NEW YORK - At a mere one year old, Ms. Yung Yung Tsuai was snatched away by fate from her homeland. Now, after over 50 years, she has truly returned. Her story is as elegant and unique as her Western- and Eastern-influenced dancing.
A seasoned dancer and choreographer who has toured internationally and taught at the prestigious Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance, Ms. Tsuai is choreographing a dance for a Chinese New Year show at Radio Music City Hall in January. This will be Tsuai's third year contributing to the show, and it represents the culmination of a long journey she made away from her Chinese cultural roots and back.
The year was 1949, and the Communist revolution left anyone sympathetic with the communists' enemies in a tough situation. Tsuai's family found themselves fleeing to Macao and then Taiwan, where Tsuai said, "Each year my father would say, 'Next year we will return to the mainland.'"
At the age of five, Tsuai began learning traditional Chinese folk dance and Chinese opera dance in Taiwan. Still very much steeped in her Chinese culture, it was 15 years later, when Tsuai was given a personal scholarship to the Martha Graham dance school in New York City, that her life completely changed.
Studying at dance school in Manhattan, Tsuai was surrounded by American culture, speaking virtually no English and sometimes meeting Chinese people who typically only spoke a different dialect of the Chinese language that Tsuai didn't understand.
"I didn't speak English well and my Chinese was getting worse," said Tsuai, only half-joking.
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Tsuai found herself without a cultural identity and had a nervous breakdown, finding some refuge in therapy.
Then began Tsuai's delve into the Western world. In 1973, she married an American named Martin Lerner.
"I couldn't speak English and he couldn't speak Chinese," said Tsuai.
She later opened her own successful dance studio in New York, and toured across the United States with noted choreographer Pearl Lang. In the 1980s, she went even deeper into America, and traveled to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where she lived alone and researched American folk dancing for two years. Tsuai still felt like something wasn't right in her life.
Then, in the 1990s, after 20 years away, Tsuai returned to Taiwan to work as rehearsal director with the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Taiwan's leading modern dance company.
Finally surrounded by other Chinese people, "I started to awaken to my heritage. Memories from my childhood came back… it was healing," said Tsuai. "But I couldn't express myself [with the other Chinese people], my Chinese had gotten very bad."
Tsuai was on her journey home. Back in America, she began to take delight in the dancing parts that had Asian themes.
Starring in Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman's "Sayonara," Tsuai said she got to interact with Japanese consultants hired for the show. "I learned the Kabuki dance, which is also related to China's Tang Dynasty," she said.
In Woodstock, New York, Tsuai also opened up her own Chinese antique shop while teaching at dance school. Although the shop's finances narrowly broke even, Tsuai had an excuse to fly back and forth to China twice a year and take classes on Chinese art history and culture. "I was buying high and selling cheap, but I learned a lot," she said.
Now Tsuai has gotten involved with the New York-based multi-lingual TV network New Tang Dynasty. The station is now putting on its third global Chinese New Year show. The show has an English-speaking co-host and classic Western singing and dancing performances. Many performances in show, however, also have the express purpose of presenting, "the essence of traditional Chinese culture in a variety of artistic forms"—so naturally Tsuai wanted to be a part of it.
Although she has been retired for a year now, Tsuai is making every effort to contribute to the 2006 Chinese New Year show. This year she is composing a key dance number. Tsuai said she has learned a lot from working intensely with other Chinese people.
"Before when I did Chinese dance I didn't know if it was authentic or not," said Tsuai, "now I'm aware of it."
She also admitted, "My English is getting worse and my Chinese is getting better."
Tsuai now lives happily with her husband in Queens, New York, and often takes care of her two granddaughters.
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