“I’m oriental occidental,” says 92-year-old dancer Coby Yee in one scene from the documentary “Chinatown Cha-Cha.” Yee was born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents, and on stage her style of dancing and costume — a Chinese jacket, Moroccan robe, and samba skirt — were equally a blend of East and West. But recently, she adds, she’s been feeling “more Chinese.”

A star of the club scene in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1940s, Yee became a hit on the silver screen in China this year after the Nov. 5 release of filmmaker Luka Yuanyuan Yang’s debut documentary feature. The movie follows Yee’s troupe of elderly dancers as it embarks on tours of China, Cuba, and the U.S. in 2019. It was the first time Yee, who died in 2020, had visited her parents’ homeland since the 1980s.

However, the movie is no simple tale of Chinese Americans “imagining China” through traditional costumes and dance, “as that’s such a cliché,” Yang says. “Coby was much more than just ‘oriental occidental.’ She combined elements from diverse cultures — a cutting-edge thing to do even today, let alone back then.”

New influences

After spending her entire life in the U.S., Yee’s Chinese was not good. The few words in Cantonese she could read with confidence were her Chinese name, Yu Gamhau, and she remembered clearly how to correctly pronounce places like Guangdong, Kaiping, and Dihai. Her father had drilled into her as a child never to forget she was from the Yu family of Dihai in Kaiping, a county-level city in the southern Guangdong province.

Yee’s father was a first-generation Chinese immigrant to the U.S., born in Guangdong. In the early 20th century, he boarded a ship to Columbus, Ohio, becoming a “paper son,” a term referring to illegal immigrants who purchased documentation that falsely claimed they were the blood relative of someone with U.S. citizenship. It was a common practice, aided by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which caused a huge fire that destroyed vast amounts of public birth records. Yee’s mother arrived a short time after.

The couple opened a laundry business and, later, a grocery store. As Asians were confined to living in Chinatowns, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Yee’s parent’s inability to speak English was not a problem. Up until the 1970s, their life was concentrated in just a few blocks of the city — it was where they lived, worked, and raised their children.

Coby Yee was born in 1926. From a young age, she had to help out with odd jobs in the family laundromat and store. Once, after ironing hundreds of shirts in a day, she vowed not to spend her life performing manual work. At 6 years old, a child next door was learning tap dance, paying $1.50 a class. Yee watched her neighbor practice and soon began to pick up the steps herself. Yee had discovered her passion, and would dance with delight anywhere she could — in the laundry room, in the family living room, and on the sidewalk. Yang says Yee’s father would joke that his daughter “looked like a little monkey.”

“Parents in the neighborhood were first-generation immigrants from China, mostly Cantonese speakers. But the American-born children grew up under the influence of Western culture. They loved swing and tap dancing,” Yang says. Yee’s mother liked Cantonese opera, one of the few entertainment options for Chinese workers of her generation, and a reminder of her faraway home. Yee often accompanied her to see shows, enjoying the colorful costumes, although she didn’t understand the lyrics.

Word of this little girl who loved to dance spread quickly in the neighborhood. Initially, Yee would dance for her father’s relatives and friends. However, at 16, she moved with her family to Washington, D.C., swapping one Chinatown for a slightly bigger one. There, a distant uncle ran a Chinese-American supper club called Casino Royal. It had a large stage and a professional band. Yang recalls Yee telling her that when she saw the performers’ elegant costumes, she thought, “Wow, I want to dance too.”

‘Dancing doll’

Yee would initially begin her three-act performance with a Chinese-style dance. She would sway a fan that covered half her face and peek out coquettishly. Her costume, which her mother made, comprised a modified Cantonese opera outfit with a Chinese jacket, a Moroccan robe, and a samba skirt (although she would sometimes also dress as a rabbit). After taking off the jacket, she would then launch into an American swing dance. For the final number, Yee would switch to a thigh-length skirt and dance Latin steps in high heels.

Being of Chinese ethnicity, Yee couldn’t dance professionally at mainstream clubs like her white compatriots. However, Chinese Americans had their own nightlife scene. Leveraging stereotypical portrayals of Anna May Wong, widely considered Hollywood’s first Chinese-American film star, nightclubs offered a distinct “oriental” flavor, which proved popular with those from Eastern and Western backgrounds. After turning 18, Yee was able to make a living dancing in such establishments, and eventually it would make her a star.

Yee relocated to San Francisco, California, in the late 1940s. There, talent agents told her that if she wanted to perform at bigger venues, she was going to need to dress more provocatively. At first, she refused, but they were unrelenting, telling Yee that she could triple her income to $1,000 a week, a significant sum for a Chinese-American family. She eventually agreed to wear shorter skirts — and just like that, she went from Chinese-American theaters to the famous Forbidden City nightclub. “But did she experience unhappiness during this time? Undoubtedly,” Yang says.

The nightclubs in San Francisco’s Chinatown were at their peak between the 1940s and the ’60s. Chinese-American filmmaker Arthur Dong “recreated” the period in his documentary “Forbidden City USA.” In one scene, a five-piece band is playing in a room lit with lanterns. The musicians are dressed in well-ironed suits, their tuxedo jackets hanging on poles. The emcee warms up the crowd with risqué jokes, and a woman sings American folk songs. Men in top hats dance gracefully, and acrobats perform fire hoop tricks. After a tap dance performance, the lights go out and Yee takes to the stage.

Yang says that Yee had a strong stage presence and could make any audience go wild. This earned her the nickname the “Daring Chinese Dancing Doll.” People traveled long distances to see her perform. The Forbidden City club held three performances a night, at 8 p.m., 10 p.m., and midnight, each lasting 45 minutes. Yee also traveled with her management agency to dance at venues around the country, bringing her national acclaim.

Family business

Despite widespread racial discrimination against Chinese Americans in the U.S., reports of Yee’s success were beginning to appear in the San Francisco newspapers. In “Chinatown Cha-Cha,” at one point she caresses an album filled with photos and articles about her early career. She opens it, looks at a picture of herself, then closes it again. “These are things I’d like to forget,” she says.

The Chinese-American journalist Ben Fong-Torres once commented on the complex atmosphere of the time: “So even though you are the stars of the show, they (white audiences) still feel superior to you and make racist remarks to your face or shout it out from the audience… I think that was pretty difficult for most of these entertainers to take.”

Yang says nightclub performers at that time often had nicknames, typically combining a Chinese prefix with the name of another American celebrity. For example, Yee’s nickname was “Chinese Gypsy Rose Lee,” while her first husband, singer Jimmy Yee, was known as “Chinese Frank Sinatra,” although he was in fact of Korean heritage and had changed his name to better fit in with the predominantly Chinese community.

Coby Yee and her husband, along with a third investor, opened their first nightclub, Dragon Lady, in 1959. Three years later, they bought Forbidden City. Yang says that Yee once described what it was like running the venue: her brother would greet guests at the door in a tuxedo; another relative would play the piano; her younger sister worked as a waitress; and her older sister handled the finances and the kitchen. After school, the younger generation came to help out, washing dishes and cleaning tables.

Yee, who was the manager and lead dancer, would run things at night and rehearse during the day, and she would update the show every six weeks to ensure return customers. However, running a nightclub wasn’t easy. While her daughter was doing her homework, Yee had to deal with drunks at the bar, leading to her developing a lifelong aversion to alcohol.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed at the end of 1943, but Yang says it took about 20 years for its effects to become apparent. Chinese Americans gradually began to work outside Chinatown and were allowed to purchase property in other neighborhoods. As a result, the Chinatown economy declined, affecting tourism, restaurants, and nightclubs.

Around that time, on Broadway, Carol Doda, a white dancer, became the first to remove her bra on stage. People were beginning to find nightclubs wanting, and turned instead to strip clubs. Yee felt Doda had crossed a line. She did not like nudity, and had never really bought into the idea of striptease and exotic dancing. By the late 1970s, due to financial issues and family disputes, Yee had closed down the Forbidden City nightclub and left downtown San Francisco to resettle in San Pablo, in the Bay Area, working primarily as a costume designer while occasionally touring as a dancer.

Late romance

Yang first saw Yee perform in Las Vegas in 2018 during rehearsals for the Grant Avenue Follies, a troupe of retired Chinese-American nightclub dancers. “She was standing on stage wearing a hat and a green fluorescent dress she’d made herself, spinning around and around like a butterfly,” she recalls. “ I thought to myself, ‘Am I dreaming?’ The feeling was so wonderful, so surreal. Here was a butterfly spinning on stage — who then told me she was 92 years old. At that moment, I saw several versions of her at once, both the young and the old Coby.”

Afterward, Yang emailed Yee and tracked her down to a senior living community. She told her about the Chinatowns she had researched, prompting Yee to suddenly exclaim, “You’re not from Chinatown, you’re from China! That’s so far away.” With a speed that neither woman expected, they began to grow close.

After closing the Forbidden City nightclub in 1970, Yee made a living through sewing instead, and remained fascinated with the beauty of Chinese opera costumes. She liked intricate and luxurious things; she would never be seen wearing a simple T-shirt, Yang says.

Yang was particularly impressed with the story of Yee’s relationship with her third husband, Stephen King, which formed the basis of her 2019 short documentary “Coby and Stephen Are in Love.” The two met at a dance club for seniors, and became dance partners. Yee was already in her 70s, while King was just 55.

“If he could not dance well, I would not be with him,” Yee once told Yang. Other than a shared passion for dancing, the couple appeared to have almost nothing in common. Yee felt the need to overhaul King’s wardrobe, becoming his personal stylist, and she would make matching outfits for them to wear on dates. He liked mountaineering; she hated exercise. “We were so different. In reality, Coby would never take off her high heels and go climbing with me,” King told Yang. Yet, love blossomed.

Besides meeting King, another turning point in Yee’s later life was joining the Grant Avenue Follies. For a long time, she had been unwilling to talk about her past as a dancer. However, after the troupe’s first performance in 2015, Yee realized that the dance scene had changed significantly from the 1970s. It was now a true form of self-expression for young people. From that point, she slowly began to come to terms with her past.

Frozen in time

While researching Chinatowns and filming her documentary series on Asian-American women, of which “Chinatown Cha-Cha” is the centerpiece, Yang rented a small apartment in San Francisco. “At night, I edited the film as the director. During the day, I filmed the women’s daily lives,” she says, adding that it was hard to predict what the elderly women would do next.

As it was her first time filming a movie, she wanted to record everything. As a result, she captured hours of footage that did not make the final cut. “There are magic moments in the filming of a documentary,” she explains. “You experience many seemingly banal moments, but when those magic moments happen, as the person behind the camera, you just know that this will transform the banality of that moment into something more.”

Yee’s troupe mostly performed in Chinatowns, sometimes in nursing homes. During a performance at a care facility in Hawaii, some residents were moved to tears. “Seeing these people in their 80s and 90s still able to dance like this, it makes you also want to get up and dance,” Yang says.

In a chat with the troupe members, Yang was sharing her experience of interviewing Chinese immigrants in Cuba when one of the dancers suddenly exclaimed that she’d heard stories about Cuba’s Chinatown since she was young, but she had never had the opportunity to visit. The woman suggested the troupe should travel with Yang on her next visit to the Caribbean. “They told me that the last time a Chinese-American performer had toured in Cuba was in the 1960s,” Yang says.

She started thinking about how meaningful it would be to bring together ethnic Chinese people from both places, and to have them perform on the same stage. So, she took the troupe to Cuba to dance at an old theater that had been converted into a martial arts school. Local Chinese residents had been performing opera at the school when it was empty for years. Yang arranged for a joint performance to “fulfill their dreams.”

When they finally met, the two groups struggled to communicate verbally, as one side spoke Spanish and the other English. But most could speak simple Cantonese, such as counting numbers and saying “delicious.” They all knew the lyrics to the folk song “Molihua,” which they’d learned from their parents, although it was different from the version sung in the Chinese mainland. “Even though they could not communicate easily, they could still connect with one another,” Yang says. “That’s why I had to make this documentary. Only a documentary can authentically capture such moments.”

In late 2019, Yang had planned to return to China for a break before resuming filming in the U.S. However, when the pandemic struck in 2020, everyone was trapped where they were and could only communicate remotely. In August 2020, Yee received the Living Legend Award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame. As the ceremony was held online, Yee put on full makeup and a skirt on the day, and performed in her driveway. She sent a recording of the dance to Yang. “She looked so beautiful,” the filmmaker says.

A week later, in August 2020, Yang received a call from King informing her that Yee had collapsed. She passed away two days later, aged 93. She did not live to see “Chinatown Cha-Cha” screened at the Hawaii International Film Festival or take part in the Grant Avenue Follies’ roadshow to promote the film in China. “But she’s in this film — and she always will be,” Yang says.

Over the six years from the documentary’s production to its release, Yang’s body went through significant changes — she was diagnosed with cancer and lost all her hair after undergoing chemotherapy. But she feels now like she’s been given a new lease of life.

When she was studying in London years ago, Yang compared the local Chinese restaurants there to time capsules, as everything seemed to be frozen in time, stuck in the China that the owners had known before they emigrated. “Documentaries are another kind of time capsule, one that is not affected by the changing times or people,” she says. “They preserve a very real moment in time, along with the details you might not have noticed. Ultimately, it is about people building real emotional connections with other people.”

During the promotional roadshow for “Chinatown Cha-Cha,” an audience member at one event asked Yee’s daughter, Shari, “Did Coby have any regrets in life?” Shari thought for a moment and replied, “No, except for one unfinished dance costume.”

Reported by Qiao Qiao.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Paper. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Vincent Chow; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header and in-text images: all from chinatownchacha.com, unless otherwise stated)