by Chan Hon Goh
For my parents, Choo Chiat and Lin Yee,
my constant source of strength and love.
– Chan Hon Goh
With Aleksandra Antonijevic in “Diamonds” from George Balanchine’s Jewels.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Dancing for a Queen
CHAPTER 1 Bears Are Shaking my Bed
CHAPTER 2 Dancing for the Revolution
CHAPTER 3 Big Red
CHAPTER 4 Slow Bird
CHAPTER 5 If You Want to Be a Dancer
CHAPTER 6 The Prix
CHAPTER 7 The World Upside Down
CHAPTER 8 Turning Pro
Photo Gallery
CHAPTER 9 One of the Corps
CHAPTER 10 On the Rise
CHAPTER 11 More Challenges
CHAPTER 12 Reaching for New Heights
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
My debut as the Swan Queen, Odette, with Robert Tewsley in Erik Bruhn’s production of Swan Lake (with the Royal Danish Ballet, I danced the Peter Martins version).
PROLOGUE
DANCING FOR A QUEEN
The Royal Danish Ballet is one of the greatest companies of the world. So naturally I was thrilled to be asked to dance with them as a guest artist during the 250th anniversary year of The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.
The ballet was Swan Lake, which is not only the most popular ballet of all time but also one of the most difficult and exhausting for any ballerina to perform. At the National Ballet of Canada, I had just ended our own tiring season and had only seven days to prepare, with a partner – Johan Kobborg – who was to make his debut as Prince Siegfried. I arrived in Copenhagen on a chilly March day and began unpacking my things in the hotel room. Instead of happy expectation, I was feeling strangely low, and as I took out each item I felt a little more lonely, a little more homesick, a little more anxious. I was twenty-eight years old and married, but I felt almost like a child again, sure that I would not be liked, that I would not fit in. I had to tell myself You have been a principal dancer for four years. You’ve just danced Romeo and Juliet to critical acclaim. You are going to dance well. They are going to like you.
The principal ballerina in Swan Lake must perform two roles – the beautiful White Swan, named Odette, and the dangerous temptress Odile, the Black Swan. In the rehearsal studio, the company’s associate director helped teach me the steps, for this Swan Lake was the version choreographed by Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet, and it was different from the ones I had danced before. So much more of it had to be danced up on pointe that my toes became badly blistered from practicing. Johan was a new partner for me – a dancer needs to absolutely trust her partner – and we did not meet until the first day of rehearsal. So although the rehearsals were going well enough, I could not help feeling tremendous anxiety. One morning, having breakfast alone in the hotel and looking at the happy couples and families around me, again I felt overwhelmed with loneliness and the childlike desire to be protected by my parents who were thousands of miles away, back in Vancouver. Leaving my breakfast, I hurried back to my room and started to cry. I cried for a good long while, and when I felt better I picked up my bag and headed to the theater for morning class.
The night of the first performance arrived. Waiting for my first entrance, I stood in the wings of the theater, jumping up and down to keep warm so that my muscles would not seize up. The first entrance in Swan Lake is the hardest – the ballerina has to “emerge” from the lake, expressing her enchanted swan form through the interpretation of the steps. I heard my music, and saw Johan already on stage and deeply into the role, and I knew it would be all right.
And it was all right, at least until the third act. Then came the infamous moment when, as the Black Swan Odile, I had to execute the thirty-two fouettés. A fouetté is a very quick spin in which the working leg whips around to create momentum as the supporting foot moves onto pointe for the turn, then down flat, and onto pointe again. Fouettés are done repeatedly, keeping the dancer whirling on the spot. I had to perform this bravura display after already being fatigued from the previous variation. I began the fouettés on the unfamiliar stage, and they were going well enough for me to throw in some “doubles” for show, when my foot hit a ridge on the stage floor, possibly the edge of a trap door used for operas. Almost losing my rhythm, I was filled with sudden terror. Yet I still had twenty more turns to go.
Backstage with Johan Kobborg, Johnny Eliasen (coach), and Maina Gielgud (artistic director).
Calm down, calm down.
I managed to rescue the fouettés and get through the rest of the ballet, although I feared that I wouldn’t. The only other glitch occurred when I was supposed to turn and meet the prince face to face, only to discover that he was way upstage. I literally had to bolt to reach him in time. What gave me strength to the end was looking in Johan’s eyes and seeing how much emotion he felt as the prince, making my Odette and Odile come alive. I myself was learning the deeper truth that great dance was not simply about doing the steps perfectly.
The experience of appearing at the Royal Danish Ballet, which had frightened me so much at the start, turned out to be one of the highlights of my career. The reviews in the Danish newspapers were wonderful and with each performance my confidence grew. To my delight, the Queen of Denmark came to the last show. On that night my only problem was remembering to bow first to the Queen’s box during the curtain calls. Beside me, Johan kept having to remind me by whispering in my ear.
As Cinderella en route to the Royal Ball. The fairy tales my father told me would eventually come true.
CHAPTER 1
BEARS ARE SHAKING MY BED
The bears were all around the bed, standing in their hunched-over, hulking way. And with their great paws they were shaking the bed, and me in it. Shaking, shaking. But I wasn’t afraid, because I felt in their soft bear faces and their warm breath and their dark eyes that they didn’t mean me any harm. …
“Da Hong, get up! We have to get out of here!” My mother’s voice. How reluctantly I opened my eyes, making the bears disappear. Now my mother leaned over me looking frantic. Somehow the bed was still shaking. What time was it? Outside, it was still dark, not yet time for my grade-one class, so why was my mother bothering me?
“Da Hong, it’s an earthquake, we’ve got to hurry.”
I got out of bed and let her lead me to the stairs where a stream of people, the neighbors in our building, were already moving down. Everyone was still wearing pajamas, blinking away sleep, faces pale and fearful. The pain of missing my father came back to me. He was so far away, on the other side of the world, and so he could not help us. I tried to distract myself by imagining what Daddy was doing now, in his new strange country called Canada. But I couldn’t picture anything.
Age six, with my one and only doll, a rare toy.
We had said good-bye to my father a few months before. It was winter and he wore his heavy coat and wool scarf as he stood on the tarmac beside the stairs up to the airplane. He gave me a hug, and told me to be good in every way and that he would see me soon. But I knew that my mother and I hadn’t received permission to leave China. I watched him walk up the stairs and go through the airplane door, and then there he was at the little window waving to us. I was seven years old and, strangely enough, I didn’t cry but felt a terrible emptiness inside me.
While I was close to both my parents, I had always felt a special bond with my father. Maybe it was because my mother had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t participate in games or carry me because of the pain. It was Dad who got down on his hands and knees to play. Because he had lived in Singapore and even London, England, he had a knowledge of Western ways that was very rare in China, and he sometimes fixed my
hair like the stars in American and British movies he had seen. The lady who opened the gates of our apartment complex and the other residents there would say jokingly, “Oh, she looks like a little foreign girl.” At other times he would tell me fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, although he sometimes got the stories mixed up because such tales had become forbidden in China and he hadn’t heard them in years. Still, it made me feel special to know that my father had been to the West.
Age six, having just seen the musical The Red Lantern.
My mother and I returned from the airport to our apartment in the city. Inside, everything was the same – the furniture, the cups and dishes on the table – but everything was different. Now I felt like crying but I knew that it would upset my mother even more, so I managed to stop myself.
The next day my father phoned from Hong Kong where he was staying with a cousin before going on to Canada. Nobody in the apartment complex had a private phone – in China we had almost no private luxuries – so we had to use the one in the reception room. And right there in that place where other residents were coming and going my mother and I started to cry for the first time.
The winter before the earthquake, me, my maternal grandmother Lau Lau, and my cousin Ping.
The earthquake of July 28, 1976, had a magnitude of 8.2 and was the deadliest of the century. Most of the people killed lived in or near Tianjin, on the eastern coast, at the center of the earthquake. Still, in Beijing there was much damage and many buildings were no longer safe, including the complex where my family lived with the other dancers of the Central Ballet of China. We had to sleep in a tent in one of the public parks. For a washroom we had to use an outhouse that was dirty and crawling with insects. How I hated to go in there! After a couple of weeks, my grandmother decided it would be better for us to move to the yard next to her house.
Months later, we returned to our apartment. My mother and I had become closer now that we were alone, and we shared the common hope of leaving China to see my father again. She told me not to talk with the other kids in school about missing him or leaving China, in case they became resentful or considered me anti-Chinese. So I kept my empty feeling – my deep well of loneliness – to myself. Oddly, this feeling sometimes comes back to me even now, so many years later, when I am on tour and far away from the securities of home. Alone in a strange hotel room, unsure of what to expect from the theater or the audience – or even my fellow dancers if I am making a guest performance – I feel anxious and fearful. It is then that my childhood emotions flood back and for a moment I feel like that small girl again, pining for her father.
In 1999, I was a special guest with the National Ballet of China on its fortieth anniversary. The Revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women was performed in excerpt.
CHAPTER 2
DANCING FOR THE REVOLUTION
Our family is from China. My mother, Lin Yee, was born and raised in Beijing. But my father, Choo Chiat Goh, grew up on the island of Singapore, the fortunate son of a successful businessman and factory owner. He also grew up in a most unusual family structure, for my father had not one but two mothers. As a young man his father (my grandfather) fell in love with a Malaysian woman and married her in a secret and unofficial ceremony. They had one child before my grandfather’s family pressured him into marrying a Chinese woman. He did so, but after the wedding he told his new wife about the first, and that his Malaysian wife would be living with them. And so they all made a life together in remarkable harmony. My father, the fifth of the nine children my grandfather’s second wife had, was close not only to his birth mother but to his other mother as well, who took him under her wing and with whom he had a special bond.
That my father wanted to be an artist – of all things, a ballet dancer – was shocking to my grandfather, who considered a career in the arts far too insecure and only for people who weren’t smart enough to go into business. But Choo Chiat had seen the ballet movie The Red Shoes and was so passionate and insistent that his father gave in and let him study dance, first in Singapore and then, while still very young, at the famous Royal Ballet School in London, England. My father’s older sister Soo Nee was already studying there, so he had someone to keep an eye on him.
Naturally talented and totally devoted to his art, my father impressed Harold Turner of the Royal Ballet School and later Nadine Legat, his well-known teachers in London. At sixteen, he was invited to turn professional and join the celebrated London Festival Ballet. But my father, subjecting himself to the highest standards, felt that he wasn’t ready. He had read in the newspapers that the Soviet Union was sending the great ballet master, Pyotr Gusiev (who was also the teacher of the young Rudolf Nureyev), to teach in Beijing. In London, Father had been impressed by the Russian dance companies most of all and he immediately decided to go to China so that he might study with Gusiev. And there was something else drawing him too: a longing to see the country of his ancestors.
Choo Chiat returned from London to Singapore to speak with his parents about the idea. Go to China! His parents were aghast. China had a hard-line Communist government headed by Chairman Mao Zedong. People in China, his father said, did not have enough to eat, or decent clothes to wear. Besides, they did not have the same freedoms that people in the West had. To make matters worse, if Choo Chiat did not return from China within two years, the government of Singapore would revoke his citizenship. But father did not care. All he knew was that he wanted to study with Pyotr Gusiev and become a great dancer.
And so he went. At the Beijing Dance Academy father excelled, graduating at the top of his class. He was offered a place in the Central Ballet of China (now known as the National Ballet of China), one of the country’s two major dance companies, and almost immediately he was named a principal dancer. He met another dancer in the company, Lin Yee, and they fell in love and were married. The eldest of four children, Lin Yee had been picked to join the Beijing Dance Academy at about the age of eleven. Her father had been a bank executive, while her grandfather had been a well-known Chinese painter (almost all of his art was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution). Lin Yee also had a Russian teacher in China, and rose to become a principal dancer at the Central Ballet, until her arthritis forced her to retire early and begin a new career as a teacher.
My parents before the Cultural Revolution, dancing the leads in The Fountain of Bakchisarai as partners for the first time.
And so my parents made a good life for themselves in Beijing. The government provided for all the members of the dance company, giving them an apartment, medical care, and everything else they needed. They didn’t have material wealth, but at least they had security and could concentrate on their careers. Father became famous as a principal dancer and he loved performing in the great ballets – Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, La Fille Mal Gardée. Even Chairman Mao himself came to see the Central Ballet.
Dad and Mom in costume for one of the Revolutionary ballets.
And then came upheaval, not just for the Central Ballet but for the whole country. In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a movement that sought to make China’s Communist society more “pure.” Professors, engineers, managers, scholars, scientists, and even artists, musicians, and writers had their jobs and sometimes their homes taken way. Older customs and cultures, and any Western influence were also considered harmful and had to be eradicated. Young people, calling themselves the Red Guards, were encouraged to attack their own teachers and to destroy ancient and beautiful monuments, shrines, and statues. Soon the Cultural Revolution grew out of control. Many were falsely accused and countless millions of people suffered. Farming and industry declined and, in the countryside, people starved.
My father feared for himself and Lin Yee. Any Western influence was now considered corrupting – he was from a Westernized country, Singapore, and had even lived in “decadent” London. He was not the son of a peasant or a worker or a soldier – the heroes of the Revolution – but of an “evil”
capitalist businessman. But fortunately, my parents escaped being personally persecuted. Instead, they merely suffered with all the other dancers as the quality of life declined and it became forbidden to perform the great Western ballets.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a former movie actress, took charge of China’s culture. She banned the entire repertoire of Western ballet, permitting only new ballets that celebrated the Chinese Revolution. These ballets could not be love stories, as so many of the old Western ballets were, with their beautiful pas de deux that express love and passion between a man and woman. Instead they had to be stories that showed Chinese peasants, workers, and soldiers as heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for the country. Nor could the style of dance be romantic or lyrical; it had to be harsh and bold, showing the strength of the Chinese people. Leotards and tights were too revealing and could no longer be worn.
The best known of these new ballets were The White Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women. As a principal dancer, my father not only performed in them, but played the leading male roles so that his fame as a dancer continued. But after years of perfecting his refined artistry, he found the harsh, folkloric movements demanded by these parts hard to adapt to. Nor could he, the son of a businessman, feel much relationship to the stories they told. For the next years he and my mother had to perform the same parts over and over and over again, not only in theaters but in factories and villages, on makeshift outdoor stages, in freezing weather. Instead of growing as an artist, my father felt himself shriveling inside. His dream of being a real artist of dance seemed to be over.
