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Shanghai Tango

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Shanghai Tango

By: Jin Xing
Narrated by: Keith Brockett
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About this listen

At the age of nine, Jin Xing entered a military academy. He knew that he had been born to dance and, in Mao's China, it was the army that provided the best training. His exceptional talent was soon recognised; by the time he was eighteen, he was regarded as the best principal dancer in China. He won a scholarship to study in the United States where he discovered a new world of contemporary dance, and made both a new identity and a decision that was to change his life - and would shake the whole of China: Jin Xing underwent a sex-change. He became a woman - and then a mother and, later, a wife.

The incredible adventure of this solider with a young girl's heart was suppressed by Chinese authorities for years, but now Jin Xing can finally tell her story. From the regimented world of the Red Army, to Europe's most elegant boulevards; from the small Manchurian village of her birth, to the dizzying excess of New York; Jin Xing's story has all the drama and energy of a classic ballet - and a happy ending.

©2007 Jin Xing (P)2008 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Biographies & Memoirs Entertainment & Performing Arts Gender Studies Social Sciences

Editor reviews

Australian actor Keith Brockett has an expressive, tender voice that sits so high on the vocal scale the listener might think the voice belongs to a woman. His voice, then, is perfectly suited to perform this memoir of gender identity, courage, and politics.

In 1967, Jin Xing was born in the People’s Republic of China and assigned the gender "male". As a child, however, Jin experienced strong transsexual desires and believed she was a female trapped in the wrong body – "God’s mistake", as she has called it. After rising to prominence as a ballet dancer and attaining the rank of colonel in the Chinese army, Jin underwent sex reassignment surgery and attained a rare official Chinese designation of "trans-woman". This is her story.

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