|  | Feature: Sport and Leisure | No.50 May 2007 |

Dance and Identity: The Chinese Immigrant Women’s Leisure Activity in Vancouver Xinquan Yang |
Abstract This paper provides a theoretical and practical lens to a leisure activity of Chinese immigrants, particularly Chinese dance. It also reveals conflicts and frustrations that Chinese immigrant women deal with during the process of migration. This research shows how Chinese immigrant women attempt to use dance in many ways to entertain themselves and promote Chinese culture in North America. Firstly, dance is a way for women to pursue personal pleasure, health and beauty, and to express self-consciousness and self-perceptions. Secondly, dance becomes a locus for collective memory, social organisation and ethnic identity building. Thirdly, dance serves as a mirror within which individuals and societies can view themselves. This reflection upon embodied identities facilitates reshaping of social lives. Finally, dance is a fine expressive art to stimulate people’s intellect, spirit and appreciation for humanity and to broadcast and advance Chinese culture. Introduction Recent Statistics Canada figures suggest that there has been a significant increase in immigrants from China and Hong Kong in the Toronto and Vancouver areas. According to Canada 1996 Census, the principal sources of recent immigration to Canada are Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, which account for half of all newcomers to Vancouver. This trend is continuing and with it, issues and concerns about mental and physical health around those immigrants have risen in Canada. Although most immigrants are from well-educated middle-class backgrounds, many, especially women, suffer unemployment and a drop in status and wages after they immigrate to Canada. Meanwhile, as these women average 35 years of age at immigration and are at a distance from family and friends, they lack support (Salaff & Greve, 2004). Women are also almost entirely responsible for the various demands of household and children in an unfamiliar environment. Such realities may result in mental and physical stress as they experience a difficult transformation from career-fulfilled status to fulltime homemakers. This shift, however, has provided this category of immigrant women with more time to participate in leisure activities. How do they accept this change and use their time to enrich their lives in this new environment? Dance is a way to do so. As Dyck and Archetti (2003) point out,
“Through a common commitment to specific techniques of the body and forms of practices proffered by different types of sport and dance, men and women may be enabled to experience a liminality that permits not only temporary escape from the realities of life but also opportunities to contemplate and experiment with new visions and possibilities.” (p. 17)
Traditional immigrant studies mostly have focused on immigrants’ social and economic adaptation to the new environment and career achievement, so a lack of research in investigating immigrant leisure activities exists (Ghosh, 1978; Li, 1999; Salaff & Greve, 2004). This study will fill this gap. I examine the motivations of and impacts on women immigrants’ leisure participation from a social psychological perspective. The research has partly revealed the social, cultural, economic and emotional consequences of migration among Chinese immigrant women in Canada. The specific objective of this paper is to study a group of Chinese immigrant women’s lifestyles by treating dance as a bodily discourse through which social identities are signaled, formed and negotiated. I have made a focused study of a site in relation to Chinese dance in Vancouver. By examining a Chinese dance studio, I was able to investigate some problems that occur in the migration process for these women. In this context, the Chinese dance studio is a space within which immigrant women not only reinforce their ethnic identity and build relationship networks, but also reformulate their social lives through dancing. Mauss (1973) notes the cultural importance of techniques of the body that can be linked to larger social processes and purposes within which particular schemes of preference, valuation and meaning may be transmitted. Dance, like sport, given techniques of the body, provides “a vital capacity to express and reformulate identities and meanings through their practiced movement and scripted forms” (Dyck & Archetti, 2003, p. 1). Furthermore, Dyck and Archetti (2003) state,
“[T]he embodied practices of athletes and dancers afford not merely pleasure and entertainment but powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or for imaging and advocating new ones.” (p. 1)
Based upon these theoretical frameworks, the following research questions were formulated for this study: Why did the Chinese dance studio appear? Why do Chinese immigrant women take Chinese dance classes? What benefits do they obtain from dance? Can dance make them physically and mentally healthy? To what extent does Chinese dance help them reshape their social identity in Canada? I have used sport ethnography to approach these research questions, including document analysis, participant observation and face-to-face interviews. In the following section, I set the context for the Chinese immigrant women’s dancing by discussing Chinese cultural and embodied practices. Next, I examine their motivations for dancing as well as their immigration difficulties experienced in Vancouver. Third, I observe that dance serves as a mirror within which individuals and societies can view themselves. Finally, I conclude that dance can be seen as a fine expressive art to stimulate people’s intellect, spirit and appreciation for humanity, and to advance Chinese culture. Chinese Dance and Embodied Practices In 1990, Cindy Yang, a renowned Chinese choreographer, established the Chinese Dance Academy (CDA), a self-supporting enterprise. Her purpose was to introduce North Americans to the lifestyles and cultures of the 56 ethnicities living in China today through the medium of dance. The first studio was opened on West Broadway in Vancouver. Over the past 16 years, CDA’s branches have spread to Richmond and White Rock. The biggest studio is in Richmond, where the largest Chinese population resides. Its door is open to everyone who likes to dance regardless of gender, age, social class, color or race. This study focuses on the “Healthy & Beautiful Mommy” program, which is designed for women with children. The dance studio is becoming women’s “fairyland” in which they can share their body images, make friends and showcase their femininity. As Vertinsky (2004) notes, “places are made through power relations which construct the rules, define the boundaries and create spaces with certain meanings in which some relationships are facilitated, others discouraged” (p. 50). The majority of patrons of the studio are middle class immigrant women who have economic capital and free time. Some immigrants only send their wives and children to Canada, but they themselves do not reside in Vancouver. In this case, these women’s husbands may have businesses or decent jobs in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, so their earned income is enough to pay all the expenses of their families in Vancouver. The problem then is not that these women lack job status but that they lack social identity as housewives. Learning Chinese dance involves learning Chinese culture. Chinese dance is subdivided into three main categories: folk, minority and classical. Chinese folk dance originated with the Han people, the largest ethnic group in China, which composes 93% of China’s population (China's Ethnic Minorities, 2005). Minority dances are representative of the other 55 ethnic groups. Every minority has its identity and equal rights in China. These dances depict people’s daily lifestyles. Unlike the Chinese folk dance and ethnic minority dance, classical dance originated from dance performances in the imperial courts of ancient China, and its movements come from the Han folk dances, martial arts and Chinese opera (“Aesthetic Elements”, 2003). The studio offers all three types of Chinese dances in the “Health & Beauty Dance” classes, and is famous for ethnic Chinese dance, costume and culture. A variety of forms of dance represent national origins, traditions and ethnicity. The techniques of dance reflect a nation’s cultural morality, social esthetics and body habitus (habit or custom). “These ‘habitus’ do not just vary with individuals and their imitations; they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges” (Mauss, 1973, p. 73). They are cemented in everybody in everyday life. For example, Chinese classical dance techniques emphasise the body’s upper torso, especially the fingers, hands, neck and head. Given its distinct gestures, the basic hand-arm movement is called the Cloud Movement and the Sword Movement. The basic foot actions in both movements are the Heel-Toe Walking, in which a dancer appears to float across the dance-floor without bobbing up and down. It features “small steps, but quick”, also called the Chinese walk, while the upper torso performs slightly differently. In the Cloud Movement, the hands and arms swirl around like clouds in front of the upper torso—it looks very feminine. In the Sword Movement, the hands and arms sweep the sides of the torso as if protecting the body from an approaching enemy (“Aesthetic Elements”, 2003). All these movements exhibit the female’s inherent mentality: feminine, attractive and self-protective. Given techniques of the body, dance instructors offer students the understanding of particular schemes of valuation and meaning of Chinese culture. Paying close attention to the ways in which women actually engage in dance, I find them not simply as dance exercisers or performers on the dance floor, but as full social persons whose engagement in dance is complex and variable. Femininity, argues Bartky (1997), is an artifice, an achievement that “[brings] forth from [a] body a specific repertoire of gesture, postures, and movements” (p. 132). The women desire to achieve this through dance so that they build confidence in themselves. With thousands of years’ development, Chinese dance is such a medium of forming a specific training repertoire of the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility and spatiality, especially in a Chinese aesthetic value. For instance, the “small steps of movement” reify heterosexuality and a woman’s feminine role in contemporary patriarchal culture. They know, as indicated by Bartky (1997), that “a well-preserved older woman has a better chance of holding onto her husband than one who has ‘let herself go’” (p. 140). When a woman’s husband is far away from her, she is more worried about keeping her husband than if they lived together. Therefore, these women show more motivation to do self-improvement through bodily discipline of dance. Based upon the aesthetic attractiveness of Chinese dance, they are trying to reify their normalized femininity of appearance. Dancing for Pleasure: The Self and Social Networks Dancing is regarded as a particularly pleasurable form of embodiment, especially in relaxed and even playful ways in which dancers “perform with excitement, passion, a deep sense of release and boundless stores of energy” (Dyck & Archetti, 2003, p. 12). Listening to beautiful music and dancing like a young lady, women enjoy the time when they practice in the studio. I have found that for middle-aged immigrant women, dancing for pleasure has two benefits: self-discovery and social networking. First, dancing helps them discover the self. As a 45-year-old woman emotionally narrated,
“Being a wife and mother, I am busy with all my housework, so I hardly have time for myself. During the one hour of dancing, I am totally myself. I care about my body and enjoy the moment.”
During the dance lessons, the women talk about their bodies and imitate the instructors’ beautiful techniques of dance in terms of movement, gesture and comportment. They look at themselves in mirrors to reflect on their efforts to accomplish particular movements. Dance, like sport, offers people a form of leisure, entertainment and physical exercise. The need for these is most obvious for middle-aged women, as “women at midlife face major obstacles such as lack of leisure time, their complex and often self-sacrificing social roles to family, lack of access to sport facilities, as well as inadequate finances to invest in their health and wellness” (O’Brien Cousins & Edward, 2002, p. 337). The “Health & Beauty Dance” is designed for women to have a place to do physical exercise. This program was initiated by Cindy, who saw that mothers sent their children to learn Chinese dance in her studio every week. While the children are taking dance lessons, parents (usually mothers) wait outside. In order to give something back to the community, she started to organize those parents to engage in physical activities. The participants responded positively to this program. After these dancers gained more technique, Cindy invited her daughter, Yang, (a famous graduated from the Dance Academy of Beijing Minority University) to work with her. Yang revived it by adding varied ethnic dance styles. For instance, in a one-hour class, students can perform eight different dance repertoires including the YuanJi, Remove Your Veil and Butterfly. When the women practice these dances, they contemplate the beautiful scenes the dances depict. At these times, a woman can forget all the trivial daily worries and enjoy herself in simple, subtle, beautiful movements, which produce elegant and graceful gestures. The studio, thus, attracts more and more dance enthusiasts to join the dancing community. In the Richmond studio, up to 100 people dance together. Second, dancing helps them build social networks in Vancouver. Dance is regarded as a physical activity, so women who dance feel “more capable, more powerful and a greater sense of belonging [which] may be more important to a woman’s physical health than whether she exercises more” (Vertinsky, 1998, p. 100). As mentioned previously, one of the biggest barriers facing immigrant women in settling down is fear of loneliness. Being isolated from family, friends and familiar environments, they lose identity, status and relative freedom in a strange place. Meanwhile, some Chinese feel frustrated when going to stay in a new host country because they cannot return home for a certain period. In Canada, immigrants obtain legal Canadian citizenship only if they stay in Canada for at least three full years. Nevertheless, most people think that their immigration may bring their children a bright future in terms of education and career choices. This feeling of loneliness seems more serious for women whose husbands do not accompany them. A 50-year old woman vividly described her feeling of loneliness:
“Nobody talks to me since I have no friends. The whole house is so silent that I am smothered by the loneliness. I proposed to return but now I changed my mind because I can dance and make a lot of friends. Here, I find a strong sense of belonging.”
This is not an uncommon example. Some women dance class after class. The attraction of dance has become a means of self-development and personal healing in a fragmented contemporary world. Furthermore, dance is regarded as a means of meeting friends and the dance studio is a place for communicating with others in order to build social networks. Sometimes, these women show their beautiful outfits or hairdos after class in the studio. They also exchange information on where to buy inexpensive quality costumes before performances. In addition to routine communications, the “Health & Beauty Dance” Birthday Party (the Party), which is held every three months, provides opportunities for these women to celebrate their achievements. More importantly, the Party provides participants with a sense of belonging, “a sense sadly lacking for many women after the end of school days” (Matthews, 1990, p. 49). Parents are usually watching their children’s performances, but at the Party, these parent dancers perform while their children are watching. This is a new way for children to look at their homemaker mothers. Their mothers are not only cooks in the kitchen, but also perform in public. Such an arrangement can change the traditional mothers’ stereotype— from a mother who wears an apron, to a modern female image, displaying their achievements in public. These leisure activities not only help these middle-aged women rebuild their self-confidence, but also contribute to their self-actualisation. Such efforts will reformulate these immigrants’ identities in a new country because dance makes it possible to experience social equality and freedom from the home. Reshaping Identity through Dance Performance in public is a focal point of dance because it is an expressive art through which social relations are negotiated and maintained. Dyck and Archetti (2003) explain how the process of identification is operating through audiences’ interpretation in, and appreciation of dance: “The moving bodies of performers, which could be scientifically described and categorized in kinesiological terms, are just as likely to be identified in terms of stereotypical images of gender, age, race, class, ethnicity, religion or nationality” (p. 16). With thousands of years of history, Chinese dance is a profound, high quality and essential cultural art; many Chinese dancers are dedicated to bringing Chinese dance into mainstream society in North America in order to advance Chinese culture. The aesthetic attractions and embodied practices of dance “serve both as public mirrors and as models of identity” (Dyck & Archetti, 2003, p. 5). Dance is a fine expressive art, which invigorates people’s intellect, uplifts people’s sprit and expands people’s appreciation of humanity. Teaching, learning or performing dance is concomitant with promoting Chinese culture. Since their debut in a Chinese school in 1990 in Vancouver, students from CDA have undertaken many local and international performances. Most of the performances presented are for various Chinese and Western charities. These contribute immensely to Canada’s multicultural tapestry. Mr. Gardom, Lieutenant-Governor of B.C., spoke at the 10th anniversary of the Cindy Yang Dance Academy (2000):
“By introducing the many dance styles of ethnic minorities in China, the Academy has provided a valuable contribution to the enhancement of the rich cultural diversity enjoyed in British Columbia.”
Chinese immigrants consider Canada to be their second home, so they make many commitments to Canadian society. The Academy’s students contribute to Canadian multiculturalism through Chinese dance, as well as their own well-being. Although Chinese immigrants encounter many frustrations and obstacles when arriving in Canada, they have gradually come to love Canada with the same passion as for their home country; consequently, they dedicate themselves to the society once they find their social identity in this new country. This is why many students spend their time and money taking part in various philanthropic performances. In 2001, the Canadian Government granted Cindy a prestigious honour, the Volunteer Award, to praise her philanthropic activities in Canada. This award belongs not only to her, but to all people who are enthusiastic for advancing Chinese culture through dance. It integrates many people’s collective dedication, energy and enthusiasm to promote Canada’s unique multicultural mosaic. CDA’s future goal is to organise a 500-person dance team to perform Chinese dance at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. Conclusion This paper presents Chinese dance as an embodiment of theory and practice in analysing Chinese immigrant women’s leisure activities. It also reveals some conflicts and frustrations that Chinese immigrant women deal with in the process of migration. This research suggests that these women attempt to use dance in ways to entertain themselves. Dance is a way for them to pursue personal pleasure, health and beauty and to express their self-perceptions and self-actualization. Meanwhile, dance, too, becomes a locus for collective memory, social organisation, and ethnic identity-building. The power of bodies represents not only how women fit into the social order, but also self-expression, for becoming who they would most like to be (Davis, 1997). Dance is the vehicle for the modern individual to achieve a glamorous life-style and to enjoy life in modern society. Dance can also serve as a mirror within which individuals and societies can view themselves; this reflection upon embodied identities facilitates reshaping social lives. Dance then becomes an exciting form to celebrate existing social, political, moral and national arrangements. Overall, these Chinese women think that performing Chinese dance brings them mental and bodily health as well as social identity. References Aesthetic elements of Chinese classical dance in Chinese modern dance. (2003, November 10). Retrieved March 3, 2005, from http://www.uga.edu/juro/2002/lynn.html Bartky, S. L (1997). Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power. In K. Conboy, N. Medina, and S. Stanbury (Eds). 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Li, M. (1999). ‘We need two worlds: Chinese immigrant associations in a west society. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Matthews, J. J. (1990). They had such a lot of fun: The Women’s League of Health and Beauty between wars. History Workshop Journal, 3, 22-54. Mauss, M (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2(1), 70-87. O’Brien Cousins, S., & Edwards, K. (2002). Alice in menopauseland: The jabberwocky of a medicalized middle age. Health Care for Women’s International, 23, 325-343. Salaff, J., & Greve, A. (2004, March). Losing status in Canada: Gender and human capital discrimination of Chinese immigrants. Paper presented at The 7th National Metropolis Conference, Montreal, Quebec. Vertinsky, P. (1998). “Run, Jane, run”: Central tensions in the current debate about enhancing woman’s health through exercise. Women & Health, 27(4), 81-111. Vertinsky, P. (2004). ‘Power geometries’: Disciplining the gendered body in the spaces of the war memorial gymnasium. In P. Vertinsky & S. McKay (Eds.), Disciplining bodies in gymnasium: Memory, monument and memorial (pp.48-73). London: Routledge. Contact Xinquan (Sheena) Yang Leisure & Sport Management Program School of Human Kinetics War Memorial Gymnasium University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. CANADA Email: xsy@interchange.ubc.ca http://www.icsspe.org/portal/index.php?w=1&z=5 Dance and Identity: The Chinese Immigrant Women’s Leisure Activity in Vancouver Xinquan Yang