If We Always Look Back

“Don’t talk about it.”

That was what Dian Dong Chen’s grandmother used to say whenever she asked about the past.

The stories were always there, just out of reach, of immigrants who left southern China for America in the late 1800s, of grocery stores and laundries, of long workdays and quieter forms of survival. They were stories that didn’t often appear in textbooks, and in the family itself, they were rarely spoken aloud.

For much of her childhood, silence felt like inheritance.

Decades later, it became something she would spend her life trying to break.

The Dong family’s American story begins around 1880, when Dian’s paternal great-grandfather arrived from Taishan, China, as a merchant. At the time, Chinese immigrants lived under the constraints of exclusion laws that restricted entry and separated families. Merchants were among the few who could bring relatives with them, and that exception allowed the family to take root in the United States.

Like many immigrants of the era, they worked wherever they could: grocery stores, restaurants, laundries, moving across cities from California to Chicago, Boston, Salem, and eventually New York.

Even their name changed in the process. Immigration officials recorded “Dong” based on the pronunciation of a village dialect, a small alteration that would become permanent.

On her mother’s side, the family story stretches back even further.

In 1864, a nineteen-year-old named Yip Sang left China during the Gold Rush era. He did not find gold. Instead, he found work: washing dishes, cooking, rolling cigars, selling coal, working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and eventually building a successful import-export business in Vancouver. Over time, he helped establish what would become Chinatown in the city.

But success did not erase hardship for later generations.

Dian’s maternal grandmother was widowed at twenty-eight with five children during the Great Depression. She refused to rely on family support, working long hours in Chinese grocery stores while raising her children alone. She also helped other immigrant women write letters home, moving between Chinese and English as a quiet form of service to her community.

Her life, like many in the family, was defined less by recognition than by endurance.

Dian’s father carried that history into a different American moment.

He served as a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, then studied engineering at Pratt Institute. But despite technical training and service, he faced limits familiar to many Chinese Americans of his generation: advancement often stopped at a certain point.

So he turned to something else.

Art.

He became a museum curator. Dian’s mother became an art teacher. Their home was shaped by painting, creativity, and the expectation that each child would find their own path.

It was in that environment that Dian eventually chose dance.

She studied at The Juilliard School, training under leading figures in modern dance. There, she met H.T. Chen, introduced by dance educator Martha Hill. The two would become partners in life and in art.

They could have built conventional careers in performance. Instead, they asked a different question:

What happens if dance is used not just to perform, but to remember?

In 1979, they founded Chen Dance Center in New York’s Chinatown. It became a company, a school, and a community space all at once.

For nearly five decades, Dian Chen has taught children in Chinatown, built education programs, and brought Chinese American history into classrooms across New York City. Through partnerships and curriculum work, she has helped shape how these histories are taught in public schools.

H.T. Chen developed choreography focused on Chinese American labor, immigration, and identity — stories that rarely appeared on American stages.

Together, their work has always moved between performance and preservation.

One of their most significant projects took them far from New York.

For three years, they traveled through Mississippi, Alabama, and other parts of the American South researching the history of Chinese immigrants who had lived and worked there after the Civil War. Many ran grocery stores or small businesses. Others worked as laborers. Most lived in relative isolation, largely absent from mainstream historical narratives.

The project became a dance work titled South of Gold Mountain.

In the field, the research often began cautiously.

At first, families were reserved. Then Dian would speak in Taishanese, a village dialect carried through generations.

Something shifted.

“Then they consider you family,” she recalled.

People invited them into their homes. Hotel reservations were canceled. Family albums were brought out from closets and drawers—sepia photographs of storefronts, weddings, and children standing in front of grocery counters.

“They actually really wanted to talk about it,” H.T. Chen said. “They’d been invisible their whole lives.”

Those conversations became movement on stage.

In one section of the work, dancers repeatedly try to move forward, only to be blocked by others stepping into their path.

“You want to go forward,” H.T. Chen said, “but sometimes society pulls you back.”

The choreography does not illustrate history so much as embody it: obstacles, interruptions, persistence.

For audiences, the work is not only about the past.

It is also about what remains unspoken.

One interviewee recalled being denied medical treatment in the South because she was Chinese, even while her family had donated money to the same hospital. The contradiction sits quietly inside the broader story: exclusion and contribution existing side by side.

For Dian, these stories are not simply historical records. They are reminders of how easily lives can disappear from public memory.

“I think it’s a real American story,” she said. “It talks about civil rights and perseverance.”

That belief now shapes her daily work.

In Chinatown classrooms and community studios, children learn ballet and modern dance. But they also learn stories: about immigration, labor, family, and place. Movement becomes a way of holding history that might otherwise be forgotten.

Most of the children will not become professional dancers. That was never the point.

The point is memory.

Looking back across generations, the pattern is not linear progress, but accumulation.

One generation worked to survive.

Another to build stability.

Another to gain education and artistic expression.

And then, with Dian and H.T. Chen, a shift: the decision to turn private memory into public story.

Not through books or monuments, but through bodies moving across a stage.

Growing up, Dian’s grandmother used to say, “Don’t talk about it.”

For much of the twentieth century, silence was a form of protection.

Now, on America’s 250th anniversary, Dian’s life offers a different answer.

She talks about it.

She teaches it.

She dances it.

And in doing so, she helps ensure that a country’s history is large enough to hold the people who built it quietly, long before anyone thought to ask their names.

Author’s Note: This essay was prepared using publicly available interviews, biographies, and historical materials. The author plans to conduct additional interviews and field reporting for a longer feature version of this story.