Rain had tapped against the windows all morning, turning Queens into a gray blur. But inside the school auditorium, the light was warm. Ling Tang stood center stage in a purple silk tunic embroidered with roses. Her hair was pulled back, a pink pom-pom bouncing slightly when she turned her head.
She held up a folded fan—bright and colorful—and looked out at two dozen third-graders sitting on the floor. Most had never seen Chinese dance up close. Some had never heard Mandarin spoken outside a restaurant. Ling waited a moment to see if they were ready.
“Before we move,” she said, “tell me something: what do you know about China?”
Hands rose. One student shouted with a laugh: “Sushi!” A few children giggled. Ling smiled. She did not scold the child for being wrong. Instead, she used the moment to explain what she was really doing there.
She was not just teaching dance steps. She was translating a culture—its gestures, history, and rhythm—for a classroom that did not speak the language.
For more than a decade, Ling, 41, a Wuhan-trained dancer and New York-based teaching artist, has worked in public schools across Maryland and New York. She introduces Chinese dance to American children through workshops that end in performances.
Her job is physical—teaching them how to move fans, ribbons, and wrists—but it is also about ideas. She teaches culture as something children can feel in their bodies.
On stage, Ling played music from an old iPod she had carried for ten years. “Molihua” (“Jasmine Flower”) filled the room. She opened her hands slowly, fingers blooming like flowers, and the children followed.
When the music changed to a kung fu rhythm, Ling dropped into a low squat, her weight settling into her legs. She was not asking them to become professional dancers. She was asking them to feel how a different culture moves.
Every few minutes, she rotated the students so each child could stand in the front row. She corrected them gently: a wrist softened, a shoulder lowered, a fan lifted higher.
Her teaching was a series of small translations—turning unfamiliar movements into something the children could understand, and then turning that understanding into confidence.
Becoming a teacher
Long before she stood onstage with American children, Ling was a student in Wuhan. She split her time between a strict school and a dance studio an hour from home. At her competitive high school, classmates measured their futures by test scores. Dance was seen as a backup plan.
“At the time, people often assumed that choosing art meant your grades were not good enough,” she said.
She learned discipline early: how to repeat a movement until no visible mistake remained. At the same time, she began to understand how much persistence it took to treat art as serious work.
After high school, she moved with her father to Maryland. She began at a community college, taking English classes before moving into university-level work. The adjustment expanded the way she thought about dance.
College asked her to read, write, and make arguments about performance—not only rehearse it. Classes in communication and performance theory gave her a vocabulary for explaining what movement could mean.
In one speech class, she gave a presentation on Chinese dance. For the first time, she realized she could explain dance as knowledge, not just show it.
“It’s not just teaching movement,” she said. There is a difference between drilling a sequence and helping students understand what the sequence means.
Dance became a language she could carry from the stage into the classroom, translating technique into explanation.
What “Chinese dance” means
Chinese dance, as Ling first learned it, followed a clear visual logic: symmetry, precision, and many bodies forming one picture. The audience saw the group before the individual.
Ling loved the order and beauty of that collective image. As she kept dancing, however, she began to wonder whether the specific person inside the group could also be visible.
She came to see Chinese dance as a living form—one that continues to grow as each generation adds its own ideas and experiences.
Later study in modern dance introduced a different set of questions. Teachers and classmates did not only ask whether a movement looked clean; they asked why it existed.
Why repeat this gesture? What is its purpose? If the goal is only to impress—“wow, so skilled”—then, some instructors told her, it risks becoming more like acrobatics than art.
She learned that meaning could live inside stillness, awkwardness, or movement that was not conventionally pretty. A body standing still could be dancing. A body rolling on the floor could be dancing—if it was communicating something true.
That shift, from spectacle to intention, reshaped her teaching. It pushed her toward a form of Chinese dance that could live outside the holiday stage.
“I don’t want Chinese dance to exist only as decoration for holidays,” she said. “I want it to be seen as contemporary art.”
A translator
Ling’s week often moves among several classrooms, workshops, and performance spaces. In public schools, she teaches mostly in English. She travels with a backpack full of fans, ribbons, and worksheets, teaching children who have never been asked to imagine their wrists as petals or their palms as water.
“Many of the kids can’t speak Chinese,” she said. “But they see me and feel recognition.”
In those spaces, she is more than an instructor. She becomes a reference point: a living connection to a culture her students may be related to but cannot easily access through language.
Her classrooms are modern in other ways, too. She does not assign roles based on gender. She trains older students to lead warm-ups. She draws diagrams for classroom teachers who have never danced.
For Ling, being a teacher means listening. “You can’t just demand discipline,” she said. “You have to explain why.”
That “why” is where the translation happens. It is the moment a fan becomes more than a prop. It becomes a reason.
Between classes are the parts of the work few people see. She reties her hair in a mirror, straightens her clothes, repacks the props, and turns toward the next group of students.
Dance is not the only form she teaches. At Think!Chinatown, she has led paper-cutting workshops, sharing a craft she first learned by watching her mother’s hands.
When the classroom moved online
On March 14, 2020, schools in New York closed. The classroom, Ling’s most physical space, collapsed into a laptop screen. Students practiced in narrow bedrooms and shared apartments. Camera angles flattened their movement; internet lag broke their timing.
Like many teaching artists, she tried to adapt, but she felt how much dance depends on shared space.
Online teaching, she said, is “very limited.” You can demonstrate steps, but you lose the architecture of attention: who is drifting, who is copying without understanding, who needs the group to feel brave.
The experience clarified what her work had always depended on: people sharing one room, noticing one another, and learning through small adjustments that are difficult to see through a screen.
As her work became increasingly rooted in local classrooms, one principle remained constant. She wanted culture to feel immediate, specific, and human to the children in front of her.
Dancing for people in transit
Her work does not stay in classrooms. During Lunar New Year, she performs with the New York Ba Ban Chinese Music Society at Penn Station, one of the city’s busiest transit spaces. Dance and live Chinese music briefly occupy the concourse.
A red ribbon trails across the floor. Tang stops inside the flow of commuters, and travelers who do not speak Chinese pause to watch. For a moment, they are drawn into the dance.
One room at a time
Back in the auditorium, the class wound down toward dismissal. Students folded fans, passed ribbons down the row, and adjusted their sneakers. Ling knelt to tie a child’s shoe.
A student tripped and laughed, and the room hummed with ordinary sounds: chairs scraping, children talking over one another, teachers signaling time.
This, too, was part of her work—the insistence that culture is not only spectacle. It is care. It is repetition. It is the quiet trust built in a room where a child can shout “sushi” and still be invited into the lesson.
When she talks to younger dancers and artists now, her advice begins not with technique, but with direction.
“Be yourself,” she tells them. If you are doing something you truly love, she says, it will not feel like work.
She urges them to learn languages, to write, to read, and to understand how arts institutions work. An artist, she insists, must be able to explain clearly what they are doing and why it matters.
Outside, the rain had not stopped. Ling zipped her jacket, pulled on a red hat, and slung a backpack over her shoulder. The stage props stayed behind: fans, ribbons, and bright cloth folded into a box.
She stepped into the wet afternoon carrying a simple belief: culture stays alive when one person teaches another, one room at a time.
One room at a time.
