The impressive life of New York City Ballet’s first Asian male dancer

But how do you track down the right “George Lee” when it’s such a common name? It took Ancestry.com and newspaper searches to lead Lin to his naturalization papers (in which his last name was anglicized from Li), an obituary of dancer Stanislawa Lee, a quote about a surviving son living in Las Vegas, and five possible phone numbers. When Lin’s voice message reached Lee in Las Vegas in December 2022, he was so shocked that a friend suspected Lin was a scammer. But then the friend’s son Googled Lin’s filmmaking profile to ascertain that she was legit. And Lee allowed Lin to interview him. The film’s title is based on a mantra his mother instilled in him: “You are going to America, it’s all white people, and you better be 10 times better.” He’s fond of repeating his story to me. The film premiered at the Lincoln Center on Lee’s 89th birthday, Feb. 10, with pending dates for festival screenings and a public broadcast.

Young George Lee performing in Shanghai.

Courtesy of the George Lee personal collection

Lee was born in Hong Kong in 1935 to a Chinese acrobat father (who died tragically in a truck accident when he was young) and a Polish ballerina mother, Stanislawa Lee, and was raised in a Russian- and Polish-speaking household (the panel moderator emphasizes, as trivia, that Lee is not a Chinese speaker). They moved to Shanghai in 1941 to live within its Russian diasporic communities. His mother, a semi-solo dancer for the Warsaw Opera, was his “greatest critic,” Lee says with love. She taught him ballet privately, while Shanghai ballet classes also trained him to pirouette among adult Russian students. Lee would earn rice by performing ballet, polkas, and sailor dances at Russian-owned nightclubs. Later in 1949, he and his mother fled the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalist Chinese and the Communists. What was supposed to be a four-month stay in the Philippines’ Tubabao Refugee Camp, turned into two years. One of the reasons for their extended stay was that Lee was ineligible to immigrate to Australia since “those days they wouldn’t like [Chinese] Asians,” Lee says in the film, likely referring to the country’s federal White Australia Policy at the time that barred Chinese immigrants from entry. A dancer friend of his late father eventually sponsored them to come to the United States, where Lee received a scholarship for the School of American Ballet (SAB) in New York and was the only Asian face among white dancers.

In 1954, George Balanchine, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, cast Lee as Tea, a Nutcracker role historically associated with Asian stereotypes and white dancers in yellowface, as documented in Chan’s book Final Bow for Yellowface. A modern viewer—especially an Asian dancer—would likely wince at the black-and-white photo of Lee mid-split-leap, with orientalist ornamentation: Fu Manchu mustache, queue hairstyle, and conical hat. But to Lee, the role was a job.

George Lee performing in New York City in the 1950s.

Courtesy of the George Lee personal collection

Younger generations would likely be more inclined to directly critique the representational politics of the dancing industry, but Lee navigated the era-specific barriers to the best of his abilities. During the panel discussion, one Asian audience member—decades younger than Lee—asked if Lee had proactively approached Balanchine for the Tea role commenting, “Sometimes we self-eliminate. We, as a minority, as Chinese, we’re not aggressive enough [to ask for the roles we want].” In this case, Balanchine noticed Lee’s talents within SAB and Lee performed what was asked of him. And as Lee explained to the audience member, “Balanchine mostly likes [to cast] the girls with the long legs, and me, no place for me [a short male dancer in New York City Ballet] yet. That was it.” Yu followed up on this comment by alluding to the general disenfranchisement of Asians in American ballet spaces. “I know that there have been [Asian] women who have struggled–even now–to become accepted in ballet [against white-dominated institutions]. So there would be issues with [Asian] men getting in as well,” she explained.

While Lee didn’t become a dancer in the New York City Ballet after Nutcracker—on the apparent account of being a “short shrimp”—another historical part materialized for him when the legendary choreographer-dancer Gene Kelly persuaded him to learn something new: jazzy, Broadway-style dancing. So Lee auditioned and joined the original 1958 Broadway cast of Rodger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, a Kelly-directed watershed musical that explored Chinese American assimilation (many today know the musical through its 1961 film adaptation). You can spot Lee as one of the springy dapper-suited dancers pulling off his double tours in the Ed Sullivan show clips.