Educational Media Reviews Online

A story about a country’s leading male dancer – and a colonel in the country’s army at that! – who undergoes a sex-change operation and becomes the country’s leading female dancer? And the country in question is post-Mao China? The willing suspension of disbelief that keeps most imagined stories from straying beyond certain boundaries would disallow such a fiction from ever being proposed, but – astonishing as it seems – the above story is true, and comprises the subject of Sylvie Levey’s brilliant documentary film “Colonel Jin Xing: A Unique Destiny.” (Note: Credits on screen, including the film’s title, and directorial personnel, differ from those on the video box!)

Born in Manchuria in 1967 to parents of part-Korean ancestry, the young Jin Xing felt he was different from other boys – not homosexual (so he says in English on camera), but a girl in a boy’s body. At age nine and against his parents’ wishes, he enters the People’s Liberation Army Dance School – where, in addition to learning dance, he receives rigorously intense military training. By age 18 he is named the best male dancer in China. Granted a sojourn abroad where he spends time in New York, he begins seriously to consider a transsexual operation, but it’s only after returning to China four years after the Tiananmen Square disaster that he undergoes surgery, in early 1995. He is so much the master of his – subsequently of her – fate that he asks a friend to film the experience, and we see some very moving contemporary footage.

Three operations over an eight-week period result in a successful gender metamorphosis. A surgical accident, however, causes paralysis in Jin’s left leg (a dancer with a paralyzed leg!), during which time, courageous to the last, she’s the only one to remain optimistic that movement in the leg will ever return. Four months later it does, and Jin goes on to her present success as dancer extraordinaire and director of her own modern dance company in Shanghai. What an extraordinary person she is – given to saying, again on camera, that the transsexual operation is a thing of the last century, now it’s time to talk about her art! (And, in fact, the film tells us, after a long period of treating any deviation from a very narrow sexual norm as pathological or criminal, China has had over 100 sex-change operations performed since Jin’s initial one.)

The film is beautifully made, beautifully photographed, and provides lovely visual testimony to Jin’s ravishing skills as choreographer and dancer, both male and female. It also contains some highly unusual footage. Proud of the success of their erstwhile colleague, the People’s Liberation Army allowed the filmmakers to shoot scenes of young children soldiers, nine to eleven years old, marching in step in the early morning darkness – much as Jin did in his/her youth – and it’s an eerie sight. Gun practice formed part of Jin’s arduous training as well.

Unctuous military officers and a Communist Party official who oversees Jin’s dance company are interviewed – and you don’t need a voiceover to come to the conclusion that PR people are much alike, West or East. Then, apparently on camera, the Communist Party official informs Jin that financing for her next production will be conditional on its aesthetic and narrative content, and Jin is left to meditate on the nature of freedom in China, artistic and other. But she remains optimistic and indomitable – a brilliantly talented human being, the subject of this truly remarkable film.