A condensed version of this story served as the basis for an original mini dance drama performed by the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company on October 19-20, 2019 at the Infinite Energy Theater. Learn more here.
A Little Red Dragon
The ribbon dance is a traditional Chinese dance of celebration. Anyone can try their hand – toddlers at the children’s museum, nursing home patients in wheelchairs… I first performed the kid version when I was six years old. After all, the concept is pretty simple. A ribbon is just a long piece of silk attached to a stick. It only takes a gentle flick of the wrist to create the image of a little red dragon flying through the air – though it takes an expert to command a pair of dynamic dragons, each over fifteen feet in length.
But for me, the ribbon dance is much more than a dance of celebration. It’s as if the little red dragon has transported me on a long journey – to the deepest part of my soul and to faraway galaxies I’d been afraid to enter alone, speaking on my behalf when I couldn’t voice words. As an American born Chinese who grew up in the South – a tiny speck of yellow in a world of white and black – the ribbon dance is my dance of empowerment.
Much like Mushu the little red dragon in Disney’s Mulan, the ribbon dance has been a constant companion throughout my life. Just a few months after I was born in the suburbs of Atlanta to Singaporean Chinese immigrants in 1986, my mom Hwee-Eng Y. Lee started what would become the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company. The first dance they performed at the Chinese Community Center was the ribbon dance. Back then I barely knew how to walk or talk, but that didn’t stop me from begging the five teenage dancers to let me play with their ribbons.
In the more than thirty years since then, the ribbon dance has accompanied me through the trials and tribulations of life. It didn’t abandon me when I looked down on it through adolescent American eyes. It followed me across the country to college and helped me start Stanford Chinese Dance. It gave me a leg up when I entered the professional dance world in New York without a dance degree or the right body type. It came home with me to the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company and fired up crowds in American schools, libraries, museums, performing arts centers, military bases, corporate HQs. It multiplied and mutated when I taught it to others and put my own spin on it. It shoved me out the door and proved me wrong when I didn’t think we were good enough for So You Think You Can Dance, Atlanta Ballet, the “mainstream.”
You see, the ribbon dance – this mythical, shapeshifting dragon – has taken on my inner demons in hundreds of onstage battles, growing larger and more skillful with each new victory. By unleashing power within me, connecting me with the world above, it has convinced me that my Chinese heritage is not a source of shame but pride – that I am not inferior just because I am not white.
Powerful Dragon or Anemic Little Worm?
I recently had the opportunity to perform the ribbon dance for my old elementary school as a part of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company’s Arts in Education assembly program. That morning my Chinese dragons and I proudly took center stage, captivating the attention of one thousand pairs of curious eyes. But twenty-five years prior, I walked through those same narrow hallways as a shy little girl. One day, I remember looking up at a bulletin board that displayed wishes on paper stars. I silently asked myself what my wish would be, and the first thing that came to mind was “blonde hair and blue eyes.”
Back then, I wondered aloud why I had to be born Chinese. Being Chinese meant that I had to go to Chinese school on weekends when everyone else could play. Being Chinese meant that I had to speak a foreign language at home and get perfect grades. Being Chinese meant walking into almost any room as the Asian one, and looking around to see if there were any others. Being Chinese meant not understanding a lot of things all the other kids seemed to think were obvious. Being Chinese meant being associated with China and Chinatown — dirty, backward, low-class.
In traditional Chinese culture, dragons are symbolic of power and strength. But unlike the powerful dragons my ribbons would grow to become, I used to think it was only an anemic little worm. Just as I looked down on my Chinese heritage, I looked down on Chinese dance as inferior to Western dance forms. There was the “mainstream” — my ballet school, or the field trips my entire grade took to see Swan Lake and The Nutcracker — and then there was Chinese dance. I did my best to keep them separate, because I figured everyone else would look down on Chinese dance too.
*
But the ribbon dance — that annoying little red dragon that just wouldn’t leave me alone… Don’t be fooled by its soft, silky texture, or its seemingly small stature. It would soon reveal its power to me, and my own power too.
True to the Asian American stereotype, I am vertically challenged and naturally shy — the kind of person who, as my middle school teacher once joked, can easily disappear behind the furniture. Even as an adult, my heart starts beating faster whenever I have to say my name and where I’m from in an icebreaker. But when I’m wielding a ribbon, I can walk into any room and command the space.
There’s something about the ribbon dance that is mesmerizing to people from all walks of life. At one point the dragon curls up into a little ball of fire, and when you least expect it, suddenly explodes out into the audience — so close that you can almost touch it — before quickly swimming back to the dancer. It’s almost sure to elicit a reaction — screams of “WOAH!” among school children, or a subtle widening of the eyes for even the stiffest corporate executive. When I performed it at the So You Think You Can Dance final callbacks in California, it got accomplished dancers from all across the country to jump out of their seats.
I used to think this moment was just a gimmick — that the ribbon dance was nothing more than eye candy to entertain the masses. But as I’ve come to realize through performance after performance in disparate communities, it’s as if the dragon breathes out an invisible bridge that connects me, the dancer, to the audience — and we form a symbiotic relationship. The audience gains joy, positive energy, knowledge about a culture they may be unfamiliar with. The dancer grows in confidence and pride — in oneself, in one’s culture, in a world that celebrates them for who they are.
When I first performed the ribbon dance as a scrawny six-year-old on a small makeshift stage in Atlanta, I never imagined it would be the first of hundreds of ribbon dance performances over a lifetime – that this little red dragon would go on to introduce me to hundreds of thousands of live audiences in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, California, and the British Virgin Islands. I never imagined it would give me a voice, rendering me visible in places I hadn’t pictured myself. That it would teach me to smile, leading me to true joy and purpose in life. That it would ground me not only in my Chinese heritage, but my full American-ness too.
Invisible Dragon of the South
A year and half after graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree, I found myself performing the ribbon dance every morning as a professional dancer in New York City. It wasn’t that I set out to pursue Chinese dance (I still looked down on it). After a soul-sucking year as a researcher for a top-ranked economic consulting firm, I just knew I was dying to dance – even if everyone (especially my practically minded Asian parents) told me I was crazy to give up a high-paying job to be one in a million artists. Somehow I managed to break into the highly competitive NYC modern dance scene – in part because my Chinese dance background came in handy for H.T. Chen & Dancers’ Asian American modern dance choreography. The ribbon dance became my lead part in the company’s educational lecture-demonstration that told the story of Chinese in America.
Like most professional dancers, I put up with morning school shows as a requisite for performing in lofty performing arts centers across the country. There was this notion that dancing for kids was somehow less important, because they weren’t as sophisticated as the “high art audience.” I figured performing the same choreography day in day out, for kids who didn’t have a choice about whether to be there or not, would get boring pretty quickly. But it’d actually become one of my favorite things to do, ever, gifting me the opportunity to be part of something I never got to experience as a kid growing up in the South – something I never knew I needed until we brought it to life on stage.
*
In New York, third graders learn about communities around the world in social studies class. In Georgia elementary schools, the only thing you really need to know about Asia is to identify it on a map (not to mention Asians in America). We studied US history – from American Indians to European exploration, British colonial America, American Revolution, Civil War… That was the America I knew — the universe I saw as legitimate. As a yellow-skinned Asian— neither black nor white — I couldn’t figure out where, or if, I belonged.
When we got to the Civil War, my teacher told us to ask our parents which side of the war our ancestors fought on. Of course, I didn’t need to ask. I knew my answer (or lack thereof) would be unlike most everyone else in the class. What I didn’t know was that among the white and black soldiers were Chinese Americans who served on both sides of the war, who laid down the tracks of America, who fought for birthright citizenship all the way to the Supreme Court (thanks, Wong Kim Ark!) – that while the history of Chinese in America didn’t appear in my textbooks, we have nevertheless been woven into the fabric of the great nation we’re proud to call home.
It was through a literal piece of dancing fabric – silk, a Chinese invention, to be exact – that I finally saw myself in the elementary school curriculum many, many years later. Not just a little something for show-and-tell, or a book I chose to read (or rather, my dad urged me to read) to fulfill an outside reading requirement. (Shout-out to Laurence Yep’s Dragon’s Gate and Dragonwings!) This was something American powers-that-be deemed worthy to be viewed by an entire school or grade level. Finally, a moment where kids of all shades gathered together to learn about my cultural heritage for an entire class period – a privilege I had assumed was only for Little House on the Prairie, square dance…and maybe Martin Luther King, Jr. on a special day.
Chasing the Pearl of Wisdom
Like a Chinese dragon chasing the pearl of wisdom, the ribbon dance has become my mode of transportation to view and make sense of the world. The dance may be the same (or a variation on a theme) no matter where I’m performing or teaching. But it’s the moments immediately before and after that are most eye-opening, providing a glimpse into universes I’d otherwise never have an excuse to visit – and even if I did, I wouldn’t have the words or courage to share an intimate part of myself.
There was the time it drove me across the Illinois-Iowa border with the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, where I spotted an anti-immigration bumper sticker amidst the cornfields. The night before our concert in Burlington, IA’s landmark auditorium, right along the Mississippi River, we had dinner at the only Chinese restaurant in town – which we were told employed most of the city’s ten Chinese people (literally). The night before that, I slept in my apartment in Manhattan Chinatown – home to the largest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. How would I view the world differently if I had grown up in either of these extremes? Can a little red dragon help close the gap?
There was the time it ferried us across picture-perfect turquoise water to Tortola, British Virgin Islands, where no amount of sunscreen shielded us from the hottest sun ever. The setting – open air taxis, free-roaming chicken, Caribbean music – couldn’t have been more foreign. But I saw myself in the young audiences who hugged us afterwards, asking for autographs and pointers on how to become more flexible. That was me when the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company performed in Atlanta eight years prior (or would have been me if I hadn’t been too shy to get close to the professional dancers). It was that same wide-eyed passion for dance – for the very same contemporary Chinese ribbon dance I saw the company perform in Atlanta – that closed the gap of 1,636 miles and the different cultures between us.
There were many more times, closer to home with the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, that showed me parts of my own state I never thought twice about. There was the back lawn I danced on for a Latino girl’s home birthday party, an Indian half sari ceremony, the National Black Arts Festival. There was Bob, the cheery old white man at an assisted living facility who could barely walk but was so eager to help me with my bags. There was the kid who saw me with my phone after a school show and said in earnest:
“Wait, I thought y’all don’t carry phones in China?”
“We do!”
“Like what kind?”
“Apple, Samsung…just like here.”
“Oh yeah, they’re all made in China!”
We may all live within miles of each other, but how often do we venture outside our own little bubbles? If nothing else, the ribbon dance offers an alternative to well-worn stereotypes on both ends of the dragon (yes, I’m guilty too) – human-to-human connection through the universal language of dance.
And then there were the places I’d put on a pedestal – that I’d figured the ribbon dance would never be worthy of. There was the time it gave me the chance to add Chinese dance to Atlanta Ballet’s summer program curriculum, stunned to overhear a white girl telling her friend “Next we have Chinese” as nonchalantly as she would say “Next we have ballet (or jazz, tap, modern…)” – without a hint of dismissiveness or exoticism. There was the time it finally gave me the courage to perform for Alternate ROOTS (one of the most well-known, nationally recognized arts and social justice organizations in the South), overcome with disbelief, pride, and comfort as the ribbon dance music – that unabashedly traditional Chinese music – came blaring over the speakers. Sometimes it takes an outside eye to see what has always been there – someone from the “mainstream” to validate what has always been beautiful, unique, enthralling.
Return of the Dragon
You know how revisiting a place from your past illuminates how much has, and hasn’t, changed? That’s how it was walking through the doors of Simpson Elementary School more than two decades after fifth-grade graduation, armed with a bag full of ribbons – and a lifetime of ribbon dance experiences too. Everything looked the same as before – except the bulletin board with the paper stars, where I’d once wished I had blonde hair and blue eyes, had been replaced with a new mural. I could’ve found my way to the gym without an escort. Believe it or not, even my PE teacher Mr. Halron was still there!
The last time I watched an assembly program in that gym, it was Okefenokee Joe with a huge snake. Today that huge snake would be me – presenting a Chinese dance lecture-demonstration with my mom, now fellow co-director of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I still get a little self-conscious when all eyes are on me. As kids started filing in by class, I smiled bashfully at the ones pointing at me and quickly turned away to warm up. Self-doubt and nervousness threatened to creep in – but then I remembered that I’ve done this so many times before. Deep down, I knew my dragons and I would be triumphant that day. It was the kind of self-confidence built not on vapid faith, but upon layers of layers of trial and error – of knowing we’d already won many battles together.
Partway through the performance, looking out into the packed audience of school children, I had an onstage moment of “Is this really happening?” Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was sitting among the rows of little ones looking up? Back then I was that awkward dance student who would refuse to smile in rehearsal – who would paste on a perfunctory smile for performances, at least until I’d inevitably forget thirty seconds later. It wasn’t that I was rebellious – I truly didn’t know (or know why I should care) how to be expressive.
But in that moment, in the vessel of my adult body, I caught myself beaming with pride. Nowadays I’m a performer who is often complimented on my smile – who can make people laugh and cry, sometimes within the same dance. How did I get from there to here? Sure… Training, experience, coming of age all of have something to do with. But you know what’s changed the most? I now know what I’m dancing for – and that having black hair and dark brown eyes doesn’t make a person any less beautiful.
*
On our way out of the school, my mom and I were stopped by a parent in the hallway. She reminded me a little bit of myself – a petite, unassuming Chinese American woman, not much older than me, speaking English without a trace of an accent. She’d just finished having lunch with her son, who’d been raving about the performance. She wanted to thank us.
A quintessential immigrant story is when a kid takes out a strange smelling home packed lunch, and all the other kids laugh at him. But that day the lunchroom chatter might have been about how the ribbons made the shape of a dragon, or how much fun it was to watch their friends get up on stage and try the ribbon dance. That day maybe the little boy’s Chinese heritage wasn’t a liability, but something the other kids thought was cool. In the formative years of their lives, before their minds became hardwired to a singular definition of “strange” or “cool,” we challenged them to experience the world through another set of cultural practices.
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Legend has it that the ribbon dance was created in honor of a man who saved a Han dynasty emperor’s life by blocking the assassin’s sword with his oversized silk sleeve. I only recently learned of this, just as I was reflecting on how the ribbon dance has shielded me from the invisible daggers of Asian inferiority. I hope it can shield others too – the boys and girls in the audience, our community at large, and especially my young Atlanta Chinese Dance Company dancers growing up alongside the ribbon dance as I have. When they’re wielding a ribbon, I hope they feel as if they have the power to command a majestic dragon – and that they’re not shy but proud to introduce it to their friends. I hope we all feel empowered to be confident in our own skin.
American Dragon
My favorite place at Simpson Elementary School was the music room. I couldn’t help but reminisce as I passed it on the way to the bathroom before the performance. Like almost every Asian American kid I knew growing up, I played piano competitively (and later violin). I loved music and always looked forward to the days we had class with Ms. Minter. I remember performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore (my stick-straight Asian hair refused to stay up in pin curls!) and learning all the words to beautiful, patriotic American songs.
I was swept up in those songs again this past May, just after performing the ribbon dance at Fort Gordon (home to the United States Army Signal Corps) in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The program kicked off with The Pledge of Allegiance and national anthem – the Army Band playing live in the orchestra pit while uniformed military personnel stood at attention in the audience – and concluded in a similar fashion with the Service Medley. Sandwiched in between was our Chinese dance lecture-demonstration – the ribbon dance, as always, our final act.
This back-and-forth between American, Chinese, American… That’s the zigzag I’ve traversed multiple times a day for most of my life. My parents spoke to me in Chinese before dropping me off at school; I’d come home to my mom’s Chinese cooking and my dad’s Chinese TV programs. I read on my phone in English while traveling in China. I dance to Chinese music on Spotify and a Netflix ad pops up…and then goes back to the next Chinese song.
I watched as the Army Band traversed the zigzag that day, maybe for the first time. From my vantage point on stage, I could see their faces as they stood in the orchestra pit the entire time – first at attention, but later unable to contain their laughter as they watched their fellow service members try the ribbon dance with me. The little red dragons looked especially tiny next to their big, burly bodies and military boots!
Before I knew it, the bold brass notes of the Service Medley had enveloped the auditorium. It took a moment for my ears to adjust to American music after an hour of Chinese dance. For a moment, I didn’t know who I was. But then the memories came flooding back from my elementary school days, singing “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in music class and reciting The Pledge of Allegiance every morning for twelve years. Back then, one of my best friends called herself a real American at my birthday party. When my dad pointed it out later — that she implied I was a fake — my mom and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. After all, she was white and I was not. Who was I to believe I could be a real American too?
But that day, standing tall in an American military base wearing a colorful Chinese dance costume, I knew. My heart swelled with pride as the patriotic American music washed over me — just as my heart had swelled as I danced to traditional Chinese music just moments ago. Both American and Chinese cultures have been so deeply embedded in who I am since birth. There’s a tenderness that reminds me of my loving family whenever I’m immersed in anything Chinese, but I’ve never pledged allegiance to any other country than the United States of America. I am, indeed, a real American too.
