Asian American Male Ballet Dancer Finally Gets His Due

George R. Lee, 89, a blackjack dealer at the Four Queens Casino in Las Vegas, is the subject of the new documentary Ten Times Better.

People tell me I’ve been rediscovered: the first Asian American male ballet dancer. But I was never hiding. I’ve been here the whole time.

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I started dancing because of my mother. She was from Poland, and she was a professional dancer. When I was small in Hong Kong, I would watch her do her exercises. She would tell me, “Oh, you want to try? Follow me.”

By age 7, I was performing in a nightclub, because during World War II, we had to make a living somehow. I was lucky: There were Russian people working in the club as dancers, and they would give me advice. I took professional dance classes with them. It was tough, at 7 years old, to keep up with the pros, but I did it.

After the war, when the Communists started moving into Shanghai in 1949, my mother got worried for our safety. So we left for a United Nations refugee camp in a jungle in the Philippines. We were supposed to stay for four months. They offered my mother a chance to leave for Australia, but because I was half Chinese, I wouldn’t have been allowed to go with her. So she stayed. We were stuck there for two years — then America accepted us. But my mother knew I would be judged differently because of how I looked. She told me, “You’ve got to be 10 times better than whoever they have there.” And I did the best I could.

In New York, I went to the School of American Ballet, the training school for the New York City Ballet. Advanced class was easy for me because of my Russian training. At the time, George Balanchine was choreographing his Nutcracker, and when he heard there was a Chinese boy in the school, he decided to use me for the Chinese Tea dance. He asked me what leaps and turns I could do, and I showed him, and he said, “Oh, that’s good. You will do that.” I could jump really high. I was hoping to get a permanent spot in the company, but they had an excuse: They said I was too short. It’s true, I was shorter than the men in the company.

Still, I had to work. I heard that someone was looking for Asians for a Broadway show. For my audition, I did a solo from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. These Broadway people didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But the show’s director was Gene Kelly, and he liked me. After my audition, I was waiting for the elevator to go home, and he came by and said, “Why don’t you take this job? You could learn something new and get paid for it.” That’s how I got cast in Flower Drum Song, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and learned jazz dance. Gene Kelly made a spot for me in one number where I could do solo jumping.