Stepping Gracefully Into Her Identity

[Shana A]

Stepping Gracefully Into Her Identity

BY ELLEN GAMERMAN

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204652904577195471188779752.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

When Jin Xing was last in New York in the early 1990s, the Chinese dancer was a confused young man reckoning with his sexual identity while trying to forge a career on the stage.

Two decades later, Jin Xing has returned to New York a very different person—for starters, she's now a woman. Since undergoing a sex-change operation in Beijing in 1995, the 44-year-old performer and choreographer has rebuilt a reputation in the dance world, abandoning some of the male roles she once performed and building a new kind of celebrity in China partly around her altered identity.