Jin Xing: from Chinese army officer to dancing TV stardom

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/10/jin-xing-chinese-army-dancing-tv


Jin Xing: 'Everything I do I choose – no matter how tough or whatever failure.' Photograph: Dirk Bleicker

Interviewing Jin Xing is tiring enough: her emphatic but accelerated delivery fills pages of a notebook within minutes. Being her must be truly exhausting. Her starring role in a Shanghai play has come to a close, but there's a new contemporary dance production; a television talkshow to host; guest spots as a judge on a TV talent contest; and three young children to mother.

That's just this autumn. She has crammed much more into her life, partly thanks to the fearsome military discipline forged as a colonel in the People's Liberation Army performance troupe. She may be the only acclaimed contemporary dancer capable of blowing up a bridge. Though she is just 43, Jin's life has spanned numerous roles, two continents and, most famously, both genders.

"All over the world, it's very tough for people to accept it," she says of her gender reassignment surgery.

But in China, which remains in some ways highly conservative, her frankness is almost unique: "Homosexuals are like a small island. Transgender [people] are a tiny island."