New York City, December 2008.

                                                                    

                                                   Blue;                      -eared

"The hair was          The eyes were            AlyRose apear-            on stage at NYU!"

                  Red;

She wore black; I wore the uniquely vacuous facial expression of the male of my species in desirous longing. And she was a dancer for godssake—No, not that kind of dancer you capitalist roader, sexist, capital P, capital I, capital G—but still there’s a litheness of body, a flexibility of the limbs that threw me into paroxysms of desire and produced unwanted thoughts of ideologically perverse acts.

Then she spoke.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what this American girl can possibly say about China that would be interesting.”

I SWEAR ON MAO ZEDONG’S MAUSOLEUM SHE SAID THAT.

Ms. Rose studied dance in China and teaches contemporary Chinese dance at the Tisch School of the Arts. According to my notes she explained that, by contrast with the decadent Western variety, Chinese dance has “little focus on romantic love, it’s replaced by love for Mao.” My notes reflect that the audience laughed at this and that Aly followed up by saying, “Well, that’s okay. You can get more done.”

Romantic-love-replaced-by love-for-Mao-but-that’s-okay-you-can-get-more-done.

Oh well. Another crush bites the dust.

On the same theme, later in her talk, “Romantic love a no-no.”

A “no-no?”  Are we twelve?

By this point I was wondering what this American girl could possibly say about China that would be interesting.

I have two memories of Ms. Rose besides those recorded in my notes.  One is that despite romantic love being a no-no in her life’s work she nonetheless punctuated her remarks with some dance…moves, if that’s the right term, and it probably isn’t, which seemed to me to be consciously sensuous in intent, and which did in fact produce that result in at least one member of the audience of the male persuasion. 

The second is that she also punctuated her remarks with Chinese, and this was clearly conscious (It is like when I sprinkle my English with Spanish: too “show-offy.”). There were at least two other native Chinese speakers on this panel, Li Onesto and Bai Di, neither of whom said a word in Chinese.

One of the things I had not remembered but that is in my notes is that Ms. Rose said near the end of her presentation that Chinese dance “presented a united front of the Han and minority peoples in adoration of Mao.”

I have just begun to write about the soul of China. There is no doubt that unity and related concepts are very important parts of the Chinese soul. China is also 92% ethnic Han. That is a very big number. By comparison the dominant ethnicity in America is “non-Hispanic white,” at (from memory) about 60%. To what extent is Chinese unity, Chinese survival—the soul of China—ethnic survival?