It’s a shame acrobats can’t compete with each other. Maybe if acrobatics were more sport than spectacle, or if the props weren’t so outlandish, an acrobat could dream of making millions, or earning international acclaim in the Olympics. Instead, this summer a subset of acrobatics, gymnastics, will represent China’s age-old patent on pushing the body by endless, mundane increments to acts of superhuman grace and skill.

“It looks rather fun,” Guo Rui replies modestly, turning away from the gymnastics competition on TV to answer a question: does that look very hard to you? This is as close as the acrobat will come to boasting, knowing that arrogance can be crippling, even fatal for one who does what he does. Besides, modesty is a natural attribute for one who has learned an obsolete craft at the end of a stick, whacked and cajoled from the age of five into daily feats of endurance and concentration that are as monotonous as they are painful.

Old Zhang is an acrobat’s trainer and can therefore boast on behalf of his charges; the abuse he heaps on them [for their own good] certainly pacifies any evil spirits who might otherwise punish arrogance with a slip, a fall, a botched performance. “How can you compare?” he queries rhetorically, assuming the mask and voice of those who brook no argument. He flicks a dismissive hand at the TV screen, where a young man swings about on parallel bars. “This is like practice - the practice before a show.”

Perhaps it is the curse of showbiz that dooms acrobats to obscurity and peanuts. Hollywood could only have happened in America, a country too young to know better. Dignified civilizations have historically spurned actors, singers, and other exhibitionists. Thus do Chinese acrobats have more in common with the American cowboy than the heroic Chinese gymnast. Both acrobat and cowboy come from the dispossessed fringes of their respective societies. Both do work seen as daring and romantic, but which no one chooses as an avocation; they are crafts of unfortunate birth and economic necessity. Both are proudly touted as symbols of the countries that never loved them. The cowboy embodies rugged independence, freedom over safety; the acrobat, transcendence through submission of the will and body. Neither symbol applies to 99.999 percent of its respective country.

But the Chinese acrobat continues to delight and astound, while the cowboy has been shot dead too many times to feasibly sell a movie ticket. Night after night, Guo Rui and his troupe bound onstage in front of foreign eyes that have just seen the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, but that are only now truly sparkling. Boneless flexibility and nerveless balance play out in scenes as old as the Warring States, yet still more thrilling than any hi-speed car chase.

The rope walk over knives, juggling firepots with the legs, physical confidence in the face of death or dismemberment earns instant respect from silver-haired vets, and concerned gasps from their tender old wives. Women in the audience are far more gratified by the teamwork in the spinning pyramid, three or more poised one handed on a plank which twirls on a young man’s head. Child spectators are transfixed by the upside down nine-year-old girl spinning a hundred-plus kilo porcelain pot with the bottoms of her feet. “Mom. Mom! How does she do that? Is it magic?”

Sure it’s magic. Why not. Everything superhuman comes at the price of sub-human [Shall we say insectile?] repetition, grind, more repetition. No liberal do-gooder could witness a typical day’s training for child acrobats- the grimy practice room, the trainer pushing the legs on past whimpers of protest, the lack of safety equipment – without deciding that the children were abused, that they were being denied their right to education, playtime…a balanced life.

Indeed, a balanced life precludes balancing above death on one finger. That’s why you will never find Guo Rui’s analogue in America, anywhere outside an East Asian time zone, unless you stumble across a gypsy camp in Romania. Guo Rui knows the discipline of waking in the pre-dawn for two hours’ practice before a bowl of rice porridge, but knows no more than five hundred Chinese characters. He often feels the adulation of a crowd transported by his skill, but he’ll most likely never feel the dull satisfaction of having more than enough for the foreseeable future. This is no histrionic attempt to evoke pity for Guo Rui or his fellow acrobats, only a little recognition why we must now turn to our TVs and computers for magic. No one wants to pay the price to know magic, especially with the margins increasingly slim, and the lures of consumer culture beckoning from every TV screen, every store window.

A story to illustrate. The China Star acrobat troupe had been performing in America for close to five years, based out of Las Vegas. Last summer, authorities took the troupe’s two bosses into custody on charges of extracting “involuntary servitude”. The performers’ tales of a scant two meals per day, paltry earnings, and restricted access to passports were more than sufficient to damn the accused in the eyes of an American public smugly accustomed to equating Chinese immigration with human trafficking.

The charges were soon dropped, however, on testimony from some of the older performers. The youngsters who had gone to the police were fishing for green cards and lives of cell phone and new sneaker ease. Two meals a day is customary for those in an industry where light and lean means life or death. The hundred dollars or so they received each month was pocket money, with more than a thousand a month per member going to China and the troupes they had been recruited from. The passport policy had been enacted after a spate of lost documentation, unsurprising for teens on the road changing costume three or four times a day.

“It’s ridiculous,” huffed one senior performer. “They see young people here eating McDonald’s and chatting on mobile phones. They could have left and taken chances as illegals – some other members have already. But someone told them if the government believed they had been kidnapped, that they would get green cards and money. I’m not surprised they believed it; they’re just kids. But I’m very disappointed they were ready to abandon the troupe.”