I read Naomi Fry's feature on The New Yorker Documentary in a piece titled 'An Aging Burlesque Dacner's Unlikely Romance' (published 14 February 2021). Then I watched the 17-minute trailer of the docufilm produced and directed by Carlo Nasisse and Luka Yuanyuan Wang titled 'Coby and Stephen Are in Love'. The docufilm "traces a partnership forged late in life and steeped in art." The full length indie film is currently in post-production and is set to be released in 2022.
Separated by age, cultural milieu, and temperament—he romantic and unconventional, she no-nonsense and more focussed—King and Yee nonetheless forged a lasting bond, on the dance floor and off.
This is such a beautiful tale of an unlikely 'autumn' romance, between legendary San Francisco burlesque dancer Coby Yee (1926 - 2020) and experimental filmmaker Stephen King when they met in San Francisco in the early 2000s, when Coby was in her early seventies, and Stephen is nearly twenty years her junior. Coby and Stephen danced together for a full decade before she passed, performing right up to her nineties across global cities.
Artist, illustrator and writer Trina Robbins' book titled 'Forbidden City: The Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs' (2010) also dedicated loads of lines Coby Yee, whose nephew Darrell Leong spoke on her behalf. At a height of 4'11", she was described as 'larger than life', and she most certainly is an inspiration, in life and in death. She made a name for herself as a talented dancer and costume-maker in a city in the late 1930s where it's home to a high number of Chinese migrants. (Anti-Chinese sentiments ran high in the 1800s to 1900s.)
Then there was the 'Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs' in San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s, marked by burlesque, or otherwise known as the 'Golden Age of Burlesque', before the audiences' preferences change, and gaudy strip joints came in. The Golden Age of Chinese Nightclubs survived through World War II, and the US-Japanese internment camps. (Talented Japanese dancers like Dorothy Toy had to leave town, and changed their names. She was born Shigeko Takahashi.) She directed and produced revues and managed her own clubs. Then Coby Yee became co-owner of a Chinese nightclub Forbidden City in the 1962, she threw her whole family into working at the club (cooking, washing, sewing, cleaning, dancing, performing, etc), and it was where her equally talented team of dancers entertained the the city till 1970.
I wondered a little at Coby's personal life, love and losses before her final and last partner in Stephen King. Her obituary listed a daughter and a son-in-law, and two deceased husbands. Born in 1926 Columbus, Ohio as one of six siblings to migrant Chinese parents, Coby moved to San Francisco to fulfill her love of dancing and sewing. Coby seemed to have led such a rich life and never stopped dancing. Coby Yee died in August 2020, at ninety-three years old. This film is dedicated to her memory.
On returning to the States, Yang and Nasisse decided to collaborate on a short that would document Yee and King’s relationship, as well as their sense of life lived as art. The camera captures Yee as she works tirelessly at her sewing machine, constructing intricate ensembles for the two of them, and documents King’s art works, for which he cuts out silhouettes of Yee in her Forbidden City glory days, pasting them in a variety of baroque, sometimes fantastic assemblages. The co-directors shot the film quickly, in just a few weeks, following the two dancers to Las Vegas—where they receive a standing ovation while performing at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, dressed in matching spangly outfits sewn by Yee—and to their modest home in San Pablo, north of San Francisco, where every surface is crowded with pictures and mementos, a maximalist mosaic of their preoccupations and obsessions. We see Yee thumbing through scrapbooks of old advertisements, in which her alluring, elaborately adorned figure is accompanied by exoticizing, orientalist epithets: “The Dragon Lady,” “China’s Most Daring Dancing Doll.” The scene calls into question how glorious those glory days really were, and serves as a reminder of the anti-Asian racism that, far from disappearing, has actually been on the rise in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, specifically in the Bay Area, where Asian-American seniors have recently been attacked. (“These are things I like to forget,” Yee says dryly, and closes the scrapbook.)
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