on the small muscle and get that technique of that little muscle working underneath the big muscle, it's quite... Yeah, it's a bit tricky for them. You think it's easy for them to dismiss? Like, oh, I just... It's too subtle, it's not a workout for me. So because they can't find that, right? So they're looking at the larger, more obvious, like you say, the big muscles and they're dismissing those really important subtle movements. Yes, yes, yes, that's true. They do find it very difficult. I remember one guy coming into my stretch and turn class and he looked around, he saw all these women and I guess he looked at me and thought, hmm, this is gonna be easy. That's kind of... Yeah. She looks like she could lie down for a while. You see, judgment. They don't understand what to see. Yeah. So anyway, halfway through the class he started moaning and groaning. I couldn't quite hear what he was saying, but we were doing abdominals and the sweat was pouring off him. And so it was quite funny because later in the changing room, this woman that was next to him said to me, did you hear what that guy was saying? During the abdominal workout, I said, no, I couldn't catch it. She said, he was saying, please God, don't let me die. You see, he's struggling so badly. And that was because he wasn't used to those kind of exercises where you really pull everything in and engage all the muscles. He was used to the big bouncy bouncy. That's why it's such an important topic to have subtle movements, subtle strength because that is something that we don't see on the surface but if you apply it to life, sometimes it's those little things that are, they go invisible because of the larger dominant narratives and the obvious surface level of everything we see in life, right? Sometimes it's the tiny little details that we don't care to look at that are so important to our wellbeing, strength and everything. Right, but those are the little muscles that support the big muscles. Ah, they are the ones that need to be engaged. But to get to there, you have to dig deeper. You have to dig very deep, very, very deep and you have to work them internally. So it's not just the movement that I'm giving that's going to work that muscle. It's you that's going to work the muscle from inside, from really contracting it. It's like you have to feel it yourself. Yeah, we can sit here now as we're talking and we can be doing our abdominal exercises. How? Tell me how. Let's do some. I need, I always need more core. So as I'm sitting here now, why are you talking to me? Can you still talk to me by pulling your belly button in towards your spine? Now this is different from the kegel, right? Not the contraction of the pelvic muscles or is it? No, not the contraction of the pelvic floor muscles pulling up. We want to just draw the belly button in towards the spine. Yeah. Good, feel that. Now it's about closing the ribs a little bit inwards like a corset. So just imagine you've got a corset on. Yeah. Clipping from underneath the breastbone, one clip, and then the next clip, and you're clipping all the way down to the pelvic bone. Right. So immediately do you feel yourself sitting more upright? More upright? But then there's a difference between, because then I feel like I'm contracting my lungs, which I don't want to do. You know, I'm holding in everything, but don't I feel like I want to open up so that I can feel like I'm present and I'm reaching out. You know, I don't... But you're not contracting this way. You're just gently pulling in that way. You're just narrowing your waist. By narrowing the waist, you elongate it. Right, right, yeah. So it has to be a conscious effort, like consistently. You don't let that go, you're saying. Yeah. I used to say to people when they walk, when they're walking down the street, just to feel as though they're pulling their flesh away from their clothes. Yeah, okay. It's subtle. It's not like that. Yes. Right. But just simply pulling your flesh, your abdominals or your waist. Yeah. From your clothes, from whatever you wear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just get that feeling of lengthening and drawing in. I mean, if you see ballet dancers walking down the street or even ballroom dancers, you can see them straight away, right? You can pick them up like that. Yeah, yeah. So they have that feeling of pulling up. Yeah, pulling up, holding it in from inside, deep inside, right? And you know that. So to wrap up our show is, what are some tips you can give, obviously, to people who, and some people are not as fortunate to have mobile bodies. They have issues, health issues that hinder movement. So again, it's the psychological aspect of it too, but what are some tips you have going forward to deal with our aging bodies, whatever level we have? I think they should do whatever they can. Tai Chi is very good for aging bodies. Exercise are not particularly what I'm teaching or, you know, or Pilates or yoga, but whatever they can do. Movement, everyday movement. I mean, I see it in the park every day, they're people swinging around, tapping themselves, tapping their legs, tapping their head. That's a very Chinese thing because you're opening, you're stimulating all the meridians and all the meridians. So any kind of exercise, anything that moves, stretch your legs every day when you get up, you know, stretch your body, swing, open up your spine, try to touch your toes every day, whatever, that's movement because the body needs to move. Yes, that's excellent. And I'm going to spin it back to your experience in Hong Kong back in the days because this concept of movement makes me think about the movement of Hong Kong, of how it's shifted and changed over the time. You know, when you were here, it was a very special time. You know, it was kind of a prime of this colonial era of decadence, so to speak, for a lot of the expats. And, but then at the same time, there was this tension about the riots. You mentioned that you were here during the riots of the 19, was it 67? 67, the Cultural Revolution. So how did that, you know, we look at the riots from a few years ago in Hong Kong, that's kind of changed things. What is, you know, you seeing that transformation and the two different types of riots protest, what type of understanding of this place do you have from that? I don't know, it's, during that time, it was pretty bad in 67, it was really bad. I mean, China cut the water supply to Hong Kong. We only had four hours of water every four days in the middle of summer. Every house was filled with buckets, buckets and buckets, buckets were the premium, you know, you were paying more for buckets than food at that time, because you had to fill the buckets up and they had to last, the water had to last for four days. So people got bombed, there were, you know, bombings going on around central. And I was quite nervous and I said to my boss at the Peninsula Hotel at that time, you know, I think I might go back to London. And he said, oh, well, why don't you just wait and see what the Kuduris are doing? If the Kuduris are not pulling out of Hong Kong, you know, it might pass and sure enough, it did. So things, you know, Hong Kong definitely has a way of bouncing back. Yes, the resilience is really, really amazing. Yeah, I think it's gonna take a little longer this time, maybe a couple of years, I don't know. But I think it will bounce back. I think things will be okay. You know, I've seen it go through tremendous steps, the financial crisis, yeah. I mean, seeing the world through your eyes as a 19 year old girl who comes out from ballet and ends up in Hong Kong, DJing at the most exclusive hotel in Hong Kong and then opening up a studio and doing all these boundary breaking things in Hong Kong is just a testimony to your strength and your vision to kind of continue to break boundaries. And I'm really so appreciative of you sharing a bit of your history and the history of Hong Kong with us through your lens. This is brilliant. So thank you so much. This is Beth Norene. If you missed it, please listen. We have so much to learn from this Wonder Woman. The pleasure was all of ours. Thank you.