He took nothing with him. He knew they would notice if he did. So he just walked away, quietly and with nothing but $300 cash, his passport and the clothes on his back.
It was a late January afternoon in 2001 when Tian Shuai, a 20-year-old dancer with China’s Guang Zhou ballet company, decided once and for all that he was not going back to China. He had only been in the states one week, but he already knew it was home.
Wearing thick black ski pants, a sweater, a reversible blue down parka and boyish good looks, Tian waited nervously in LAX airport. He was supposed to board a plane bound for Atlanta, the second stop on the company’s international tour. But instead he was planning his escape. He sat clutching his passport, a document the company held at all times—except now—to stop dancers from doing just this. Running away. He finally had the identification needed and with that came the impulse to flee.
His bag was checked and in a backpack next to him were the rest of his belongings--some clothes, a music player, a disposable camera and his toiletries. But those things were not important. He knew if he took the bag it would be too obvious. So he reached in, grabbed all of his cash, got up and walked away. He needed some fresh air, he said.
He spoke not a word of English, but with the help of a calling card, he dialed the only person he knew in the U.S. Du Yuping was his mother’s best friend and lived 3,000 miles away in Flushing Queens, N.Y. He asked if he could stay with her. She said yes. “Teach me something in English,” Tian asked. She told him to get in a cab and say, “Take me to a motel.” And so he walked briskly out of the sliding doors of LAX airport, unable to read the exit sign, got into a cab and said: “Take me to a motel.”
He was scared, he was nervous, but he knew at this point it was too late to turn back.
He needed to get things in order. There was only three hours before the company arrived in Atlanta and realized he was gone. First he must call his mother, a ballet teacher back in China, and break the news.
“Mom, I’m not coming home. I’m going to stay,” he said in Mandarin. “How could you do that? Why didn’t you tell me?” she responded. She was angry and hurt. He understood, but it didn’t change how he felt. He had left home at 11 years old attend a military boarding school in Beijing. Now he was even further away and definitely not coming home. But there was little time for assuaging his mother’s fears. He needed to call his roommate back in China to make sure his belongings were saved.
Prior to traveling, the company insisted the dancers sign contracts stating they would return or else face seizure of their possessions. They could do this because the dancers lived in housing provided by the company.
Tian had a refrigerator, washer, dryer, television and VCR, but he wanted only two things: his pictures and his IDs. “Everything else you can have,” he told his roommate. “Just drag it into your room and say it belongs to you.” Hours after that phone call employees from the company knocked on the door, confiscated all of Tian’s belongings and changed the locks. He was gone.
“I was lucky to get stuff out before they came,” he said.
New York
With a bit of luck, Tian got a $100 plane ticket from Los Angles and arrived in New York City the very next day. It was much colder than Los Angeles and he was thankful he thought to wear his ski pants and parka on that fateful day. In practically every picture taken of Tian during his first six months in America he is wearing those pants and coat.
In Flushing Queens, Du Yuping took him in like a son. She fed him and housed him, helped him find a lawyer and encouraged him to figure out a way to stay legally. Her daughter also lived with them. Because of her Tian found the New York-based Joffrey Ballet School. She had been a student there.
“I was trying to figure out how I was going to stay legally,” he said. “I thought the best bet would be to get a student visa.” So he auditioned—“because it was the only school I knew,” he said—and was awarded a full scholarship.
His mother sent him $2,000 and Tian made it last six months. Du Yuping provided food, and shelter while clothes were given to him by her friends. For Tian, a fashion plate back in China, this was one of the hardest things about letting everything go. “It was sad. I love clothes, I love fashion,” he said.
Slowly he began learning English with the help of an electronic translator Du Yuping bought him in Chinatown and watching television with subtitles. Tian made it his goal to learn 10 new words a day and studied on the train to-and-from ballet class.
After six months of living with Du Yuping and studying at the Joffrey, Tian decided it was time to take responsibility and move out. After half a year practically mute, unable to carry on a conversation in English, he had finally made a few friends at the school and with them moved into an apartment in Jersey City, N.J.
He slept on a mattress on the floor in a room he shared with two other dancers. “Not even the sheets were mine,” Tian said. They were lent by a friend. Taped on the wall next to his bed were three pictures of Tian dancing. They reminded him of what he had come for. Scattered on the wall above his head were Chinese decorations his mother sent to him. They reminded him of what he had left.
To support himself, Tian got two jobs. The first, which he did five days a week in between ballet classes, was putting together shopping carts at 50 cents apiece and sorting boxes of electrical socket parts. “If I could put together 100 [carts] a day I would make $50,” he said. But he preferred to sort the electrical bits. This made him $60 or $70. Sometimes the boxes were too big to fit in the warehouse, forcing him to sort outside in the summer sun. From this task he came home sun burnt and sore.
The second, on Saturday and Sunday, was at a Laundromat in Queens. He worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. But the commute from Jersey City was two hours each way. At first the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, denied him the job. The commute was too long. “It is for your own good,” they said. But Tian needed the work. So he had a friend call-up and lie, saying that Tian had moved to Queens and was living with him. Every Saturday and Sunday Tian woke up at 4 a.m. and returned home at 8 p.m. The 16-hour-day made him $50.
He did all of this while taking three to four ballet classes everyday five days a week. He would wake up in the middle of the night, his legs cramped and in spasms, and have to beat on them until the muscles released. He could have taken fewer classes. But that is not Tian’s style. “I needed to be better than the American dancers,” he said. “Because [the companies] were going to have to go through the trouble of getting me a visa.”
Continue in second column
V-I-S-A spells trouble
Six months after Tian arrived in New York City he found out his request for a student visa had been denied. The lawyer he had paid $200 to file the necessary papers hadn’t even spelled his name correctly on the application and Joffrey had forgotten to fill out the paper work stating he was on scholarship there.
“I was having a breakdown basically,” Tian said. “Because that was my only hope to stay here. All the suffering, all the hard times, I was hanging onto that hope that I would be able to get a student visa and then a work visa.”
Now it was all uncertain. He lost 10 pounds in a week from stress and began suffering panic attacks that jolted him awake a night and sent him running to his bedroom window, where he would thrust his head out gasping for air.
Du Yuping was pressuring him to get a fake marriage, a common solution for those seeking a green card. But this would cost Tian $20,000 to $30,000 and he was not interested. “For me it was about pride,” he said. “I was not going to do that. I thought I was capable of getting a work visa and doing everything on my own.”
At the same time, Edith D’Addario, the director of the Joffrey Ballet School was pressuring him to use a lawyer she trusted. But that would cost Tian $1,000, money he did not have.
Since running away from LAX six months earlier, this was the first time Tian wondered if he had made the right decision. “At that time I was barely surviving with two jobs. I had just enough money to pay for my rent and food,” he said. “I did not know whether I wanted to keep fighting for this.”
Then Joffrey agreed to pay the $1,000 lawyer’s fee if Tian performed in demonstrations on behalf of the school, free of charge. He said yes.
And so he spent the next six months repaying his debt to the school and waiting to see if his student visa would be granted. It was. And there was more to celebrate. Tian had been offered a contract with the Atlanta Ballet where he would make $600 a week. He took it.
A risk rewarded
Today Tian, 29, lives on the 55th floor of an impressive high-rise off Lake Shore Drive. Panoramic views of the lake and the north side of Chicago span the length of his sparse yet sleekly decorated living room. A large flat screen television and state-of-the-art computer bookend the room. His bedroom is a far cry from the mattress on the floor he slept on eight years earlier. The wall of taped pictures has been replaced with floor-to-ceiling windows with views of tree-lined Lake Michigan. In place of his mother’s Chinese trinkets hangs a Franz Kline-esque painting. Topher, his Yorkshire terrier zig-zags the room nipping at my legs.
In the past eight and a half years, Tian has seen his mother for a total of three days, when she came to New York on business. He has seen his father not once. And has not spoken to him since his parents divorced last year. As of now his passport has expired and going back to China would be difficult. But he hopes his mother will come to visit him this July.
He received his green card two and a half years ago and must wait another two and a half to apply for citizenship. After that time he can go to see his mother and family, who all remain in China.
Right now all he can do is try to be a good son. He is buying his mother a new car and sends her a remittance of $1,000 every month.
In the past few years Tian has almost doubled his income by working on the side. Two years ago he was signed to Ford Models, a premier modeling agency. In addition to this he runs his own ballet slipper import business. He buys ballet shoes from China and sells them at a cheaper price than his American counterparts. Now he holds accounts with Atlanta ballet as well as with dancers from the Joffrey and San Francisco Ballet. And if that were not enough, he enjoys buying cheap video games and flipping them for a profit on Amazon.
During that time, Tian has also suffered a hernia and a ruptured appendix, which has necessitated two surgeries and a slew of physical setbacks. He is working to get back in shape and after four years with the Joffrey he is excited about what is yet to come. Tian seems unfazed by obstacles.
Standing in his pristine stainless steel kitchen, cuddling his squirming yorkie, Tian puckers his lips as Topher showers him with wet licky kisses.
“I am happy how my life turned out now,” he said. “I would not want to go through it again. But it made me appreciate what I have now and made me a stronger person today.”