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.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa


Author Bios from The Difference in Butterflies Web site

Marilyn Meeske Sorel

Marilyn Meeske Sorel has published fiction and non-fiction using pseudonyms as well as her own name. She is a Pulitzer Prize nominee for a six- part print series ‘Vera, My Child’, a story of the death camps. She taught at UCLA, Dept of the Arts for some years where she conducted writing seminars. During this time Ms. Sorel hosted and produced AUTHOR, AUTHOR, for KCRW fm Los Angeles, a popular program featuring Ms. Sorel in conversation with writers. She currently lives in New York State and is awaiting the re-issue of her romantic thriller THE WHITE ISLAND.

Yung Yung Tsuai

Yung Yung Tsuai (co-author)

is currently teaching at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. She came to the United States on a scholarship directly granted to her from Martha Graham after a meeting in Taipei City, Taiwan in 1970. Since then she has worked with the Daniel Nagrin Workgroup, Pearl Lang and Dancers, the Vanaver Caravan, and Susan Stroman. She founded the Yung Yung Tsuai Dance Company in 1980. She has taught, performed and worked as a visiting artist for NYU, George Washington University, Brigham Young University and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. In the past three decades she has worked with the Yangtze Repertory Theater, La Mama Theater, and the Papermill Playhouse among others.

Critics have described her work as: "As rich in pain as in sweetness..." by Burt Supree, The Village Voice; "Blending the atmosphere of ancient China with a modern dance vocabulary..powerful and poignant..." By Doris Diether, Villager Downtown; "Fine gradations of delicate and forceful movement…fascinating..." by Jack Anderson, The New York Times.