American Thought Leaders - What Is Shen Yun? An Exclusive, Inside Look With Leading Shen Yun Artists | Special Episode

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

At a time when much of the performing arts seem to be on the decline, one company has experienced a meteoric rise.In less than two decades, Shen Yun Performing Arts has grown from one to eight companies touring the globe simultaneously—each with its own live orchestra. Shen Yun now travels to 200 cities and performs in front of over one million audience members each year.These artists are driving a restoration of authentic Chinese culture—yet they are banned in China.In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, we get an exclusive, inside look at the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company—through the eyes of its artists.How has Shen Yun achieved its remarkable success? What is the secret to its approach?And why does the Chinese regime feel threatened by their performances?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If you want to achieve greatness, there's always certain sacrifices they have to make. At a time when the performing arts seem to be on the decline, one company is experiencing a meteoric rise. If you imagine the canvas came to life, if you could hear the music, if you could see the colours come to life. In less than two decades, Shen Yun has grown from one to eight equally large companies touring the world simultaneously, each with its own orchestra. There's the mental aspect and also the physical aspect. You have to train every part of your body

to jump, flip, dance. They now travel to over 200 cities a year and perform in front of over 1 million audience members. I want my audience to walk out of the auditorium feeling better than when they walked in. So how has Shen Yun achieved this success? What is the secret to its approach? In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, we get an exclusive, inside look at the world's premier classical Chinese dance company. All the materialistic things people try to pursue, it's not gonna last forever.

What lasts forever are the things you have inside. They're driving a restoration of authentic Chinese culture, yet they are banned in China. It's something that the CCP has tried to destroy. So what is motivating the artists behind this global phenomenon? There's something more noble than us.

There's a lot of wisdom that you can draw upon. Artists from the Renaissance period, they spent years on just one piece of art. But what they came up with would go on to inspire people for generations. That's what we're trying to achieve. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. William Lee, it's such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me, Jan. For many of the audience members, it's unexpected that a show that focuses on traditional Chinese culture and dance and expression would be made in America. Right. When I tell people that Shen Yun is made in America,

a lot of people don't believe it. They think we're from China, people who don't understand us. And it's like a breath of fresh air when you come out of China where you're scared to say what you truly believe. But in America, you can speak freely. It goes back to how Shen Yun was founded in 2006

by a group of artists who flee China because they wanted freedom of belief. And that's pretty much the American dream. You know, you're a refugee, you come to America, you start with nothing. And then you build up your own company, you build up your life from scratch. And it's actually kind of astonishing in a way, because this is a time where performing arts are not growing at the moment at all, right? And Shen Yun is. Shen Yun's really become a global phenomenon. I don't think there's anyone who I talk to that haven't heard of Shen Yun before.

So you've been with Shen Yun for quite some time. Yes. How many shows have you done? I've been touring since 2007. And every year we put on about 100 performances per company. So I think I have 1,500 performances under my belt, at least. That's incredible. So this is a wonderful opportunity here on American Thought Leaders to talk to a series of Shen Yun artists.

It's not something I've really had a chance to do before. And of course, you are a principal dancer, but you're also a teacher, which is very interesting. I want to talk to you about that. Before we go there, tell me a little bit about who we're going to talk to today. Yeah, today we have principal dancers who have been with Shen Yun for a very long time, veterans Peter Huang and Angelia Wong. Some of your viewers might even recognize their faces from billboards or posters from some of our past season advertising. And like me, both of them studied

at the New York-based Feitian Academy of the Arts and earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Classical Chinese Dance from Feitian College in Cutterbackville, New York. We also have Marilyn Yang, Jesse Browdy, and Lillian Parker. They are all rising stars who have

received international dance awards and have been accepted to study at Feitian and Toru Shinyun as part of their practicum. And because we also have live music at our shows, we also have one of our musicians, a violinist, Sarah Veazey. So I want to take you to the beginning of a show, the first show of a season. You've been through a few seasons now. And so what's going through your mind? Excitement, I guess. In different cities, different countries, you feel a little different. And then to bring a whole new program to the audience. We're really looking forward to the audience's reaction. We wonder, oh, if this year's program, are the audience going to like them? Are they going to understand what we're trying to convey and all that? So tell me a little bit about the energy just before a show is about to begin.

Do you get nervous? I'm always nervous. There's always some butterflies. I remember one movie director, I think, he said something about there's a beauty of a live performance because there's an exhilar a live performance because there's a acceleration that comes from success, but it also comes with a Certain level of fear or faith of failure because you only have one chance

But if you ever get a chance to be on the side stage while we're performing you can see everyone Like we're saying hey, let's go go let's do well when you have the whole team with you it's much easier to overcome the mental pressure so before you became a dancer you wanted to be a pro basketball player how does what happens in Shen Yun and Shen Yun training relate to elite sports training, like might be in basketball? The similarities between the two fields, I'll say, is the physicality. The interesting thing for classical Chinese dance is that we use natural muscles, which is the muscles that we use while walking, climbing stairs, running, playing sports. So being able to train basketball at a young age actually helped me.

After being accepted to Feiti Academy of Arts, and then graduating, going to college, and becoming a Shaman dancer. Looking back, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, I guess. And so that's it? And then life changed? I mean, tell me more. I started dancing when I was 14 years old. Before that, I had been playing baseball for roughly seven years. And the thing about baseball is,

it's not a very physically demanding sport. There's not much high paced activity going on in baseball. And then when I joined Shenron, when I became a dancer, you have to train every part of your body to be able to do everything, jump, flip, dance. There's a lot of flexibility involved. I guess for many years, because my grandfather was into baseball, my dad liked baseball. I guess for many years because my grandfather was into baseball,

my dad liked baseball, and so for many years it was always my dream to go pro, to go professional as a baseball player. Until I saw that Shen Yun show. I think it was the spring of 2018. I saw the passion in everybody's faces. I saw that they genuinely loved what they were doing. And that kind of changed my view. I guess I wanted to do something a little bit more meaningful, like more impactful.

I wanted to inspire people and change people in a way that kind of I was inspired and changed. And I guess that's kind of what moved me to become a dancer, to be like, okay, this is what I want to do. Most of the Shen Yun performers are Chinese. And I can't help but notice that you may not be all Chinese, at least.

I was born and raised in the West. I had pretty much no concept of Chinese culture. And that's what we're doing is a Chinese dance form. And at first, when I started dancing the first few years I Could copy the movements I could do them with relative accuracy. It's just for some reason there was something missing This just felt a little bit off. I was just a little bit different than my peers And so how did you overcome that it just came back to?

studying ancient Chinese history, kind of diving into the histories of certain characters, or even not certain characters, just like the histories of different dynasties, the whole dynastic cycle. The more I learned, I realized the more my dancing kind of changed to embody certain Chinese principles, like, you know, the balancing of opposites. Loyalty or like faith, compassion or forgiveness, like those are the values. And I think that's just very universal.

It's really just the service culture is different and the things underneath are something that everybody can connect to and that you can actually use in your life or that inspires people in their lives. So Lily, I'm going to deal with the elephant in the room. You know, you're pretty obviously not Chinese and you're a Shen Yun dancer and most of them are. So how did that come about? Yeah, that's a question I get asked a lot actually, like why are you doing

Chinese dance? You know, a lot of kids would do ballet and stuff. Since I was little, I liked dance and I always took classical Chinese dance classes. My parents signed me up for it and then I just liked it, so I kept doing it. And then once I saw Shen Yun, you kind of get like the full picture of like what it could actually be. And it was just so expressive and so interesting. And for a little kid, it was just, wow, like, that's awesome. And you just want to keep doing it. And then eventually that led me to Shen Yun, which is like the biggest kind of classical Chinese dance company right now. So I take it your Chinese is pretty good.

Okay, yeah. What would you say is your, you know, your favorite thing about doing this, about being a dancer? There's a lot of things that are great. I mean, seeing so much and just learning so much in dance or like Chinese, Chinese culture, or just the people around me, like, because our dancers are from all over the world. And then myself traveling around the world and just seeing how people in different countries live and how they react to things that was just really eye opening. And another thing is, like just hearing the audience's reactions, because often you can't really see the audience. It's just like a black sea of heads, you know, and we can't really hear that much backstage.

So when you go out and you hear the audience reaction, it's like, oh, you know, what we're doing actually makes people touched or makes them laugh, you know. That's something that I kind of appreciate a lot. I thought they were spectacular. It was powerful, and it is something that's needed in today's society. Oh my gosh it was a riot. I didn't expect to laugh so much and also be touched so much. I was literally looking for something which was magical,

uplifting and it was way more than that. What you're seeing in Shen Yun is an educational experience. You get to learn a little bit about Mandarin. You get to learn a little bit about ethnicity, a little bit about culture. I saw that they were happy. They were joyful as they were expressing themselves. And they loved sending us that beautiful message of honesty and love and just focusing on knowing that there's something bigger than us, a creator, a divine. So what's the day, what's a day in the life of a Shen Yun dancer? Let's start with when

you're not on tour and then maybe when you are on tour. The whole morning is just dance. So usually it's like dance class, which is like fundamentals and bar and stuff. And then we'll have rehearsals for the show and then lunch. And then in the afternoon we'll have rehearsals for the show and then lunch and then in the afternoon we'll have academics and then in the evening just usually more rehearsals and then in between the breaks we'll do like self-practice and stuff that's usually what a day on campus is like and then on tour it can vary a lot more depending on like the schedules and the shows but if we have like an evening show and we're setting up we'll usually go to the theater in the morning, we'll have class, and then we just spend like the whole afternoon like setting up the stage, setting up props, and like rehearsing with orchestra.

And like we're just the dancers, we don't actually have to put everything up, but like all the curtains, the whole orchestra pit, everything's getting set up, and then just getting accustomed to the theatre a bit, because every theatre is different. How tough is it to learn how to dance and hone your craft and become, you know, one of the best traditional Chinese dancers out there? Well, as a dancer, you know, there's the mental aspect and also the physical aspect. If you're talking about physically, is it tough? Oh, definitely it's a tough work, you know? But I guess every profession has its hardships. So I don't really think it's a big problem.

Just get over with it. Just be tough, be strong, get over with the physical aspect. But mentally, I think, is to keep the passion for every show i think that's the hardest part because over time like you play the character through practices rehearsals dress rehearsals and then you bring it to the audience it's probably thousands of times already but just to remind myself that the audience only come once. Dancing is just very, very physical. That is probably the most difficult thing.

When you're tired, when you're down, what's going to push you to get past that, get back up? And at Shen Yun, we create an entirely new performance every year, and our standard is world-class. So, of course, the training is rigorous, and our schedule is busy, but what we do is deeply rewarding and fulfilling for us as artists. So tell me about that, you know, there's

going to be great days where you had, you know, you hit, you know, perfection or almost close, but then you're going to have bad days too. It's psychologically strenuous. How do you get through all that? Everyone, no matter who you are, you go through the hard days. You're always going to have the bad days, the days you don't want to get up. And for me, what really gives me hope and keeps me going is knowing that what I do is giving hope to others. Just seeing how people are so touched and changed from the show, it really touches us. And to know that what I'm doing can make a difference in other people's lives. If that means me getting up another day

and pushing through another painful class and it's more stretching or just stretching through all the sore muscles, if that makes a difference in someone's life, then that's worth it for me. And that's really what keeps me going. I guess I want to talk a little bit about some of what that takes, some of the personal sacrifice that might be involved.

What is that like? No matter what field, if you want to achieve greatness, there's always certain sacrifices that you have to make. For me personally, I would say the thing that we sacrifice the most is time. Whether it is your personal time, your free time, the time you spend on your hobbies, or time with family. But the better way to replace sacrifice, I would say, is to invest. You're investing time in the thing that you're working on, no matter what field. And for the arts, there's a lot of time you have to invest in order to improve. Take the artists from the Renaissance period.

They spent years on just one piece of art. But what they came up with would go on to inspire people for generations. That's what we're trying to achieve. If you really want to have a taste of traditional culture, traditional art, maybe you would go to a museum taste of traditional culture, traditional art, maybe you would go to a museum, you look at the paintings,

but in the end, they're just a painting. But Xinyun is like, if you imagine the canvas came to life, if you could hear the music, if you could see the colors come to life, that's not something that you're just watching. I think that's really an experience. Let's say you know someone doesn't know anything about Chinese history, doesn't know anything about traditional Chinese culture. How would you explain to them how Shen Yun might be

beneficial to their life? It might seem boring, I think, maybe to young people, like, oh, it's just like your ancient history ancient history like why do you need to learn history but there's so many stories from history that we can learn from and history repeats itself you can always look back and see how how did other people handle these situations and the world is so fast-paced and to me I feel like all the materialistic things people try to pursue, there's a ticking time to it. It's not going to last forever.

But what lasts forever are the things you have inside, the core values that you hold. In Chinese, there's a saying called qing shen he yi, and that literally translates to the instrument and the soul are one. And I think that means that in order to be a musician, in order to be an artist, you're going to be channeling your inner self into your art in order to speak to your audience about something. And I think nowadays a lot of people use it to vent their anger, vent their angst and their frustration. But composers like Mozart, I felt like he was really trying to reach to a realm a bit higher than maybe what we could reach and trying to bring it down to us

and to kind of make us think that, hey, there's something bigger than us. Hey, there's something more noble than us out there. We just need to try and reach it. I've spoken with many people about how Shen Yun seeks to portray authentic traditional Chinese culture, but when it comes to the orchestra, I mean this is a seems like a completely new art form actually because you have a full western orchestra and incorporating these Chinese instruments that doesn't sound traditional, it sounds like something new. So can you kind of square this for me? Chinese Symphony Orchestra is definitely unique in that it has a really interesting blend of the Eastern and Western music, they each have a very different approach towards melody and harmony. Eastern music is mainly focused on the melody, the flow of the melody,

and how that kind of fits into the bigger picture. And Western music has always been focused on harmony, how you can create tension and resolution within harmony. By combining these two ways, Eastern and Western, with the harmony and the melody, you're actually creating something that is very traditional, because what is music? Music is melody with harmony. People talk about how in sync everyone is

or the flow, how remarkable the flow of the different pieces is. So how is that actually achieved? You have to really understand that what you're presenting on stage, you're moving as a team. You're dancing as a team. You're not dancing as an individual. You have so many dancers on stage at a time. You have to make sure that every single one of these dancers on stage is good. So that really goes back to our rehearsals. I actually lead a lot of the rehearsals. So I would watch everyone dancing. One person might stick out. I had to fix that movement before we can move on. You can't just leave one person,

you know, his movements can't look different or else you're not synchronized. Right. And that's just the dance, right? And then there's also this backdrop, which is incredibly immersive. So backdrop, dance, orchestra. It seems like an incredible amount of work and kind of logistics frankly to make this all happen the simple answer is that we put a lot of hours into rehearsals from that aspect you know you'll see that the dancers look in sync but on a deeper level what's really in sync are our hearts and what that means is the dancers and the artists, the musicians, we believe in the mission of Shen Yun. The mission of Shen Yun is to revive authentic traditional Chinese culture

and to present that to the world. Why is it that we feel so strong about this? It's because traditional Chinese culture is something that is almost lost. It's something that the CCP has tried to destroy. So we feel it in our hearts. This is something that needs to be done. It's something that the CCP has tried to destroy. So we feel it in our hearts. This is something that needs to be done. It's something that the world should see. I think it's a really important thing to understand why Shen Yun can't perform in China, but at the same time, a lot of the dancers are from China.

I think that why is very very important. Why would the CCP not want people to see authentic traditional Chinese history? And that's because they're atheists, right? They don't believe in the divine. They only believe in themselves. And what do they want the Chinese people to believe? They want the Chinese people to only have faith and belief in the CCP. Going back 5,000 years, China has always been a spiritual nation. The people are not religious per se, but they've always been spiritual. They believe that there is the divine, there are ghosts, there are spirits, there are deities, and they are watching over people. And it drives people to become better.

Like if I'm in this room by myself, and I do something that's bad, I think nobody's watching me. But the Chinese people believe that there is somebody watching you. God is watching you. The divine is watching you. That is really a core part of Shen Yun. We want to show that Chinese civilization, authentic traditional Chinese history, has its roots in the divine, in spirituality.

So they're very afraid of that, because it's the opposite of their ideology. Oh, and that ideology is so important to them, isn't it? Yeah. They want control. They want control of the people. For me, it's because of my faith, of my belief. And I practice Falun Dafa. It's a spiritual practice that believes in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. And a lot of the artists at Shen Yun practice Falun Dafa. And that's one of the reasons why Shen Yun is based in New York. Because all over China in the 1990s, it was hugely popular doing the exercises and meditation of Falun Gong or Falun Dafa daily. Even the government estimated that 100 million people were practicing

it. But because it was so popular and because it was like reawakening the spirituality of China that the CCP had been actively wiping out through all of its persecution campaigns like the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and so many others. In 1999, the CCP launched a persecution campaign against Falun Dafa. It was brutal, and it was nationwide. There are many artists now at Shen Yun who were persecuted, and the persecution is still happening today. When I was in China, when I was growing up,

I was scared to tell people that I practiced Falun Dafa because the CCP is persecuting people. Even when I moved over to America and I had some Chinese friends, I would be afraid to tell them that. But now that I'm older, I think about it, I'm like, what is wrong with having faith? There's nothing wrong with it. What is wrong with believing in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance? When I do things, I think about, you know, if there's someone higher up watching me, I should make a better decision. And then you think about society.

In a community, what if more people are faithful? What kind of decisions will they make? I've been thinking a lot about sort of elite military training. My sister-in-law's brother, he went through ranger school, very difficult, very onerous. And very often people that are involved in these programs, they have something higher that drives them forward, right? So tell me a little bit about that, if that makes sense. I think it's really important to have something that's like your compass that's always pointing north inside,

or else it's really easy to get distracted or lost. Just society nowadays. So I think faith is something that really grounds me. Tell me about that faith. Explain that to me. I came to school, I came to Shen Yun when I was not a practitioner. Most people were practitioners of Falun Gong. And they were very nice. And they never like, oh, you have to do this and all that.

But every day they'd study the lecture of Falun Gong. And they do meditation and exercises. So it was just a natural thing for me because everyone here was so nice. I was like, okay, let me try this too then. So truthfulness, compassion, tolerance, that actually guide me along my ways on my dance career. You know, in traditional China, scholars or musicians or perhaps dancers,

they would all have like these kind of practice of meditation or centering and all. It would be actually a central part of that of their scholarship of their dance of their music so and how does that apply here i think it's actually very similar just maybe the methods of what we do are different in like modern times but i think that idea of like meditating or like reflecting it's basically the same and I think just calming down it's it's under it's underrated I think people are like oh you know that's just a waste of time you know I'm just sitting there and like breathing but when you calm down you can see the bigger picture you can see everything clearly and then everything else you

do after that is going to feel very different I think there's perhaps some life advice in general for many people in what you just described. Tell me a little bit more about the culture of Shen Yun. I think in Shen Yun there's also this culture of selflessness, how you help each other, not just improve yourself. I remember my first Yan Yun Shen Yun. After we finish each CD, we have to strike out, right? And I see tenors, sopranos, conductors, principal dancers. They all help with striking out.

There's no ego. There's no prima donnas. And that's why we're able to be so successful. But what about, you know, of course, I've seen you dance and you do very well at it. And I can imagine, you know, a lot of people saying, oh, you're so great. You're such a fantastic dancer, all this stuff. How do you keep that from going to your head? I think what I try to do is just block out the noise, block out all the praise, because that's not going to help you. What I didn't realize until a few years in maybe was how big of a problem ego can be.

Because as you improve as a dancer you start to think oh like I'm pretty good and then once people start telling you your problems because that's usually one of the few ways that you can improve really quickly is when other people see your problems and they point them out to you and if you don't accept that then there's no way to really improve. Back at home I used to be involved in a lot of orchestras, and I found that there was a lot of competition about who gets the first stand, who gets the first violin,

who gets the solos. And here, the culture is completely different. It's not even that it's kind of under-the-carpet kind of competition. It's genuinely everyone's kind of pushing each other to do better, wishing the best for each other. And it's more of the culture is kind of like if you get a solo, if you're sitting first desk, you're genuinely happy for each other. And we are genuinely happy for each other.

And there's no sense of fighting for a certain position or for a certain spot. What happens if someone does have a bit of an ego sometimes? Because I'm sure it must happen. There are people, right? But then it's mostly common when they first come to Shenmue. But after time, I think they're able to, I'll say, mesh with us. They see how other people carry themselves, right? And if you're the person with an ego, you'll stand out straight away. I think for them also is a process of learning and adapting or maybe even cultivating,

you know, letting go of that. What about you? Did you have to go through a process like that? Yes, definitely. There was one year in Sydney where we were performing and that was actually my first year of being a principal dancer. On one of the days I injured my big toe. It popped out of the socket sideways and then I thought that I could keep going but every step I took the toe would pop out again and go back, pop out again and

go back. During intermission in the the middle of the show, we decided to switch positions to get me off. And all the dancers, not principal dancers, they just learned my positions on the spot. They learned new beats. They took out my techniques in a span of 15 minutes. I realized at that point that no matter how good you think you are, you're nobody without the people around you. Because you cannot do a whole show by yourself. It's a teamwork. I mean, that's incredible to hear a little bit of this insider knowledge and that people can adjust that quickly. Everybody coming and helping you in that moment

where you're having, where you're struggling. Zhenyu is more of a family than it is a company. Now we have eight companies and over a hundred dancers. And I know every single dancer by their name. The bond that we have is so strong and that no matter what happens on stage, like my injury that day, no matter what happens, we're always able to keep it together. Shen Yun has a beautiful campus, Dragon Springs. I'm wondering if you could kind of walk me through

what you see when you arrive at the campus and you start walking through. We're located in New York, the Hudson Valley, and our campus consists of two parts. One is the traditional Tang-style Buddhist temple grounds, and the other is the facilities where we train. The first thing you see are big, beautiful Tang Dynasty temples. I remember my first time coming up, and it was some windy road in the middle of the forest,

and didn't really know what to expect. And then we made a left turn and wow. I didn't, it was kind of awestruck at first because it's a type of architecture that you can't really find anywhere else in the world. It's very traditional, I guess, and beautiful at the same time. What is it like in having that architecture, I guess, in the space where you're actually practicing? I find it really cool because the outside, a lot of the buildings are like

ancient Chinese temples, but then our training facilities are very advanced and so it kind of like puts the two together. So when you're in the classroom, it's like really big windows and you can see all the mountains outside. And another another thing oftentimes in the hallways they'll have pictures of the previous shen yun dances and like throughout the whole school so when i first came it was like wow you can just spend like 10 minutes walking down like two meters of a hallway just like looking at all the pictures and all the costumes and the dancers yeah i mean you must get a sense of history. I mean, Xinyun, we kind of think of it as a relatively new phenomenon, but it's got a few years on it now. Yeah, and you can kind of feel like, oh, I saw that piece when I was like a kid.

It's nowhere else on world that's like this, because like one example I would use is normally if you were to lose your wallet, for example, or drop a dollar or so, you turn around, you look for it, it's gone. But on our campus, you see whiteboards and someone has a $1 bill. It's like, oh, lost. And it'll be there for months because no one will take it. So it's really, it's just a really healthy environment. Nowadays in modern schools, a lot of kids are just like, have no respect for teachers. But like coming here, I guess it's also part of like a dance training. You have this like teacher-student relationship.

And you can just see that in class or just in the hallways when people see the teachers and how they treat each other and treat their elders. They carry this respect and that's something that is definitely deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Yeah, and I think at one point in Western culture, that has, of course, shifted. So Shen Yun talks about traditional Chinese culture. You see it portrayed on stage. At the same time, though, as a number of dancers have explained it to me,

you're actually also living that. So how does that work? In Chinese we have a saying, 学艺先学做人, and that can be roughly translated as, before learning a skill, first learn to become a good person. In classical Chinese dance we talk about every single movement that you do portrays emotion. And more than that, what you present on stage, your dancing, is actually a reflection of your character. It's a reflection of who you are in real life. You're not just playing a role, but you have to actually embody that role or that character's values in your ordinary life. It does make sense to me when you're playing a virtuous character. But what about if you're playing

one of these nasty characters that you sometimes see? Honestly, playing nasty characters is pretty difficult for some people at Shen Yun because you really have to think about how he was raised, what's his motivation in life, how did he become that person

that is now not such a great person. But in Shen Yun, in our two-hour performance, we might present 20 different pieces. And each piece, you'll be portraying a different role, a different character from a different period of time in history. They could be a thousand years apart, right? In a movie, you just portray one character.

In Shen Yun, you might have to portray 10 different characters. Why don't you pick one of the roles that you've played as a principal dancer and tell me about how you prepare for that. I've been doing the Monkey King for 10 years. For Chinese kids, everyone knows the Monkey King. When I was a young kid, I remember my dad would buy the DVDs and watch the whole series. He started as an all-powerful, very proud and arrogant character. He would challenge the gods.

He thought he was above everyone else. And when he changed his ways, he became a better person, a better monkey. For me as well, because when I first started portraying the Monkey King, I was very young. I was this hot-blooded youth. I thought that I could take on the world. That's what The Monkey King relates to me a lot. I've seen you portray multiple important figures in Chinese history. So maybe give me a sense of something you've learned from one of them.

The 2023 season, I actually played two roles of being a mother. I'm not a mom. I've never been a mom. But when I think of the role now, I still get emotional because I get really immersed into these type of stories

because I know that the story that I'm telling right now isn't fictional. It's the story of a mother who raised her kid until she was old enough to go to school. And one day, her child, her daughter, was persecuted to death because of her faith in Falun Gong. And it's something that's actually happening to people

that have the same faith as me. Sorry. Like, how do you portray the pain of a mother losing your child? And the fact that my character was able to look past the hatred and able to hold on to faith to pull herself through and didn't lose herself to the hatred or the resentment towards the people who took the biggest thing from her life away from her. I'm very touched by how deeply you try to resonate

with all these characters. Everyone cares about your family, your kids, and so it was really important for me to be able to portray that realness and feel those raw emotions. Is there any particular show that you've done that you remember distinctly, like something happened that makes it memorable for you?

The most memorable show would be... I think it was 2018. We were touring Europe. And then one day my dad called me and he said, uh, hey, come to the backstage. There he was with my grandpa that I haven't seen in almost ten years because he still lives in China,

and I wasn't able to visit him in all these years. Basically he walked past me because he didn't recognize me. He was very emotional because it was the first time he saw me perform. He said good job, keep going and then he said sharing his hope and that really touched me because he lives in China and the message that we want to give out is the message of hope for the Chinese people, especially. When he was able to say that, it meant the world to me. Because it was the last time that I met my grandpa before he passed away. And I'm very grateful that that will be my last memory of him.

Thank you for sharing that. That's a very touching story. Especially, you know, considering not everybody's aware of how significant it might be for someone to say Shen Yun is hope if they're, you know, living under the auspices of the Chinese regime. This is really what we all hope for, especially from people from China. That's beautiful.

This has been a really wonderful conversation where I've frankly learned a little bit of behind the scenes, what goes on with Shen Yun, who are the performers and who are the artists and so forth. Well, William Lee, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. And thanks again for bringing everybody with you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for joining us on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan-Jay Kellek.