The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 151 - Jennifer Lin talks about her film Ten Times Better

JOHN

Today we welcome back to the Musical Innertube a friend of the podcast, Jennifer Lin. She was a very accomplished correspondent and reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 31 years, and her postings there included Beijing, New York, and Washington DC. These days Jennifer is an author and a filmmaker, and she's here today to talk about her latest documentary, titled Ten Times Better. It's about George Lee, who became the first Asian dancer on Broadway, and almost everywhere else he went, a child dance prodigy who grew up poor in Shanghai, a refugee fleeing war. George was selected as a teenager by George Balanchine to dance in his original staging of The Nutcracker, and he was recognized by no less than Gene Kelly, who cast him in the original production of Flower Drum Song. Jennifer has been showing Ten Times Better to audiences all over the country, so let's find out what people think about George and his wonderful story. Welcome back Jennifer!

JENNIFER

 Well, thanks John and Don for having me back!

 DON

Great to have you!

JOHN

It really is, and exciting too! Watching the movie, I'm reminded  - because I got a chance to see a slightly different version, as Don did, 6 months ago - I'm reminded of the personality of George, that he is bigger than life still today at 89. Such an amazing story of course almost tells itself once you have all the visuals in place. Did you find that too, that his personality is part of what really makes this movie go?

 JENNIFER

 Absolutely, that's the thing that really draws people in. It's not only that he had this amazing journey as a dancer, but people just really respond well to George himself. He's endearing. My producing partner Jon Funabiki, this is his first movie that he's been involved in, and I told John, I said, "John, you know we caught a unicorn here!" I mean, it's just such a perfect little tale, and so, again, it's not only what George did is a dancer, but the fact that he's such a humble person, and he's just very kind of happy with - you know, he's not bitter and I think that really comes through.

 JOHN

 I mean he could have been better couldn't he? He does he does acknowledge that many of the places that he went wouldn't deal with Asians. Many times he he'd gone Broadway, and of course, like everybody else does, he auditions and auditions and auditions and they would keep him until the very end, and finally say something like, well, you're too short. And the typecasting, he does acknowledge that that sometimes hurt, but you're right, the bitterness, he's left that behind if he ever had it. I don't think looking at yours, the happy-go-luckiness, I don't think he was ever bitter.

 JENNIFER

 Yeah, and I think one of the messages that comes through, one of the themes, is resilience, and how that has served him well in life too. So, yeah, I mean, you know, we're taking it on the road now, the movie, and we're starting to show it mostly at film festivals, but it's so interesting to hear people's responses. So, we had a a screening in Las Vegas in May, which is George's hometown, and in the beautiful Beverly Theater, which is a brand new art house in the arts district of Las Vegas, and you know one of the people who came to the screening was the CEO of Wynn Casino. And he came with his wife, and you know they supported the film, and catered the event, and afterwards you know this this CEO, his name is Craig Billings, he talked to George, and he told George, he goes, "You know, I grew up in Vegas," he said, "I'm the only son of a single mom, and your story and the resilience that you showed in your life really resonated with me." So, I think it hits people in a lot of different levels. For Asian-Americans, of course, it resonates because it's really lost history that we've excavated here. But then again it's just George and his resiliency and his kind of positive outlook on life that I think also has an effect on audiences.

DON

 It's interesting too, because, if you just listen to that cursory summary of George's life, you would think maybe, and again it's stereotyping, but people have the idea of the "dragon mom."  But it's interesting because George's mom was Polish!

 JENNIFER

 Right!

 DON

His father was Chinese. But the Polish mother - and I was married to a Polish woman for a number of years, or a woman of Polish descent, and I will say that the Polish are equally able to be "dragon moms." But he had a very good relationship with his mother, and a lot of what he did was to please his mother and make her happy. On the other hand, she really put him in through the drills of being a good dancer and he really, really paid off at the end with that.

 JENNIFER

 She was the quintessential "Dance Mom-slash-Tiger Mom," and that's the type of overbearing person that you could as a child grow up to resent. But to the opposite, you know, George, in the film he kind of tears up when he when he recalls his mother, and I think that's a really poignant moment of the film. For George and his mother, it wasn't just dance because dance was a beautiful art form and she was good at it and he was good at it - no, it was survival. When they were in Shanghai he was just a boy and she had him dancing at nightclubs. They were paid sometimes during the War years in rice. When they got to New York it was very much about survival, and his turn to Broadway came after disappointment in ballet, not getting hired by the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, but he turned to Broadway because they needed to have a paycheck. And so that it was so lucky for him that just as he was searching for work, Rogers and Hammerstein were also searching for dancers and actors for Flower Drum Song which was like full employment for 3 years plus for George. So, again, like, there was, you know, he he and Mom were very close, and dance was a way for them to survive, and there's no bitterness. George just feels nothing but admiration for his mother for pushing him and that's what I tell my daughter, Don, the reason I push her, the reason I was a "tiger mom" was just for her to do well

 JOHN

It's good to mention, because of course one of the main things is that George looks Asian is Asian who talks about looking different from everybody else. He knew that when he was walking around those one place where he said oh no coloreds, well of course I can't go in there cuz I'm colored. And the other side of him, though, is pretty European. He's got that injection of the great Russian tradition. And he even says that, he says my training, my way of thinking about dancing, was the Russian way, where you have to do everything perfect, no excuses. And his mother was quite a teacher - every time she saw him slightly slumped over his cereal she would slap him or something, give him a tap on the shoulder in no unmistakable fashion. He is a mixture, which he does acknowledge also, is that, you know,  he had the Russian part and he learned English and of course the Chinese part.

JENNIFER

 Well, you know, a very interesting point, John, that didn't come out in the movie but came out in our conversations with George is that he grew up in Shanghai in the 1930s-1940s, and Shanghai back then was a very international city, and his mother was very close with a lot of the Eastern Europeans, the Russians, they lived in the old French concession of Shanghai. And his mother observed how the Europeans treated the native Chinese, and not with a lot of respect, and so when they were in the refugee camp heading to New York City, George's mother had a very, you know, frank conversation with him, saying, "George, all they're going to see is your face," and George looks very Chinese, and she said, "They're going to treat you like a Chinese person, so that's why you have to be ten times better, because you're going to white America, and they treat people of color differently." That's a very relevant topic these days. But he was mixed race, and, you know, he did know that when he got to the United States people would just see him as a Chinese man, and his mother, his Polish mother, taught him that lesson from a very young age. So I have to believe that Shanghai had something to do with it.

DON

Yeah. The international mixture in Shanghai. How did you come upon Georgia's story in the beginning in order to tell it? How did you get introduced to George and that remarkable story?

JENNIFER

 I discovered George in the library.

 DON

 Okay.

 JENNIFER

 I was doing my research at the New York Public Library on The Nutcracker. I wanted to see  what I could learn about the New York City Ballet's premiere. That's really the gold standard Nutcracker in America, and that came out in 1954, the genius George Balanchine choreographed it. So I was looking at the files, Don, and I saw the publicity photos and there was this picture of a young Chinese man doing the t-roll, and I was looking at it, and I was like, who is this? And I didn't realize that in 1954 the New York City Ballet had any dancers of color, so I just became intrigued by this dancer named George Lee. I remember precisely when this was - it was November, 2022, and in fact I was waiting to go see The Nutcracker with my daughter across Lincoln Center and so I had a few hours to kill and I was at the New York Public Library. So, I was like, who is George Lee, and why don't I know about him? I've been a reporter my whole life, so I just put on my reporters hat and I said, why, I need to talk to him, because I couldn't find any other records on him, and no evidence that he ever appeared again with the New York City Ballet. And he had gotten rave reviews for his performance in The Nutcracker, so it took me about 5 weeks but I finally tracked him down.  This is a story in and of itself, but, you know, I I kind of hit a dead end trying to find him because George Lee is a very common name, and you know there are a lot of George Lees in the world, and I just couldn't find him. So, Phil Chan, who is an Asian American dance producer in New York City, he introduced me to a woman named Arlene Yu, and Arlene used to work at the New York Public Library, and she too was looking for George Lee for the same reason I was - like, who was this man who was dancing for Balanchine back in the 1950s? So we exchanged emails and I shared with her everything I knew and she shared with me everything she knew. And again, Don, I had hit a dead end in trying to track down George Lee. But she gave me the key to unlock the mystery, She sent me a one sentence brief that had been in Variety newspaper that she had found, and it said simply that George Lee -  it was from 1959 - and it said George Lee became a US citizen today. And so it's like, aha, so he was an immigrant! So with that I was able to track down his naturalization papers on Ancestry.com, and it gave me his date of birth and it also said that on this day that he became a US citizen he changed his name from L-I to L-E-E. So I went back to Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com, I found the ship manifest when he came to the United States by boat in 1951, and on it it mentions how George was 15, and he was traveling with his mother, Stanislava Li, which is a very unusual name. And so I put that into Newspapers.com and I found her obituary, and it says she's survived by one son, George, who lives in Las Vegas. So, you know, I used one of those websites called Truthfinder.com, you know, I took out a trial subscription for a week, and I plugged in his name in Las Vegas, came up with five phone numbers. The first four that I called, I got "this number is no longer in service." The fifth number I put in and I got, you know, "please leave a message." So I left a rambling message saying, "I'm a filmmaker from Philadelphia, I'm looking for George Lee, George Lee the ballet dancer, he danced for George Balanchine in The Nutcracker, yada yada yada yada." And soon after, I got a phone call from this man who said, "I'm George Lee," and I said, "George Lee the ballet dancer?" And he goes, "Yes, George Lee the ballet dancer." He goes, "Why are you looking for me? I'm nobody."

 DON

 Ahh...

 JENNIFER

 And, Don, that just resonated with me, because, you know, he told me his life story and after I hung up the phone, I called my producing partner Jon Funabiki, I said, "We have got to do a story about this man! It is an unbelievable epic tale, and he also has a great story to tell about ballet and Broadway!"

So if you'll indulge me for a minute here, fast forward to February. We had our premiere at Film at Lincoln Center, and the New York Times, a week before the premiere, did a profile of us and George and the making of the film, and they ran it on a Sunday - not a bad time to run in the New York Times - and so, that Wednesday, the New York Public Library and a group in New York called Works in Process, which does programming around dance,

they held a special event for us, where we could talk about using the archives to tell our story, and how we found George at the at the library, and basically how we built this documentary, because we did rely on the New York Public Library for a lot of photos and vintage footage.

And Works in Process flew George out to New York - it was the first time he had been in New York City since 1993 - so now the man who told me when I first reached out to me "I'm nobody" -  I have to tell you that Wednesday at the event at the New York Public Library, because of the New York Times, the 200 seat Auditorium was filled, so much so that they had, you know, auxiliary seating in the lobby for another 40 people. And in the audience was the president of the New York City Ballet, the artistic director of the New York City Ballet, and the head of the school of American Ballet. And when George, this "nobody," when he walked out on stage, they didn't even say his name and everyone stood up and applauded.

DON

Wow!

JENNIFER

And to me, that's been like the most memorable moment of this whole Incredible journey. Like, George got his due. And the New York City Ballet invited him to a production, and had him backstage so he could stand on the magnificent stage there at Lincoln Center.

And the School of American Ballet invited him to come to the school, and we went, we observed a class being taught, and George got his picture taken, and, you know, the New York Public Library did an oral history of George. So, it's just been such an amazing journey for me as a journalist, this, you know, I've never really experienced anything like this, so it's been remarkable. And, you know, George's is getting his due. This is long overdue but people are now realizing he was a pioneer, he did contribute something, he was a first, so it's been really wonderful.

JOHN

Well, your story shows us that you still have journalist chops and that you use them exactly the right way. People who don't have your experience, I think, as a journalist might have been at loose ends, but you followed it on the merest of trails, that's just great. I'm wondering...

DON (interrupting)

I also think that probably, I mean, there may be a job waiting for you on Finding Your Roots, on that PBS show, because you did a heck of a job there.

JENNIFER

Yeah, right! Or I should get hired by Ancestry.com, because I really did rely on them to track him down. It's a remarkable resource.

JOHN

What are you finding on the cinematic trail as you show this movie around in different communities? What are people, what questions are they asking, what are they telling you?

JENNIFER

It's been really interesting. We've screened the film now in Las Vegas, L.A., San Francisco We're going back to L.A. in September. We're also going back to San Francisco, we're doing a special screening, too, with the Oakland Ballet - one of our advisors is the head of the Oakland Ballet, so they're doing a screening for us. What I'm finding is, just the overwhelmingly positive response of audiences to George and his story. And George is really, you know, a man of few words, sometimes. When he's before a big audience like that, I mean, I think he's kind of still overwhelmed by the reaction. But, you know, I've done quite a few private screenings with, like, affinity groups at corporations - these are known as employee resource groups - and those have been very interesting, because a lot of people who I've spoken to are Asian-Americans. The whole messaging of having to be ten times better really resonates with a lot of immigrant groups, not just Asian Americans, but, frankly, you know, to be honest with you, I think it's a message that resonates with just a lot of people. Women have felt that need to be ten times better. And so, I think people respond to the messaging of the film. And they're also taken by George and his clear closeness, still, to his mother, and how she really shaped who he is. And I think people, a lot of people, relate to that. So it's been really very heartwarming. We've had quite a few screenings, and we hope to have a lot more. We have it on the film festival circuit, so, fingers crossed that we get into more festivals, and we should be finding out soon. But, yeah, so it's been quite a positive reaction.

JOHN

Can you tell us a little bit - you mentioned Jon Funabiki - did you want to talk a little bit about your production company? Because, you're Jennifer Lin, and we haven't had anybody else in front of the mic, but I'd love you to talk about the group that's making these movies with you.

 JENNIFER

 It's a very small group, a skeleton group, of filmmakers. The producers of both Ten Times Better and my current project, which is called Beyond Yellowface, are my daughter Cory Steig, who is a former ballet dancer herself, and Jon Funabiki, who is a long time friend of mine. John and I met like 40 years ago when we were both much younger journalists, both covering Asia for our respective newspapers, myself for the Philadelphia Inquirer and John for the paper in San Diego, and that's how we met - we met at the East West Center in Hawaii, and we were doing a fellowship there, so John has a background in writing about Asian-American issues, and he also has a background in philanthropy. He was with the Ford Foundation, so I reached out to him when we were starting work on Beyond Yellowface, and I said, "Hey John, how would you like to produce a movie?" And he said yes, which is great. His granddaughter is a dancer, so we like to joke that he's a "Dance Grandpa," and I'm the "Dance Mom," and Cory is the dancer, and so the three of us have been really steering the ship, Beyond Yellowface and then Ten Times Better. And you know, I worked with the same cinematographer and same editor from my previous project, which was Beethoven in Beijing, and the DP is Paul Van Haute and my editor is Rachel Sophia Stewart. And so that's essentially the team, John. We are we are a tight group. But you know the wonderful thing about filmmaking today is, the way into it is less of a problem than it would have been like 15-20 years ago.

JOHN

We’ll be back to our podcast in just a moment. But first, here is a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Jennifer Lin is a filmmaker, writer and journalist living near Philadelphia. For 31 years, she worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on events in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and throughout the Asian world.

JOHN

But she soon realized that the story she wanted to tell was that of her own Chinese family, which had converted to Christianity in the late 1800s and endured persecution and hardship to come to the United States. The result was her first book, Shanghai Faithful.

DON

Her documentary Beethoven in Beijing tells the story of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 visit to China, bringing not only Western music but also a new relationship between China and the United States – and a China-wide obsession with Beethoven.

JOHN

Beethoven in Beijing debuted on PBS in 2021. Jennifer also wrote the accompanying book. Among her recent work is a finished film, Ten Times Better, and also, Beyond Yellowface, now in post-production.

DON

 For more on Jennifer, check out her website, jenniferlinmedia.com. Beethoven in Beijing is available on PBS Passport under Great Performances. For more on Ten Times Better, check out tentimesbetterfilm.com, and for more on Beyond Yellowface, check out beyondyellowface.com.

JOHN

And now we return you to the Musical Innertube, already in progress. 

DON

I'm wondering, too - and this may tie into to this next project, Beyond Yellowface - but when George is asked why he didn't get into the Ballet Theater in New York, he says they told him he was too short. And he is a diminutive man now, probably more than when he was younger, but still he he's not a very tall guy. He's not 6 feet. But I'm wondering as I'm watching the show, if that might have been sort of a way to let him down easy, in the sense that, when he went to Broadway, he was needed for Flower Drum Song because that was all Asian performers or as many Asian performers as they could get. But again, his time on Broadway trailed off after a while. And I'm thinking, maybe, you know, it was a time when Asian - there wasn't that idea of inclusion, and Asian dancers weren't there. "There's plenty of white dancers. Why do we need an Asian dancer?" That sort of attitude.

JENNIFER

I think today he could have found work as a ballet dancer with a ballet company. I think the understanding of what makes the perfect dancer is much broader today than it was in 1954. And in 1954, the ideal for a male dancer at the level of the New York City Ballet or the precursor to American Ballet Theater was a very tall, typically Caucasian man. And George could look around and see that everyone that ballet theater, the American Ballet Theater, was hiring tended to be kind of Nordic type, sure, much taller. So, you know, George is of another generation - and I find this to be pretty common among his generation - where he didn't see it as an Asian thing, he saw it as height. But, when he went to Broadway he did get work. He got work in Flower Drum Song, which was all about the Asian-American Experience. Hal Prince, the great director, hired him for Baker Street, and he played the role of the Chinese coolie. He got hired in Annie Get Your Gun, and played the role of the Chinese cook. So do you see a pattern there?

JOHN

Yes!

DON

Very much so, yeah!

JENNIFER

 You know, there is a little bit of typecasting, and when he would go to these cattle calls for other musicals, and they would tell him, well, George you're not the "type," what does that mean? You're too short, or you're not quote "the type," so I think George had to battle barriers that were placed before Asian-American dancers that weren't placed before others. So it was an issue, but it's not something I think that he focused on. And I think to this day he probably wouldn't say, oh well, you know, there was a racial issue there - I think he would say oh, I was too short. And he was on the short side, but there are dancers his size who are with ballet companies, top ballet companies. I had one dancer who engaged in a conversation with me after seeing the film, and he was he was on the shorter side, and he said, "You know, there's always a role for short dancers. I mean there's certain characters, like Puck in A Midsummer's Night Dream, where you need a short dancer. We all don't have to be six feet tall." That wasn't really an option for him back in the 1950s

JOHN

That's not the way that producers and casters were thinking certainly. Beyond Yellowface is a sort of a much larger movie. It doesn't focus only on one dancer, it really focuses on a topic, which is the treatment of Asian people in a major medium. You want to talk a little bit about that? I hear that it's in post-production.

 JENNIFER

 Yes it is. And really, Ten Times Better and Beyond Yellowface are bookends. Where Ten Times Better looks at an Asian-American pioneer in dance, so the past - and Beyond Yellowface really looks at the present and the future of dance when it comes to Asian-Americans.  Beyond Yellowface, it focuses on two dancers of Asian descent in New York City. Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, and they started the "Final Battle for Yellowface" movement, which is really challenging the ballet world to do better, both in terms of the stories they tell and representation among dancers and choreographers. And specifically, one of the first things they did when they were started about five, six years ago, was to look at ballet stories starting with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is the entry ballet for everyone. There are hundreds and hundreds of productions of The Nutcracker every Christmas. And so the Chinese dance has been problematic. Usually the depiction of the Chinese dancers kind of falls into racial tropes of, you know, the long queue, the pointy fingers...

 JOHN

 Oh, gosh, yes!

 JENNIFER

 Actually it's very interesting story - and this is in the movie - but Phil Chen and Georgina Pazcoguin had gotten a call from Peter Martins, who at the time was the artistic director of the New York City Ballet, and Peter Martins basically could not ignore the fact that a lot of people had written into the New York City Ballet saying, "I don't feel comfortable with the depiction of the Chinese dancers in your version of The Nutcracker." So Martins had Phil talk to him and advise him and actually made changes in the costuming and the little bit of the gesturing in in that dance, toning it down a bit. And so, you know, Phil and Gina looked around at other dance companies and said, there are a lot of dance companies whose depiction of the Chinese dance is really insulting. And so they started the "Final Battle for Yellowface" movement, which is basically a pledge, saying I'll no longer do yellow face on stage and I will deal with the racial tropes in ballet. And they have gotten hundreds of people to sign this pledge, including many of the top ballet companies. But they've gone beyond just looking at the Chinese dance, which is basically 70 seconds of choreography, and Phil has looked at an entire ballet that's very problematic called La Bayadère. It was created more than 100 years ago by a choreographer named Petipa, who also did, like, Swan Lake and a lot of big ballets, and it's set in an Indian temple, and there's nothing Indian about it. It's like it

sprang from his imagination. But there are things about it that are problematic. For instance, performing in blackface. And some of the temple characters are basically men with wild hair and loincloths and darkened skin, kind of crawling around the temple. And a lot of people have said, you know what, we're not comfortable with this. So what Phil did is, like, why can't we take the story, keep the choreography, keep the music, but let's take the story out of the temple and put it in another setting. And he chose a Hollywood studio in the 1930s, and they're filming a cowboy musical. And so they perform this production, this new production, in March at Indiana University which has a real top flight ballet program, it's one of the best in the country. We filmed it, and it was it was delightful, and you know minus all the offensive things like blackface, and, you know, kind of an insulting portrayal of Indian people. So there are, a lot of folks embrace what they're doing, and a lot of people don't, but what they're doing is, they're raising a topic in the rarefied world of ballet and saying, you know, we should stop and think about what we portray on stages, and there should be more representation, and there should be an absence of racial tropes in in these classical works. It's a provocative film, and hopefully we'll finish it in time for it to appear in festivals next year.

DON

I would think too, also, that it shows a way - because, um - the thing that comes to mind, and it's kind of very weird, but the thing that comes to mind is, when I went out and bought a bunch of DVDs of old Warner Brothers cartoons. And they felt the need to have Whoopi Goldberg do a little intro on it that said, look, these were made in the 1940s and black people are not portrayed very well in there, and neither are Asian people, there are war movies in there where Asians are the villains, but that was then, and this is now, and we just want to let you know we're going to run it anyway, but you have to keep that in mind. With dance, that's such a fluid thing that you can do what they did to change a racist temple into a cowboy thing. In other words, you can change the setting, you can change the costuming,

but keep the choreography. And that just seems like a wonderful way to update something without having to rip the life out of it, or rip the guts out of it.

 JENNIFER

 You would think, Don, but there is a rigidity in the ballet world to change. And so, like, with La Bayadère - that came out in the1800s, when not a lot of people went to India. They didn't know what it was about - they would read about it because the Prince of Wales went to India in 1875 and that was big news and everyone in Europe was reading about it -but no one had traveled there, few people had. Well, okay, today we know what India is like, a lot of people go there, we know what China is like, so why would you fall back on kind of this orientalist fantasy when you could, like, make it more realistic, or put in a different setting? But there is kind of - this is one of the classical arts, ballet, and there is a certain rigidity from straying from what was. And so they're kind of, like, nudging the ballet world to just ask questions. And, you know, as the woman who runs the ballet department at Indiana University says, they're not saying, don't do La Bayadère, but why not try a different way of doing it? Why not experiment? And so it's a bold experiment. I frankly think it works. Viewers will be able to decide for themselves, but it's kind of a happy change. It was very interesting, Don, to talk to the young dancers, the young university students who were in it. And, you know, the one dancer I spoke to was of South Asian descent, and she was, like, "I used to do traditional Indian dance as a youngster, and when you look at the old La Bayadère there's nothing Indian about it." So you know, there's that. And there was one black dancer who said, "You know, I know it's not personal but when I see these old films of La Bayadère where the dancers are in blackface, it feels a little personal." There's no need to do that, certainly. Sarah Wroth, the woman who runs the ballet department, she said that when she was a professional dancer she had to paint her body brown to do La Bayadère, and she said she didn't ask questions. But there's no reason today not to ask questions, like why are we doing this? So yellow face, you know, is a lot like black face. I should have said that at the outset because not a lot of people know what the term means. So like when Georgina Pazcoguin, who's the other character in Beyond Yellowface, the first time she did the Chinese dance in The Nutcracker for the New York City Ballet, she had to put on yellow makeup to accentuate her already Asian features. We don't have to do that today. It's also interesting, one of the scenes in the film is at the Wilmington Ballet, and the artistic director, they were doing The Nutcracker and they invited Gino down to do the Sugar Plum role, and he told me - he's African American - and he said when he was a kid growing up in ballet and doing the Chinese dance, he had to put on white face! And he said, "Thinking back on it now, I'm horrified, but that was just like the time." So, we are evolving as a society, can't ballet evolve too?

JOHN

Sure. Things are changing, glacially. And it just seems that it's hard to be in the middle of change, especially when change is never done. Do you feel that?  Because I know that you yourself, part of your connection to these topics, is that you are from a family story which includes China, and includes but also - many people would be surprised to - know Christianity, because a great great grandfather of yours - I think or maybe great great? - converted in the 19th century. I can't remember how many great in front of the grandfather.

 JENNIFER

 Yeah! So, John, my father was from Shanghai, and he was part of the great diaspora of people who fled China in 1949 after the end of the Civil War there, and came to the United States. He was in medical school, so he did all of his medical training then, first in Atlantic City, then in Hartford, Connecticut, and finally in Philadelphia, where he was working at Temple hospital and met my mother, an Italian-American nurse from Camden, New Jersey, and the rest is history. But, yeah, I mean, I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I didn't live in Chinatown. My father was a busy surgeon, my mother raised us, so my kind of connection with my Asian heritage really evolved as I grew older. Again, a very kind of a hot topic these days, racial identity. And I really started exploring my Asian Heritage in 1979 - I can actually pinpoint it - when my father took me and two of my sisters to Shanghai to meet the family he left behind. His parents had passed away by then, but he had a brother and a sister who were still living in the family home. So I got to stay in the family home, meet these relatives who had just been kind of names in letters that we got every month from Shanghai, and really kind of see the world where my father grew up. And learning in that trip in 1979 that their lives were hellish for many many years. I also learned that one of the reasons was this Uncle of mine who was one of the leading Christian voices of the 20th century, a man by the name of Watchmen Nee. And during the Communist era in China he was immediately arrested and sent to a labor camp and labeled an enemy of the people. So if you're related to an enemy of the people, you too are an enemy of the people. And so for the family, the Lin family, the cultural revolution was really a horrible time. I'm 19 years old, I'm in China for the first time, learning all this, and it's like, wait, what? So for me, that was kind of the seminal moment that was the turning point where I'm like, okay, kind of, I grew up in in America in the 1960s and '70s, and you know the Vietnam War was constantly playing in the background, right, and you wanted nothing more than just to be quote "All-American." But then I'm in China, it's like, wait a second, this is where I come from. I mean it sounds trite, but it's like that started this whole long life-long journey for me of trying to find out like what my family was all about. And that led me to writing a book, Shanghai Faithful, which is a family memoir, and I go all the way back to the beginning, to my great-great-grandfather, who was a fisherman in Fujian Province who became the first convert to Christianity. The trajectory of my family over five generations is really the story of modern China, but through the eyes of a family that was Christian, and by virtue of that had really tight, close connection with westerners. It's an interesting way of looking at Chinese history, again over the last 150 years. And it took me 40 years to report and write, but I finally came out with that book almost 10 years ago. It was kind of an awakening, John. As a teenager I didn't grow up with a strong identity when it comes to my Asian heritage and it evolved. Which is I'm sure something Kamala Harris can relate to, just saying!

 JOHN

 Yes, right about now!

 JENNIFER

 Correct!

 JOHN

 Where can people see Ten Times Better? Is it on the PBS web page?

 JENNIFER

 Not yet. I mean we are working with one of our supporters, the Center for Asian American Media, to have a national broadcast on PBS, and that will happen sometime hopefully in the next few months. But for the moment it's on the film festival circuit. If you check our website, tentimesbetterfilm.com, that's where we update people, and on social media. For your listeners in L.A., we have a screening coming up at the Japanese American Museum. We have two screenings in San Francisco, and one at the Reading (Pennsylvania) Film Festival which is October the 11th. Hopefully more, but stay tuned, and follow us on social media and we'll tell people what else is coming up.

 JOHN

 Well, Jennifer Lin, thank you for being our guest again on the Musical Innertube. We always go places and really enjoy the ride! A wonderful short documentary, Ten Times Better, you know we're rooting for it to be seen by as many people as possible, and I can't wait for Beyond Yellowface.

JENNIFER

John and Don thank you again for having me on. It's always a pleasure talking with both of you.

DON

Thanks again, Jennifer.

 JENNIFER

 Thank you.