Burlesque dancing in China: Jenevieve Chang on expat parties, performing for Jackie Chan and reconnecting with her violent dad
The author of new book The Good Girl of Chinatown reveals her glamorous life as a Shanghai burlesque dancer and how an obedient Chinese-Australian daughter was drawn to the extravagant dance form
In her time in Shanghai’s expatriate playground, Chang, who worked there as a burlesque dancer, met film producers who had criminal records in their home countries and out-of-work Australian actors who landed starring roles in Chinese soap operas. Having a white face afforded you cultural capital: foreigners “were automatically offered four times a working wage than a Chinese-looking person”, she says.
When she was asked to fill in for a dancer for a performance in the northeastern city of Yantai, for instance, the nightclub owners were livid that she was Asian – and refused to pay her.
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Chang’s experiences of Shanghai feature in her first book, The Good Girl of Chinatown, which chronicles her time as a dancer in the eponymous burlesque club. The decadent club opened to local fanfare and international media coverage. The proprietor’s vision, Chang says, was to “appeal to this idea of Shanghai once being the ‘whore of the Orient’, where anything could happen, where East meets West”.
Burlesque is a dance that is less about sensing the movement from within than interacting with the expectation of the gaze