When H.T. Chen & Dancers performed “South of Gold Mountain” in Houston, I road-tripped from Atlanta — twelve hours each way — to watch the piece. Twenty-four hours in the car — all for a single dance performance. Why, you ask? What does it mean to you? Are you crazy?! (Yes, of course, but I digress…)
You see, H.T. Chen & Dancers was my first professional dance contract. After graduating from Stanford the year before, I’d been working for a top-ranked economic consulting firm a few blocks from Times Square — in one of those fancy skyscrapers with revolving doors and important people making elevator pitches on their way to their cubicles. It was an excellent job — great starting pay, full benefits, decent hours (relative to the field) — an all-but-guaranteed stepping stone to top business schools. But I hated it. The many nights of eating Seamless Web dinner at my desk and taking the black car home past midnight are still vivid in my mind. As the car sped down the FDR in quiet darkness (well, the big city version of quiet and dark), I’d ask myself what was the point of making money just to stay alive, if staying alive made me so miserable. And let’s just be real — I was thinking about dance 24/7, on and off the job. So I quit once I could find a professional dance company that would hire me.
That company, of course, was H.T. Chen & Dancers. Finding employment in the dance world is much like the catch-22 of any other field — to get a job you must first have professional experience, and to have professional experience you must first get a job. So I was really lucky that H.T. Chen and his wife Dian Dong saw something in me — even though I didn’t major in Dance, even though I had minimal professional experience, even though I was younger than most who are selected to join their company. For that, I will always be eternally grateful.
It’s not that I look back on this rite of passage with rose-colored glasses. To be sure, it was hard, hard work. And sometimes I wanted to bang my head into a wall. Since this was a part-time dance company contract, we all had to work other jobs just to make less than half of what I used to make in my other life. For most, it meant dancing for other companies, teaching (if not dance, then yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, etc.), waitressing, bartending, or all of the above. For me, it meant running the company’s Chinatown dance and piano school on weekends as the School Administrator.
Err… Let’s just say that I have some interesting stories to tell. Like handling all of the monetary transactions from a knapsack in the hallway (sometimes $800 cash from one parent alone) while trying to juggle any number of things mostly by myself — answering the phone while parents crowded around my desk needing one thing or another, running the school store, locking and unlocking classrooms, watering more plants than I could count, scarfing down my lunch, sweeping all the studios and hallway floors, keeping the bathrooms stocked, taking little kids to the bathroom while their parents weren’t there, fending off homeless people trying to camp out in the bathroom (true story!)… Or crawling on my hands and knees to patch up the linoleum dance floor with Priority Mail boxes from the post office that we cut into exactly the right size to fit into the holes (don’t worry, the marley covered it all up beautifully!). Or sweeping the floor in a tiara between guest performances of The Nutcracker pas de deux for the school (in the words of the kids, “Look! The princess is sweeping the floor!”). It wasn’t all fun and games. There were days I’d lie on the floor in the studio and close my eyes to fight back tears, because I was always doing stuff wrong (my Stanford education did little to prepare me for janitorial services!). And I had no life since I worked weekends, so there’s that.
But at the end of the day, the work was deeply meaningful to me. And that made all the difference.
I am an American born Chinese, and I grew up in the South in a world of Black and White. When we learned about the Civil War in grade school and our teacher asked which side of the war our ancestors fought on, I had no answer. It was an innocent question, but the implications were grave — it taught me that I am an outsider, even in a country in which I am native-born. The history of my people in America — that more than 50 of the approximately 200 Chinese living in the US at the time fought on both sides of the Civil War, for example — was simply not taught in schools. I didn’t know this, in fact, until a couple of years ago when I was invited to perform for the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. At a planning meeting, the facilitator surveyed the room for native Atlantans. To everyone’s surprise (including mine), I was the only one who raised my hand.
Yes. The Asian one was the only native Atlantan in the room. Think about that for a minute.
So to dance for H.T. Chen & Dancers — a troupe that had an educational lecture-demonstration specifically dedicated to the history of Chinese in America — wasn’t just a dream come true. It was something my childhood self — trying to figure out where I fit in the Civil War conversation — couldn’t ever imagine dreaming of. Through modern dance, we told stories about Angel Island Immigration Station (like Ellis Island of the West, where Chinese immigrants were detained for months or even years at the height of the Chinese Exclusion Act), building the transcontinental railroad, and breaking a shoe factory strike in North Adams, MA. Much of this history, I’m embarrassed to say, I didn’t even know about. Until I had the opportunity to share it every morning with school children of all colors — black kids from the Bronx, white kids from America’s richest suburbs, recent immigrants scattered all throughout the city… Talk about coming full circle.
I left the company long before H.T. and Dian started working on “South of Gold Mountain,” a concert piece about the history of Chinese immigrants in the South. As a young dancer I wanted to try new things, and the prospect of a full-time dance contract with another company that toured more frequently — meaning that I didn’t have to work the School Administrator job anymore — was too good to pass up. Three years had passed before I received a strange e-mail. By then, I had returned to Atlanta as the Associate Director of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company. Some company I never heard of — called Alternate ROOTS — was asking if ACDC could help connect H.T. Chen & Dancers with the local Chinese community. The request was really nebulous — we didn’t know what this Alternate ROOTS company was all about, or what H.T. Chen & Dancers was trying to do. But we called anyway and were like, “Actually, I used to dance for H.T. Chen & Dancers! I know them quite well. Of course we can help!”
In truth, this chance reencounter — fate, if you will — helped me more than I could help them. In preparation for what would become “South of Gold Mountain,” H.T. and Dian wanted to interview families who had settled down in the South for many generations. I didn’t know any (my family came to the South in the 80s, and most everyone else I knew came around the same time or later). My only contribution was connecting them to a historian who did know. But this fateful encounter essentially got me a job — one that I didn’t even know I was looking for but somehow fit like a glove — because I accidentally discovered that Alternate ROOTS was hiring when I went to their website to figure out who the heck they were. Believe it or not, I’ve been on staff for almost four years now and the work at the intersection of the arts and activism has not only been a source of income but also a huge inspiration for my own artistic practice. Funny how things plop in your lap when you least expect it, huh?
But back to “South of Gold Mountain”… Being a Chinese American who literally grew up South of Gold Mountain, I’d always been curious about what the final product would be. The piece toured for over a year in the South before I had a chance to see it. When they were in Alabama, just a little over two hours away from Atlanta, I had to perform in South Carolina that same day. I even thought about flying up to watch the New York City season, but alas, I still have no life because I still work weekends — now with the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company. So when I found out that the Houston performances were on a holiday weekend, I figured this might be my only chance. Do I really want to travel that far to see this one piece? Twenty-four hours in the car? Am I freakin crazy?! Well, yes. But where else am I going to see a dance piece like this, where I can learn more about a history — my history — that I know too little about? I searched and came up empty, so off I went.
PHOTOS
Touring with the company in 2008 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, the site of the shoe factory strike broken by Chinese workers in 1860:
Performing H.T. Chen’s then new piece “Between Heaven and Earth” for Lucy Liu (!!!) and the students of MS 131, in collaboration with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, in 2009:
Touring with the company in Birmingham, AL in 2009:
With H.T. Chen, Dian Dong, and my mom Hwee-Eng Y. Lee after the performance of “South of Gold Mountain” in Houston in 2016:
Reunited with former colleagues after seven years (you might recognize them from the previous photos)!
