Footnote to History

By Si-lan Chen Leyda

Published by Dance Horizons  (ISBN 0-87127 134 6)

Copyright 1984

Cover jacket introduction:

If Si-lan Chen were not a dancer, her life story would still make fascinating reading. Born in Trinidad to a Chinese father and a mother whose roots were African and French, Si-lan was at various times in her life a British Subject, a Chinese dancer and a Soviet artist, usually depending on the tenor of the times, on where she had been and where was at the moment …

Born in the first decade of the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Chen was separated early from her father, a Chinese diplomat who visited his wife and children when his schedule permitted. Her formative years were spent in the Caribbean, then England, then China, the Soviet Union, and prewar Germany. Eventually she married an American and ended up in New York.

As the daughter of a diplomat, once she was reunited with her father more or less permanently, she had entrée to many inner political circles, meeting in her adolescence such historic figures as Madame Sun Yat-sen, General Chiang Kai-shek (who was later to place a price on her father’s head, causing the family to flee China), Mikhail Borodin and many others. In Moscow, she studied dance with the great Kasian Goliezovsky, the brilliant but impossible former pupil of Fokine and classmate of Nijinsky…

Her story weaves in and out of country after country, as Chen dances her way through political revolutions and counter-revolutions, social upheavals and cataclysms inside her globe-trotting family, within which partings – often with no assurance when or if loved ones would be reunited – were a fact of life…

Through it all, she emerges a truly extraordinary woman, a born and thoroughly committed artist, a veritable citizen of the world whose life has been an adventure, vividly told.

Dedication:

The memory of Agatha Ganteaume Acham – Chen, my mother

Page 1:

… As European disease and ambition weakened the Indians, hardier Africans were brought over.

It took a desperate love of life to survive the stinking holds of the slave ships. This is how my remote African ancestors arrived in his American home. Another ancestor came in a more elegant vessel. Admiral Ganteaume sought and found refuge in the West Indies when the families of Napoleon’s supporters were forced to flee France.

In China, Chen Kan-chuan, a native of Shunte hsien, Kwangtung province, fought in the army of the Taiping rebels and was forced to flee to the West Indies when that revolt failed. Making his living as a barber, and know as A-kan, he went first to Jamaica and then to Trinidad where he settled in the southern part of the island. The given name of the head of the family, A-kan, became corrupted to Acham, and my family name Chen was pushed aside to household use only.

Page 2:

My Chinese grandmother … continued her active management of a shop and some land until the age of 75. When I last saw her she still slept with her coffin under her bed – to prolong her life.

My father, Eugene Chen, was the eldest son and the old lady’s favorite. She sent him to Port-of-Spain to study law at Queen’s Royal College, where he graduated with honors and then went to London to be admitted to the bar. He returned to Trinidad to become one of its leading solicitors and to marry a girl he had had his eyes on since his student days.

Within the walls of St. Joseph’s Convent, my mother, Agatha Ganteaume, had spent her childhood conducting a one-woman reign of terror. She had constantly shocked the nuns by refusing to deny that she had a body and absolutely refusing to bathe in her underwear.

The serious and methodical Eugene had fallen in love with the gay, mischievous Agatha. But the Chinese are extremely race-conscious, rarely marrying outside their own race. When my father announced his intentions toward Agatha Ganteaume, there was a storm of protest from family and relations. My mother possessed a square jaw, and my father was also obstinate, so they were married.

Having become a successful solicitor, father made regular trips to London on business. He bought St. Isidore, a cocoa plantation, and built mother an age-defying stone house, one of the first in Port-of-Spain, importing the blocks of gray stone from the neighboring island of Barbados. The house was named Kem-lin, their first child, a girl.

Kem-lin died at the age of five, but she was never forgotten, even by those of us children who were born long after her death. Mother and father always held up the miraculous Kem-lin as an impossible ideal for our behavior and goodness. I pity poor Percy, who was born during the reign of the saintly Kem-lin. He must have had a hard time of it, for Kem-lin not only dominated my parents but the entire household …

Page 3:

In the years between Percy’s birth and mine, there were some hazy infants who grew tired of this world very quickly and left behind them only names and nicknames to be re-used. Other families have a normal, simple attitude towards names, but our family wasn’t so easily satisfied. In the first place, all the children had two official names – a Chinese name and an Anglicized version of the Chinese name, for baptism. Besides these there was invariably a nickname to shut out outsiders. For example, my Chinese name is Si-lan, but I was baptized, went to school and grew up as Sylvia, and my family nickname I is Titta. The following child was named I-wan, baptized Bernard, and nicknamed Jack, after an earlier boy who had died. Since Si-lan means Western Orchid Flower, it was natural for my sister, born much later, to be named Yu-lan – Sister of the Orchid Flower! This was Anglicized into Yolanda, and she was known as Yone. Percy, whose Chinese name is Pen-nan, brought the whole name problem to a naturally absurd climax with a solution of his own. When anyone asked him his name, he would rattle off with a staggering speed, “Percy Joseph Lionel Vincent Brown Malony Lancelot Acham!” We settled this by calling him P.J.