Photo: Safeed Rahbaran/New York Times via the Las Vegas Sun.
“George Lee at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, on Jan. 16, 2024. Lee was the original Tea in ‘George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,’ ” says the New York Times. “A documentary filmmaker found him and a lost part of ballet history in Las Vegas.”
Several of my good friends from college are Chinese. I don’t know if I am stereotyping my friends, but having come from a throughly impractical family, I was impressed at once with what seemed to me a startling level of practicality. Practicality about what kinds of courses to take for what kind of well-paying jobs; even practicality about potential marriage partners.
So one of the things that struck me about the mother in today’s lovely story was the way she helped her son earn rice during the Japanese occupation of China and her advice to him when they headed to America.
Siobhan Burke reports at the New York Times, “Among the blaring lights and all-hours amusements of downtown Las Vegas, in a sea of slot machines at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, George Lee sits quietly at a blackjack table, dealing cards eight hours a day, five days a week, a job he’s been doing for more than 40 years.
“Lee, 88, was likely in his usual spot when the filmmaker Jennifer Lin was sifting through old photos at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2022, wondering what had become of a dancer with a notable place in ballet history. Pictured in a publicity shot for the original production of ‘George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,’ in the role known as Tea, was a young Asian dancer identified as George Li.
“For Lin, a veteran newspaper reporter turned documentarian, the picture raised intriguing questions. In 1954, when the photo was taken, it was rare to see dancers of color on the stage of New York City Ballet, the company Balanchine co-founded. Who was this young man, this breaker of racial barriers, this pioneer? Was he still alive? And if so, what was he up to?
“ ‘I became absolutely obsessed with trying to find out what happened to George Li,’ Lin said in a video interview.
“In just over a year, that obsession has blossomed into a short film, Ten Times Better, that chronicles the unexpected story of Lee’s life: from his childhood in 1940s Shanghai, where his performing career began; to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where he fled with his mother, a Polish ballet dancer, in 1949; to New York City and the School of American Ballet, where Balanchine cast him in ‘The Nutcracker’; to Flower Drum Song on Broadway, his first of many musical theater gigs; and ultimately, to Las Vegas, where he left dance for blackjack dealing in 1980. (He changed the spelling of his last name in 1959, when he became a United States citizen.) …
“ ‘So many years I haven’t done ballet,’ Lee said over coffee at the Four Queens on a recent Sunday, after his shift. ‘And then suddenly Jennifer comes and tries to bring everything up.’ …
“Lin was not the only one who had been searching for Lee. In 2017, while organizing an exhibition on ‘The Nutcracker,’ Arlene Yu, who worked for the New York Public Library at the time and is now Lincoln Center’s head archivist, was puzzled by the relatively few traces of him in the library’s vast dance collection. ‘Whereas if you look at some of his peers in ‘The Nutcracker’ in 1954, they went on to careers where there was a lot more documentation.’ …
“Lee, in his heyday, was a dancer to know. At just 12, he was already winning public praise. In a preview of a recital of the King-Yanover School in Shanghai, the North China Daily News called him an ‘extremely promising young Chinese boy, whose technique is of a very high standard.’ A reviewer wrote that he ‘already may be said to be the best Chinese interpreter of Western ballet.’ (Lee saved these newspaper clippings and shared them with Lin.) …
“Lee’s mother, Stanislawa Lee, who had danced with the Warsaw Opera, was his first ballet teacher; as a child, he would follow along with her daily barre exercises. Shanghai had a significant Russian population, and with that a robust ballet scene. To earn money, Stanislawa arranged for her son to perform in nightclubs — ‘like a polka dance, or Russian dance, or sailor dance,’ Lee said. The clubs would pay them in rice. …
“In 1951, an American friend of Lee’s father sponsored them to come to New York, where he introduced Lee to the School of American Ballet, City Ballet’s affiliated school. As Lee narrates these twists and turns in the film, one memory anchors his recollections. Before they immigrated, his mother issued a warning. ‘You are going to America, it’s all white people, and you better be 10 times better,’ he recalls her saying. ‘Remember that: 10 times better!’
“The footage of Lee in his 20s suggests he took that advice to heart. In television appearances — with the company of the ballet star André Eglevsky, and in a number from Flower Drum Song on the Ed Sullivan Show — his power and precision dazzle.
“ ‘He was good; he was really good,’ [Phil Chan, cofounder of Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative focused on ending offensive depictions of Asians in ballet] said. ‘Clean fifth, high jump, polished turns, stick the landing — the training is all there. He’s already 10 times better than everybody else.’ …
“In a 1979 interview heard in the film, the former City Ballet soloist Richard Thomas, who took over the role of Tea, raves about Lee’s peerless acrobatic jumps: ‘He was wonderful! Balanchine choreographed a variation for him that none of us have ever been able to equal.’
“As Lee remembers it … the City Ballet makeup artist put him in full yellowface, and Balanchine insisted he take off the makeup. ‘He is Asian enough! Why do you make him more?’ he remembers Balanchine saying. Lee was costumed in the Fu Manchu mustache, queue ponytail and rice paddy hat often associated with the role, now widely critiqued as racist caricatures. But he said he didn’t take offense. ‘Dancing is dancing,’ he said. …
“He pieced together jobs for more than 20 years, often unsure of what would come next. He was dancing in a Vegas revue, ‘Alcazar de Paris,’ now in his 40s, when a blackjack dealer friend suggested he go to dealer school. ‘I can’t dance all my life,’ he remembers thinking.” More at the Times, here.
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