Dai liked to play with her cousins on the sea beach to pick shells, swim, paddle a boat, fish, climb trees, or even play soccer. Playing outside the room all day long, Dai saw the tropic sun burned her skin to a dark hue. Hence her family intimately nicknamed her as the "cocoa chocolate."

When Dai was five, one of her cousins who was studying dance in Britain visited Trinidad. Her cousin, soon after finding that the little girl was very good at expressing the rhythm of music with her body language, taught Ailian some basic ballet moves.

When Dai was six or seven years old, she began to perform children's dance on the school's stage. At 10, she choreographed and performed a dance by herself called Colored Egg , according to the Easter custom.

Upon her mother's persistence, Dai was accepted as a student of a white teacher's student despite serious racial discrimination at the time.

Growing up on Trinidad, Dai had four dreams. The first was to become a singer. She then wanted to be a navy soldier because there were many ships visiting the island, and she was interested in the life of a sailor and very curious about the world. Another dream was to be a musician because she started to play piano at the age of 7. She even set her sights on becoming a painter.

Although she began taking ballet lessons at the age of 5 and enjoyed dancing for family members after dinner every day, she did not think seriously about dancing until she was 14, when her mother sent her to London. There she received ballet training by such luminaries of ballet and modern dance as Anton Dolin, Dame Marie Rambert, Rudolf Laban, and Mary Wigman.

  Study in England

In 1930, she went to London to study dance. Though ballet and modern dance were not well connected at that time, Dai Ailian learned both of them, which greatly helped in her later development.

Misfortunes struck six years into Dai's stay in Britain. Her father gambled away all the money and could no longer support Dai and her sisters in London. Dai's eldest sister had married in London, and her other sister went back to Trinidad. But out of her love for dance, Dai chose to stay. She did all sorts of jobs just to survive on her own and won two scholarships to study at the Jooss-Leeder Dance School at Dartington Hall. 

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