| Reviews
1: Eva Yaa Asantewa (http://Infinitebody.blogspot.com/2008/03/difference-in-butterflies.html)
Arts journalist published since 1976. Poet and essayist. Psychic counselor and metaphysician specializing in Tarot and transformative modalities. Wants her post-life to be as a fairy godmother to the world: granting wishes, rescuing lost kittens and righting wrongs.
InfiniteBody, Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Difference in Butterflies
Perhaps in keeping with today's insect theme, I have just finished The Difference in Butterflies. This memoir by Nanjing-born dancer and Martha Graham teacher Yung Yung Tsuai and co-author Marilyn Meeske Sorel (iUniverse, 2007) is, as advertised, a highly cinematic tale. It immediately pulls the reader into a human story full of emotion, drama, and color that rushes at your senses.
You feel for the child at the center of this story, sensing her anxiety and her pride. Tsuai's family escapes dictatorship but cannot escape the hell of their own punishing relationships. The brightly-talented, repressed and exploited dancer longs for acceptance for herself alone. Instead she gets the following assessment from her grandmother: "You are the garbage picked out by this misfortunate fate."
According to her account, Tsuai's father was an angry, abusive man and unfaithful to his wife, but he was also an appealing storyteller, and so is his daughter, retaining into adulthood her childlike, honest openness. Seeing The Wizard of Oz, she and her mother fall hard for Judy Garland. "On the wall, above the board, we tacked a poster of Dorothy and friends," she writes. "I conversed with them whenever I felt troubled."
As time passes, the young woman will come to need stronger therapies to deal with her trauma and with challenging adult relationships. Primal Scream, for instance, "worked, allowing many of us to vent buried wounds...primal was an underground excavation with loud explosions." She also turned to channel Shepherd Hoodwin and found his work quite liberating, although her mentions of it come quite late in the book and are frustratingly sketchy. Oddly sketchy, too, is much sense, beyond glimpses, of the substance of her career in dance. And until near the end of the book, there's precious little information about the troupe that she and her husband nurtured, and then only as background to the narrative of their financial and marital problems.
Unfortunately, the book is marred by odd errors that should have been caught by a copyeditor. References to "Ruth St. Denise" and "Helen Tamari," are glaring examples. A breathless description of a Graham performance--"They tripped the light so fantastic they took away the audience's breathe"--is indeed breathtaking.
The Difference in Butterflies is ultimately about transformation and the surprise of long-sought happiness lurking within one's deepest instincts. An imperfect tale, it nevertheless makes one cheer with relief for its teller.
2: DanceTeacher (dance magazine)
Memoirs/Biographies
APRIL 2008
In a Nutshell: A good book to recommend to dancers interested in world history.
In 1970, Tsuai arrived in New York City after being recruited by danceicon Martha Graham in her native Taipei. Suddenly free of the societal restrictions imposed by Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek and the controlling parents she had supported, the dancer struggled to find her place in the big city. While the text sometimes is a bit choppy, readers will experience the ups and downs in the life of a professional dancer/choreographer who, with the help of Graham and an unconventional psychotherapist, Shepherd Hoodwin, escapes outer and inner oppression to find her own identity as a free woman.
Though not entirely dance-focused, the book provides a historical look at life under the pressure of war as well as one woman's bravery and determination to rise above her circumstances.
3: Mark Sacharoff (msacharo@temple.edu)
a playwright & English professor
WENDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2008
This is a tale of two countries, Taiwan and America. Few well-known books have been written that take place in Taiwan, so American readers for once get a vivid picture of the country during the fifties—the sights, sounds, customs, and colors. Ghosts and witches abound folk religion and folk tales play a large role in people’s lives.
Yung Yung Tsuai, the memoirist, suffers a wretched childhood, downgraded by her grandmother as the “dead slave-girl” and terrorized by her father, who holds her over a well and threatens to throw her in if she doesn’t stop crying. Yet, her dancing makes her a child star on television from the age of five on, a fate that she does not much appreciate. When she meets Martha Graham, she makes the trip to the U.S. to pursue a dancing career on scholarship. By then, she is plunged into a culture in marked contrast to her own--the wild and frenetic culture of the sixties, and she becomes transformed into a bohemian--smoking pot, using LSD, taking on lovers, and having an abortion. She meets Martin, who is from a rich family from Westchester, but who is very much manipulated by his powerful parents. Yung Yung meets some of the antiwar leftists of the Vietnam period and even smokes pot with William Kunstler, the premier defender of left-wingers who got into trouble.
In place of ghosts and witches, there are Primal Scream Therapy and the use of a medium, upon both of which Yung Yung depends for emotional relief. Her career in dancing also has its turbulence, as she oscillates between performance, teaching, and periods of despondency. Her financial situation is often precarious, and the couple often reluctantly has to fall back on Martin’s rich, domineering parents. As Yung Yung grows older, however, a certain maturity sets in.
This memoir has some poetic and colorful passages. Yung Yung has a decided artistic sensibility, for she is continually observing scenes from life and composing choreography out of them. Marilyn Meeske Sorel has taken the raw memoir material and skillfully organized it into lucid and often lyrical prose.
4: Molly Cheek
actress (major film credit: American Pies)
SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 2008
I just finished reading your outstanding memoir and wanted to tell you how moved I was. Your ability to impart the profound loneliness at the core of all of us is unique and quite an accomplishment. It is a very poignant tale and very brave of you to expose your soul and your psychic struggles. The intimacy, ultimately, is what makes it so relatable.
I thank you for sharing your story and revealing so much. What a wonderful gift you've given to all who are privilaged to read your words.
5: Eva Perrotta
dancer/choreographer from France
FRIDAY, FEBRYARY 1, 2008
I haven't been so hooked by a book for a long time .
I would like to thank you for your honesty, your open spirit, and your generosity.
I was very touched by your raw emotion, at the same time your delicate vulnerability.
The Difference in Butterflies is talking directly to my body .
The experience of reading this book is profound and the images are strong, cinematic.
Thank you for allowing yourself to be naked.
Thank you for reminding me that we all look alike when we have the freedom to share our truth...
Much love,
6: Elizabeth Hoover
a student of Michael Teachings
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2008
It is a single act of power!
This act of power is assisting me in my own spiral upwards.
Thank you for your beautiful prose and indicated movement within the text of your story.
Thank you for your courage in completing your act of power.
This act of power is in the Native American sense of power.
It is an act of clear courage that assists others as they journey their journey.
Thank you!
7: Kathryn Schwenger
A student of Michael Teachings
MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2008
Last night I finished reading The Difference in Butterflies– “A Chinese dancer’s memoir of her flight from inner and outer tyranny’”, by Yung Yung (Tsaui Lerner) – and I am still feeling somewhat in awe and blown away by this book! While I purchased it several weeks back, I was only able to get around to starting it last week and I have been enthralled!
First, Yung Yung, thank you so much for letting me know about your published autobiography - I thoroughly enjoyed reading it – and in fact often couldn’t put it down when I should have, continuing to read long after I should have turned out the bedside lamp! Your story is mesmerizing and inspiring. I am in awe of what you have accomplished, and thank you so much for allowing me insight into who you are and how you have found yourself.
Second, this book is a wonderful read! It offers an unexpectedly intimate portrait of the inward and outward journey of a woman trying to find herself, not just in several different countries, but through different cultures and generations. I found myself re-living her experiences with her. As the cover quote says, this book is indeed cinematic, and would make a great movie!
8: Glenn Stewart
I am completely addicted to Yung's book "The Difference in Butterflies.” I sit in the local diner
reading it for hours, and they almost have to throw me out. Sometimes, I will read a page 2 or even 3 times because the words and images are so colorful. They literally jump off the page, as a dancer
might do.
I recommend everyone to run, not walk, to their local or online bookstore and get this book. It is an amazing story, as well as being a true one.
Regards,
Glenn
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