Shanghai Tango by Jin Xing with Catherine Texier

Jin Xing is a former prima ballerina, one of the brightest stars of the Shanghai Ballet. But her journey to international fame was fraught with difficulty, because Jin Xing was in fact born a man.

From an early age she was intensely uncomfortable with her gender - a young boy dreaming of becoming a ballerina and a princess. Unable to understand or put words to these feelings, she immersed herself in ballet dancing, her first love. Before long, her precocious talent was noted and at the age of nine, in spite of her parents' concerns, she joined the People's Liberation Army Dance Corps. There, she received both dance and military training and attained the rank of Colonel.

The curtains opened on a new act in her life when, at the age of nineteen, she received an arts scholarship to study modern dance in New York. While there she discovered for the first time that it was possible to change sex. She took the singularly courageous decision to return to China to undergo one of the first full sex-change operations the country had ever witnessed. The dream she had nurtured from youth - of becoming a woman - finally became a reality.

As dramatic, graceful and deeply felt as a pas de deux, Shanghai Tango is an inspiring and compelling account of growing up in a body that feels alien and of braving pioneering surgery in Communist China.

Genres: Nonfiction -  Memoir - LGBT - Asia - China
Condition: Good
Published: First published 2005. This edition published in 2007 by Atlantic Books
Pages: 195
ISBN: 9781843546320
Weight: 330g