Lion dance in America

This chapter follows the southern lion from the emigrant counties west of the Pearl River Delta to American Chinatowns, kung fu schools, Vietnamese parishes and federation championships. It explains who came, which lions they brought, why the Hok San lion you drum for arrived in America much later than most people assume, and how American practice now differs from practice in mainland China and Hong Kong. Where the sources disagree, both versions are given. Massachusetts gets its own section near the end.

Where Chinese America came from: Taishan, Siyi and Wuyi

Until the 1960s most Chinese Americans traced their families to a small corner of Guangdong. The core of it is Siyi (四邑, Cant. sei3 jap1, Mand. Sìyì), "Four Counties", usually written Sze Yup or Say Yup in American English. The four former counties sit on the west side of the Pearl River Delta: Xinhui (新會, san1 wui6, "Sunwui"), Taishan (台山, toi4 saan1, "Toisan" or "Hoisan"), Kaiping (開平, hoi1 ping4, "Hoiping") and Enping (恩平, jan1 ping4, "Yanping"). All four now belong to Jiangmen (江門, gong1 mun4, "Kongmoon") prefecture.¹

Add Heshan (鶴山, Cant. hok6 saan1, "Hok San"; Mand. Hèshān), the home of the Hok San lion, and you get Wuyi (五邑, Cant. ng5 jap1, "Ng Yup"; Mand. Wǔyì), "Five Counties". Wuyi became the official collective name only after Jiangmen was set up as a prefecture-level city in 1983. Overseas communities still mostly say "Sze Yup", because Heshan became a county later than the other four: when the name Siyi was coined, Heshan's land still belonged to Xinhui and Kaiping. A rarer "Six Counties" (六邑) form adds Chixi (赤溪), which was merged into Taishan in 1953.²¹ A Taishanese-language video puts it simply: Heshan "was established later and added to the grouping", and "one of the main two styles of Southern Lion Dance originates in Hok San".³ The San Francisco lion historian David Lei says the same from the American side: Hok San is "one of the five districts - we used to call it Say Yup, four district, but now they add Hok San".⁴

Taishan was carved out of Xinhui on 12 February 1499 as Xinning County (新寧縣, san1 ning4, Mand. Xīnníng) and renamed Taishan in 1914. US postal and census usage spelled it "Toishan"; locals call themselves and their speech "Hoisan" (台山話, toi4 saan1 waa2, Hoisan-wa).⁵⁶ Taishan calls itself the "First Home of the Overseas Chinese" (第一僑鄉, Cant. dai6 jat1 kiu4 hoeng1, Mand. dìyī qiáoxiāng). The Los Angeles Times estimated in 2007 that about half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent; the city itself now reports about 1.8 million people of Taishan origin abroad, up from an earlier official figure of about 1.3 million in 91 countries.⁵⁷⁸

Taishanese is a Yue (Cantonese-family) language, but it is not mutually intelligible with Guangzhou or Hong Kong Cantonese. It was the dominant speech of North American Chinatowns, almost a lingua franca, until somewhere between 1965 and the 1980s, when Hong Kong-style Cantonese and later Mandarin displaced it. Chinese writers nicknamed Siyi speech the "little Esperanto" (小世界語) of the early overseas communities.⁶² Lei, whose own clan are the Lees of Donghan in Toisan, adds that Cantonese and Taishanese call themselves Tong yan (唐人, tong4 jan4, "people of Tang") and Chinatown Tong yan gai (唐人街), and that Tang poems rhyme better "in Cantonese - better yet in Taishanese".⁴⁹

Two other origin groups matter for lion history. Sam Yup (三邑, Cant. saam1 jap1, Mand. Sānyì), "Three Counties", is Nanhai (南海), Panyu (番禺) and Shunde (順德) around Guangzhou and Foshan; modern Nanhai and Chancheng districts are in Foshan. In other words, the home county of the Fut San lion is Sam Yup, not Sze Yup.¹⁰ The often-repeated division of labour was that Sze Yup people worked as labourers, Sam Yup people as merchants and Zhongshan people in farming; treat that as a generalisation.¹ Hawaii is a separate story: about 75% of Hawaii's Chinese are Cantonese with roots in Zhongshan (中山, formerly Xiangshan 香山, Cant. "Heung San", renamed in 1925 for Sun Yat-sen), with a large Hakka (客家, haak3 gaa1) minority. In the first half of the 1800s about 30% of Hawaii's Chinese were Hakka, against about 3% on the West Coast. About 46,000 Chinese arrived in Hawaii between 1852 and 1899. The Chinese name for Hawaii, Tan Heung Shan (檀香山, "Sandalwood Fragrant Hills"), comes from the sandalwood trade of 1792-1843.¹¹

Heshan itself was a much smaller emigrant source than Taishan. Chinese Wikipedia gives about 250,000 overseas Chinese of Heshan ancestry in 83 countries and regions, plus about 200,000 residents of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan; English Wikipedia gives about 360,000 abroad, "particularly in the Americas such as Chile, Peru and the United States".¹²¹³ Compare Taishan's 1.3 to 1.8 million.

Exclusion and the bachelor society

Chinese contract workers went to Hawaii, Peru, Cuba and the Central Pacific Railroad, where Chinese made up about 80% of the workforce; by 1870 there were about 63,000 Chinese in the United States, almost all in California.⁵ Hostility followed. A short explainer on the New York parade sums up the effect: after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act many immigrants moved from the West Coast to East Coast cities, and a 1902 law made Chinese immigration "permanently illegal", leaving "mostly lonely young men" who took to the street at New Year and joined the parade.¹⁴ The Choy Li Fut master Lau Bun (commonly written 劉彬, a form the sources read do not confirm), born in Taishan in 1891, is an example of how people got in: his father had worked in California, and he entered through Mexico in the early 1920s on a paper-son identity under the name "Wong On".¹⁵

Massachusetts saw the same pattern. The first Chinese to arrive in numbers were 75 labourers brought from California in 1870 to break a strike at the Sampson shoe factory in North Adams (50 more came later). Laundries opened on Harrison Avenue and people settled in Ping On Alley from about 1874-75; the first restaurant, Hong Far Low, opened in 1875. On 11 October 1903 a police raid arrested 234 men in Boston's Chinatown, and 52 were deported.¹⁶¹⁷

Rachel Watford, whose 2019 Georgia State thesis is the main academic study of American lion dance, links the long period in which lion dance stayed inside Chinatowns to this hostility (roughly the 1870s to the 1940s) and to the national-origin quotas that lasted until 1965. One of her informants said that in the 1970s lion dance was still performed only in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles.¹⁸

Chinatown institutions: district associations, clan halls, tongs and the Hung Mun

American Chinatowns ran on a layered set of organisations, and lion dance lived inside them. The top layer in San Francisco was the district association (會館, Cant. wui6 gun2, Mand. huìguǎn), which grouped people by home county. Their order of founding shows the Sam Yup and Sze Yup split directly:¹⁹

The Six Companies acted as an informal consulate for the Qing government until a consulate opened in the late 1870s. They ran a school, kept a census, helped with remittances and shipped the bones of the dead home to China. Other cities used other English names: the Chong Wa Benevolent Association in Seattle, the United Chinese Society in Honolulu. In Boston the CCBA "coordinates activities such as the lion dance celebration for the Lunar New Year" with Chinatown Main Street.¹⁹ Temples sat alongside the associations: the Kong Chow Temple (岡州古廟), a Guan Di temple founded in San Francisco in 1849 by Xinhui people, became the Kong Chow Clan Association in 1854, was rebuilt after 1906 and moved to its Stockton Street building in 1977.²⁰ Below the district associations were surname and clan associations, which still open their spring banquets with lion dance (see the Boston section below).

Cutting across all of these were brotherhoods open to any surname or district. The most important for lion dance is the Chee Kung Tong (致公堂, Cant. zi3 gung1 tong4, Mand. Zhìgōngtáng), the North American branch of the Hongmen (洪門, Cant. hung4 mun4, "Hung Mun") or Heaven and Earth Society (天地會, Tiandihui). Its English name "Chinese Freemasons" has no connection to Western Freemasonry. A Tucson study dates the organisation formally to 1880, but earlier lodges existed, and the Canadian branch dates from 1863. Membership was open regardless of region, surname or clan and was mostly working class. Sun Yat-sen joined in Hawaii in 1904 and helped write its 1904 constitution; the Chee Kung Tong expelled him on 13 January 1923.²¹

The word tong (堂, tong4, "hall") also covers societies such as the Hip Sing (協勝), On Leong (安良), Hop Sing (合勝), Suey Sing (萃勝) and Bing Kung (秉公), which fought the "tong wars" of San Francisco and New York.²⁴ A National Geographic documentary describes tongs as "part political group, part community association", a "uniquely Chinese American institution" that grew up to support immigrants facing discrimination and gave isolated settlers "a sense of belonging".²⁵ Being multi-surname brotherhoods, the tongs and Hongmen lodges are one root of Chinatown martial-arts and lion organisations. The direct evidence for that link is strongest for the Chinese Freemasons, whose athletic clubs field lion teams in Boston, New York, Chicago, Vancouver and Edmonton (see below); Chicago's Hung Ching club (洪青體育社), for example, opened the city's 42nd UNITY Lunar New Year gala in 2026 with three lions.²⁶ The Edmonton club's head coach put the pattern this way: wherever you find Hung Mun athletic clubs, "you'll always find lion dance and kung fu"; she also said the club was founded to help members keep in touch with family overseas and to give "security and protection against any racism or unjust treatment towards chinese settlers".²⁷

The earliest lion dances on record

Finding the first American lion dance is harder than it sounds. A search of the Library of Congress's digitised newspapers for "lion dance" found almost no 19th-century American reports under that name: most hits were about Siamese royal funerals, Japanese New Year or Paris vaudeville, and the first relevant usage is a 1927 report on Chinese in Yokohama dancing "the popular 'Lion dance'". English-language papers rarely used the phrase before about 1910, so early reports have to be looked for under "dragon", "joss", "New Year", "Bomb Day" or "procession".²⁸²⁹ What survives is a patchwork:

San Francisco. The earliest recorded New Year celebration was a "great feast" on 1 February 1851, organised by Norman Assing. "A dragon first appeared in the streets of San Francisco during the 1860 celebration heralding the Year of the Monkey." Through the 1860s and 1870s papers describe flags, banners, lanterns, drums and firecrackers; Harper's Weekly complained about the firecrackers in 1871, and the San Francisco Call noted in 1892 that white residents "invade Chinatown during the holidays".³⁰ A short history of the New York parade dates the first "carnival-like event with flags, banners, lanterns, drums and firecrackers in San Francisco" to 1858.¹⁴ Watford, citing Chiou-Ling Yeh, adds that in 1876 more than a dozen Chinese were arrested at San Francisco's New Year for breaking the city's firecracker ban, and, citing Ronald Takaki, that lion troupes have danced at New Year in US Chinatowns "since the 1800s".¹⁸

Marysville and the Bok Kai festival. The Bok Kai Temple (北溪廟, "Northern Creek Temple") in Marysville, California, honours Bok Kai, the northern water and rain god also called Pak Tai (北帝) or Xuanwu (玄武). The present temple was built in 1880 at D and First Streets; an earlier one existed in the 1860s. It is described as "the only in situ 19th-century Chinese Temple in the United States that is still active". The town's "bomb festival", in which rings are fired into the air for people to catch, is documented from at least 1873; about a dozen Californian Chinese communities held such festivals in the late 19th century, and the Marysville event was renamed the Bok Kai Festival in the 1950s, when it was the last one left. Chinese residents called Marysville Sahm Fou (三埠, "Third City"), after San Francisco (大埠, "Big City") and Sacramento (二埠, "Second City").³¹ Lei calls it "the longest continuous festival parade in California". On 5 March 2022 about 150 people marked the 142nd Bok Kai festival and parade, "and lion dancing was part of this parade as it most likely was since the very beginning". That last phrase is his inference, not a record.⁴

The Marysville dragon, Moo Lung (舞龍, "dancing dragon"), needed about 100 people to perform. Lei says it went to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and to the New York Fourth of July parade in 1911, as well as Seattle and Los Angeles. The troupe travelled by train and, barred from most hotels and restaurants, relied on a network of Chinese communities along the way; it got home from New York only in November. Lei compares this network to the "Green Book" that African American travellers used, and says the point of the effort was to show "that Chinese were more than just common laborers". Corey Chan of San Francisco's Kei Lun school restored Moo Lung in 2014, a job of about half a year. Dragons of the same age and, Lei says, the same maker survive in Bendigo, Ballarat and Melbourne in Australia.⁴⁹ Later, San Francisco's 1961 parade dragon (125 feet, with a 75-pound head) was sold to Marysville and used in the Bok Kai parade until 1984.³⁰

The oldest moving images of an American lion dance found for this guide come from Marysville. A 16mm film catalogued as "[Chinese Lion Dance: Marysville, California] 1925" (maker unknown, Prelinger Archives, digitised by A/V Geeks) shows crowds and stores, a parade, fireworks, the "Chinese Ring game" and a close-up of the dragon as the city celebrates the Bok Kai Festival. A search-engine summary, not seen on the catalogue page itself, adds people holding strings with green cabbage and money for the lion dancers and the "Firing of the Rings" at First and C Streets.³³

Seattle, 1909. At the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the "Chinese Village" on the Pay Streak midway, run by the concessionaires Ah King Co., advertised weekly from June to October 1909: "FREE EXHIBITION The Chinese Lion Dance", with a "Pekin Troupe ... direct from China" and a "Native Orchestra". Who danced, and in what style, is unknown.²⁸ Lei says Moo Lung was also borrowed for Seattle's Alaska-Yukon festival and for the Los Angeles Fiesta.⁹

San Jose and Los Angeles. The San Jose dragon's last documented appearance was in front of the Ng Shing Gung temple in Heinlenville Chinatown in 1924. The same local history says that "as soon as the early Chinese in America had a large enough audience and means to do so, dragon and lion dances were practiced", and that the dancers were traditionally martial artists.³² A 2005 parade history (seen only as a search snippet) says a Chinese lion and dragon procession was one of the finest units in Los Angeles's La Fiesta parade of 1898; this has not been checked against 1898 newspapers. Los Angeles's New Chinatown, the first US Chinatown owned by its Chinese residents, opened on 25 June 1938, and archive catalogues describe photographs of a lion dance at its West Gate with a children's band; Loyola Marymount University holds an undated photograph titled "Lion Dance, New Chinatown, Los Angeles".³⁴

New York. From the 1870s papers described New Year in Manhattan's Chinatown, with a banquet and mahjong in the Chinese temple at 12 Baxter Street; an 1894 report mentions "all kinds of oriental noises and jollifications". "In the 1920s and '30s, celebrations grew more elaborate and public to incorporate a street parade, with loud fireworks, gongs, and lion dancers." The Museum of Chinese in America holds photographs of a 1934-35 parade, Mott Street in 1947, a lion dance in the Year of the Lamb in 1955 and a lion dancer parade in 1963.³⁵ The New York parade explainer says that in 1930, in the middle of the Depression, "New Yorkers of different ethnicities came together to enjoy the lion dance and kung fu performances".¹⁴

Washington, DC. The Chinese Youth Club was established in the late 1930s (1939 according to a Voice of America report) and organised the first lion dance in DC in the 1940s; the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center dates DC lion dance to the Second World War. The local CCBA has organised DC's Lunar New Year parade for about seven decades, and formal Jow Ga kung fu training in DC Chinatown began in the late 1960s, with Hoy K. Lee among the first teachers.³⁶³⁷³⁸

Honolulu. A Bishop Museum photograph by Tai Sing Loo, about 1955, shows a "Chinese lion dance in front of Wo Fat Restaurant on Hotel and Maunakea Streets"; the museum links it to Konohi, the Hawaiian name for Chinese New Year.³⁹ The Gee Yung martial arts and lion dance association gives its own founding date as 1941 and calls itself the second-oldest martial arts association in Honolulu.⁴⁰ A 1957 Honolulu photograph shows a lion with a kung fu performer.⁴¹

Boston. The Kwong Kow Chinese School (廣教), founded in 1916 to teach Taishanese, sponsored marching bands in holiday parades.¹⁷ Boston outlets describe the Chinatown Lion Dance Parade as a tradition of more than 70 years, which places its start around the 1950s.⁴²⁴³ The Boston Chinese Freemasons' Hung Ching club grew from the Gung Ho Club of 1948 (see the New England section).⁴⁴

Two more pieces of evidence show how lion dance was used in the 1930s to 1950s. Benjamin Judkins, a historian of Chinese martial arts, found a press photograph dated 23 January 1941 of Lee Fung, "Director of Chinese Lion Dance", holding a broadsword (大刀, daai6 dou1, Mand. dàdāo) (the newspaper and city are not identified), and notes that in the 1940s and 1950s Chinatown businesses and restaurants promoted lion and dragon dancing "as a way of attracting tourists to their neighborhood". A Los Angeles postcard, copyright 1952, shows lion dancers under paired US and Republic of China flags.⁴¹ And in San Francisco, Lau Bun, the Taishan-born Choy Li Fut master who had worked as a guard for the Hop Sing Tong's nightclubs and gambling houses after arriving in 1931, founded the Wah Keung Kung Fu Club in the 1930s. It became the Hung Sing Kwoon, he "trained a Lion Dance society" and held yearly kung fu and lion dance benefits for the Chinese Hospital. He is widely regarded as the first to open a permanent, somewhat public Chinese martial arts school on the US mainland, refused non-Chinese students until the late 1950s or 1960s, and died in 1967.¹⁵ One of the first documented American Chinatown lion troupes, in other words, was run by a Taishan-born master under tong protection.

Lei argues that around 1900 lion and dragon dancing in America was also political. In America, unlike Qing China, people were free to organise against the Manchu dynasty, and "lion dancing was performed as a revolutionary statement". His evidence is symbolic: a dragon is accompanied by Sun and Moon lanterns, and carried in reverse they form the character Ming (明), the name of the dynasty the Qing replaced.⁴⁹

The San Francisco parade from 1953

The big American Chinese New Year parade is a 20th-century creation. In 1951 and 1952 the Chinese Six Companies staged anti-Communist New Year parades (the "Torches of Liberty") with about 10,000 attendees. On 15 February 1953 H.K. Wong, with the restaurateur Johnny Kan, Paul Louie and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, launched the modern festival; the Grand Marshal was Joe Wong, a blinded Korean War veteran, and 140,000 people watched. Wong said the festival "eliminated that 'mystery Chinese' feeling". In 1956 the parade moved to the afternoon for television. A new dragon imported from Hong Kong in 1957-58 was "billed as one city block or 150 feet"; a 125-foot dragon followed in 1961, two dragons in 1969, and in 2000 the Foshan-made Gum Lung, more than 201 feet long. The route ran along Grant Avenue from 1953 to 1964 and changed in 1965.³⁰ The Golden Dragon is carried by about 100 members of Leung's White Crane, and the parade sets off about 600,000 firecrackers; one Wikipedia passage gives the dragon's length as 268 feet.³⁰

A newsreel dated 16 February 1953 shows the first modern festival: "a fashion show adds a modern touch but the high point is a traditional lion dance". It frames the event in Cold War terms: "Communist China has banned the holiday but free Chinese welcomed the year of the serpent ... with a bang".⁴⁷ A former parade director, Wayne Hu, told a Bay Area TV station that "parades were not a thing from China that they brought over"; during the war years Chinese had marched with a big Chinese flag into which people threw money. The Chamber of Commerce businessmen became the official organisers and created the Miss Chinatown USA pageant in 1958.⁴⁸

David Lei, who directed the parade from 1977, is blunter: the Lunar New Year parade is "like chop suey, fortune cookies, [an] American thing made up here in America". China never had a New Year parade; the nearest thing is the Lantern Festival procession on the fifteenth day. H.K. Wong, a founder of the Chinese Historical Society of America, started it "to promote Chinatown to bring in more tourists ... a marketing scheme". Lei joined in 1965, when he was asked to recruit classmates to carry the dragon's body, because martial arts teams then had only 15 to 20 members, enough for the head and tail only; the pay was $7 when the minimum wage was $1.10. In the early 1970s, he says, "there were a lot of gangs", and Chinese were in the news for gang wars and illegal political contributions; the parade, watched by about eight million people on television, was the one time of the year "we control the media".⁹

Other cities ran comparable events. In Vancouver in 1958, a Chinatown Spring Festival sponsored by the Chinese Freemasons Centennial Committee for British Columbia's centennial drew more than 20,000 people; its 250-foot dragon, imported from Hong Kong for nearly $5,000, was carried by 300 men in relays.⁴⁹ New York's Better Chinatown USA held its first Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Festival in 1996.⁵⁰

Which lions the early Chinatowns danced, and the Hok San question

The best direct testimony on early styles is David Lei's, and it is clear. The Fut San (佛山, Cant. fat6 saan1, Mand. Fóshān) lion "is the more traditional lion we see here in San Francisco and more popular outside of China". He describes two Fut San body types in use: the traditional long-tailed lion, "done more for ceremonies", and a newer short-bodied lion that combines a southern head with a northern-style body.⁴

"I didn't see in San Francisco until 1973 when the Yau Kung Moon lion dance troupe first introduced this because their style is from Hok San."

David Lei, Chinese Lion Dance in the American Context (2022)

Yau Kung Moon (柔功門, Cant. jau4 gung1 mun4, Mand. Róugōngmén) is a kung fu system whose San Francisco association, 美國柔功門國術龍獅總會, is still active.⁵¹ Lei adds that the Hok San group brought "their own drumming beats as well", and that a Hakka-style lion was performed in San Francisco only once that he knew of, in 1974, by John P.C. Wong.⁴ David Lei on Hok San reaching San Francisco @ 21:52

That raises an obvious question. If 70 to 80 percent of Chinese Americans came from the Wuyi region, and Heshan is one of the five Wuyi counties, why was the Chinatown lion Fut San and not Hok San? The sources do not answer it directly, but they point to several reasons:

• Heshan was the smallest and latest of the five. It was the last of the five counties to be created (in the 1730s, see Chapter 5), the Wuyi name that includes it became official only in 1983, and its diaspora (about 250,000 to 360,000 abroad) was a fraction of Taishan's.²¹²
• Heshan's emigrants went mainly to Southeast Asia. An 1888 inscription in Singapore already mentions lion dances by Heshan people there, and Singapore's Heshan-lineage troupes became the core of the later Sar Ping tradition (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 12).
• The Fut San type was the general Guangdong and Hong Kong lion. The Hok San style itself is credited to Feng Gengchang (馮庚長, born 1852) in the late 19th century, so by the time it took shape the first emigrant generations were already in California (see Chapter 5). Lei's own view is that the Cantonese lion "came to California with these opera troupes" in the mid-19th century.⁹
• The teachers who ran American troupes came from Guangdong and Hong Kong kung fu lineages. Lau Bun had trained under Yuen Hai of the Foshan-based Hung Sing branch of Choy Li Fut; Hong Kong Hung Gar followed after 1965.¹⁵⁵²
• Heads came from Hong Kong workshops. The old White Crane lion Lei brought to his 2022 talk was "purchased in 1976, made in Hong Kong".⁴

Why, then, is Hok San strong in the US today? Not because it came first, but because it came back, from Singapore and Malaysia, at the moment American lion dance turned towards competition. Lei calls Hok San the style "now used for competition" and Fut San the "more traditional" one. He says the narrow, "duck bill" Hok San head is lighter, and that competition heads carry few pom-poms because "in competition if one of these balls drop off you deduct points, so instead of tying them very tight we'll just take them off".⁹⁴ The Malaysian head maker Siow Ho Phiew (蕭斐弘), who founded the Wan Seng Hang (萬勝行) workshop in 1986, makes more than 300 rattan-framed heads a year and exports them to Australia, France, the US and China.⁵⁴ The rest of the story (Sar Ping seminars, Hawaii's newer teams, the Vietnamese-American teams and the federation) is told in the sections below.

1950s to 1980s: Hong Kong, Hart-Celler and the kung fu schools

The change began before 1965. After the Second World War Hong Kong immigrants arrived in Boston, and the Kwong Kow school switched from teaching Taishanese to Cantonese.¹⁶ The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) then transformed Chinatowns. Passed on 3 October 1965, it abolished national-origin quotas; from 1 July 1968 it set a cap of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere with no more than 20,000 from any one country. Hong Kong, as a British colony, had its own quota.⁵⁵⁵⁶ Working-class Hong Kong emigrants began arriving in San Francisco "in large numbers in the late 1960s", and Hong Kong Cantonese gradually replaced Taishanese in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Manhattan.⁵⁷⁵⁶ By 1980 about 85,000 Hong Kong-born immigrants lived in the US (a Migration Policy Institute figure seen only in a search summary); in 2021 there were 248,024, with the largest groups in the Bay Area, New York and Los Angeles.⁵⁶

The second push came from film. Hong Kong kung fu films were popular in the US from the early 1970s; according to Hendrix and Poggiali's book These Fists Break Bricks, "for a year kung fu films swept the box office" before overexposure and the wave of imitations after Bruce Lee's death in 1973.⁵⁸ The Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center says that in the 1960s and 1970s, "with the rising popularity of Asian martial arts, Lion Dance also became more popular among a wider swath of Americans".³⁸ Watford's informant who saw lion dance only in three Chinatowns in the 1970s was describing the start of that change.¹⁸

The result was a wave of kung fu schools run by Hong Kong-trained teachers, most with lion teams, that moved lion dance out of the association athletic clubs and into commercial and community schools. Hong Kong Hung Gar (洪家, hung4 gaa1) reached US cities through students of Lam Cho (林祖), nephew of Lam Sai-wing: Y.C. Wong in San Francisco, Bucksam Kong in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and Kwong Tit-fu and Tang Kwok-wah in Boston.⁵²

Several details from this period matter for coaches today. Wah Lum's founder taught Northern Praying Mantis, yet his schools field southern lion teams: a northern kung fu lineage dancing southern lions is common in American schools. Wah Lum's Orlando team performed at the opening of Epcot in 1982, calls itself Disney's main lion dance partner "for over four decades", and describes the lion as "the 'soul' of a kung fu school".⁷³ Lei says his troupe was earning "forty thousand a year on lion dancing alone" by 1974, never charged membership and never applied for grants; it chose to spend the money on taking the whole school to Taiwan and Hong Kong for six to eight weeks to learn the culture and dances, instead of buying a McDonald's franchise.⁹ The well-known Boston-based teacher Bow Sim Mark (麥寶嬋), born in Guangzhou in 1942, emigrated to Brighton, Massachusetts in 1975 and founded the Chinese Wushu Research Institute in July 1976, but no source found ties her to lion dance.⁷⁴

Membership rules also shaped who could dance. Valerie Tom founded the Chinatown Community Young Lions in Manhattan in the early 1970s because, when her eight-year-old son wanted to lion dance, "you had to either belong to an association or a family organization and they were basically for people that were born in China, not for the American-born Chinese". The team began in her living room and was four generations deep about 43 years later. She also describes a drift in American-born drumming: "we beat a little harder, a little faster because we're a youth group".⁶⁵ Lau Bun had refused non-Chinese students until the late 1950s or 1960s; Dean Chin in DC was known for taking anyone who showed commitment.¹⁵⁶⁹

Tongs, gangs and street rivalry

Lion dance grew up next to Chinatown's darker institutions, and the overlap gave it a reputation that still follows teams. In New York, from the 1890s into the 1920s, the On Leong tong (led by Tom Lee, with Lee Toy as enforcer) and the Hip Sing tong (led by Mock Duck) fought over opium, gambling and prostitution; a 1913 raid exposed a wider ring and federal action shut down the vice trades.⁷⁵ In San Francisco, Lau Bun's early school operated while he guarded Hop Sing Tong businesses.¹⁵ In the 1970s a new generation of youth gangs appeared: on 4 September 1977 gunmen attacked the Golden Dragon Restaurant in San Francisco Chinatown, killing five bystanders and wounding eleven, in a turf war aimed at the Wah Ching gang.²⁵ A 1985 New York television report described Chinatown gangs extorting restaurant owners as far as Bergen County, New Jersey, and said they "answer to higher ups".⁷⁶ None of these sources ties a named lion troupe to a crime, and a coach should not repeat claims that do.

Community leaders used sport and lion dance as an alternative. The Chinese American sports association of the western US (美西華僑體育會) was founded in San Francisco in 1969 to steer Chinatown youth away from gangs (Chinese press names two of them as the "Apple" and "Lemon" gangs, 蘋果幫 and 檸檬幫) and towards sports; Yau Kung Moon lions performed at its 57th anniversary in 2026.⁵¹ The Boston Gung Ho Club of 1948 was founded by teenagers as an alternative to the Chinatown YMCA.⁴⁴

Rivalry between troupes was real. Karlin Chan, who joined the New York Chinese Freemasons Athletic Club in 1970 at 12, recalls street fights between rival lion troupes in 1973, 1974 and 1975. The cause was etiquette: troupes passing each other were expected to lower the lion head, and raising it was a public insult. He called the 1970s "basically a free for all". The police later set separate routes and assigned two officers to each group.⁶⁰ Lei says that in New York "you must take out a permit from the police department a week before you lion dance in the street", precisely because of fights between martial arts groups.⁴ Watford's informants said that "until the late 1980s, lion dance groups in America were rivals" and would fight on meeting; one Boulder master saw fights over turf in New York's Chinatown, and teams divided territory. They described the courtesies (no raised head, no excessive blinking, never turning the tail on another lion) as "old Fat San guidelines".¹⁸

The lion itself carried status. When Lei started, "the multi-colour lion represented the older organization; you didn't take out a multi-colour lion unless you were an organization that's been around for a while". A white beard meant an old lion, a black beard a younger one, and a short beard "a young, young lion looking for a fight"; with a multicoloured beard "you're absolutely going out there for a fight".⁴ Lei also admits the drama of a street face-off: "who's really the more ferocious".⁹ A gang stereotype has persisted into recent years. In a 2017 documentary about the New York team New York United, a young member's relative watched a show, said "they're a gang" and refused to buy him a laptop for college until he quit; he bought his own and kept dancing.⁷⁷

What Chinatown lion dance meant

For most of the 20th century the American lion did four jobs at once.

Blessing and business. The core activity was, and is, the New Year round of Chinatown businesses. Valerie Tom: the lions "bless every single business establishment that wants a blessing", do three bows at each, and collect a red envelope (hong bao), "the offering to the lion".⁶⁵ New York's "Super Saturday" (超級周六), the day before the Manhattan parade, keeps the custom on a city scale: troupes visit businesses from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., each with a permit from the NYPD's 5th Precinct. In 2026, 14 groups registered (the past maximum was 23), the police deployed 82 officers and closed Chinatown to traffic, and the Sanitation Department cleared the firecracker debris afterwards.⁷⁸ New York's firecracker history shows how city rules shape the custom: since 1998 a police-supervised firecracker festival (now in Sara D. Roosevelt Park) has replaced street firecrackers, and in 2024 one million were set off at 12:30 p.m., with lion dance by the New York Choy Lay Fut team.⁵⁰

Eye-dotting, the ritual that "wakes" a new lion (see Chapter 9), is practised in America too. On 1 February 2026 the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association held its first large eye-dotting (醒獅點睛) for five lions: after prayers, toasts and incense, guests including state legislators dotted the lions' eyes, ears and noses with cinnabar (硃砂) and white liquor, and the lions then performed choi cheng.⁸¹ Lei adds the Cantonese reason the lion licks the cash register: its tongue, lei6, sounds like "profit".⁹ Casey Avaunt's thesis on Little Saigon's Asian Garden Mall argues that lion dances "sell culture" and are integral to the mall's economy.⁸²

The organisation's calling card. A lion showed the strength of a school or association. Lei: to find "young athletic people and a group of people that's organized you have to go to a martial arts school".⁴ Raymond Wong of DC's Wong People calls lion dance "one of the levels of kung fu training ... you can look at as a weapon", whose power to drive away evil comes from kung fu.⁸³ A New York lion dancer at Wan Chi Ming says the lion shows "the spirit of the martial arts school or the association".⁷⁰

Identity. For American-born Chinese, the lion became a way to be Chinese. Kelly Wong of the New York Freemasons calls it "kind of a lost art here in America" that he wants to pass on: "I think it's what makes our family our family".⁸⁴ Corey Chan of Kei Lun says the stories the lion acts out are about filial piety, loyalty and righteousness, "the stories that Chinese people tell their children. This is why you're Chinese."⁷¹ Mai Du of Boston's Wah Lum said lion dance videos show "Chinese and Asian Americans are accepted as an integral part of the community".⁸⁵

Tourism and politics. Chinatown businesses promoted lion dance to attract tourists from the 1940s, and the 1953 festival was designed to dispel the "mystery Chinese" image.⁴¹³⁰ In the Cold War, lions under paired US and Republic of China flags, and newsreels contrasting "free Chinese" with Communist China, made the lion a political statement too.⁴¹⁴⁷

Lei pushes back on the stock American explanation. Ask Americans why lions dance and the answer is always "to ward off evil spirits"; ask dancers what the spirits are, whether they believe in them and how the dance scares them away, and "the answer is always no or I don't know". He calls the repeated phrase a microaggression, because young Chinese Americans get asked "do you really believe in this?", and argues that firecrackers invite gods and ancestors rather than scaring anything away. He prefers to say the lion teaches: the word for lion (獅, si1) sounds like "teacher" (師), and choi cheng is a lesson in goal-setting, discipline, teamwork and deferred reward. He has used lion teams in youth work since the 1970s as an example of Gordon Allport's contact theory: "American-born and China-born don't get along ... in a lion dance team they get along very quickly".⁹⁴ American teams still tell simpler origin stories. Boston Children's Museum's partner team, Worcester Youth Nian Dancers, tells the story of villagers scaring away a monster with pots and pans, and Seattle's Mak Fai names the beast as the Nian; Watford found the Nian story is the most common in the US because it is "the simplest and least offensive" (see Chapter 2 for the legends).⁸⁶⁶⁸¹⁸

1. Permit and route. In New York the troupe gets a police permit in advance and is assigned a route; elsewhere the association or organiser arranges the round.⁷⁸⁴
2. Firecrackers and drums at the door. Businesses set off firecrackers as the lion arrives; Boston restaurants "leave offerings to 'feed' the lions".⁸⁷⁸⁸
3. Three bows. The lion bows three times to the establishment; Watford's informants gloss the three bows as heaven, earth and people.⁶⁵¹⁸
4. Choi cheng. The lion takes the green and red envelope, often lettuce, sometimes oranges; in Boston the lettuce is kicked into the crowd and oranges are tossed.⁴³⁸⁸
5. Leave without turning the back. Watford's informants say lions back out of a shop so as not to turn their back on it.¹⁸

1975 onward: Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese refugees

The third wave came from Vietnam. Watford describes lion dance reaching the US in "two main separate events": Chinese labour migration from the late 1800s and Vietnamese refugees from 1975.¹⁸ Many of the refugees were Hoa (người Hoa), ethnic Chinese of Vietnam, who formed the majority of those leaving in 1978-79 after nationality registration in 1976, inflation in 1977 and worsening relations between Vietnam and China.⁸⁹ The Hoa included Cantonese and Teochew speakers. Many settled away from the old Chinatowns: in San Francisco, for example, on Larkin Street ("Little Saigon") rather than in Chinatown.⁵⁷ In Los Angeles Chinatown, the Thien Hau Temple (a Mazu temple) is run by the Camau Association of America, which serves Teochew Chinese-Vietnamese refugees from Cà Mau province; it bought and remodelled a former Italian church in the 1980s, dedicated images from Vietnam in 1990, and on New Year's Eve hosts lion dance while representatives of more than 25 Chinatown family associations light firecrackers at midnight.⁹⁰

Watford, citing Avaunt, says the diaspora kept dancing in the Little Saigons partly "to politically state their opposition" to the Socialist Republic, which had censored such performances, and that "Vietnamese churches and youth groups started small lion dance groups".¹⁸

The Vietnamese-American lion world is organised differently from the Chinatown one. It runs through Catholic parishes, Buddhist temples, scout troops and Vietnamese martial arts schools rather than district associations:

The festivals are Vietnamese, though the lion is shared. The Union of Vietnamese Student Associations has run the Tết fair in Orange County since 1982; it moved from Garden Grove Park to the OC Fair Grounds in Costa Mesa in 2013.¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁶ Little Saigon's 2023 flower street opened with "khai trống múa lân" (opening drums and lion dance) on the last day of the year, and its 2025 parade on Bolsa Avenue featured "pháo nổ, múa lân" (firecrackers, lion dance).¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁸ In San Jose, Branden Mach of the Golden Turtle Lion Dance Association learned a high-pole routine the day before a January 2025 show and told reporters "Tôi rất tự hào về nền văn hóa Việt Nam của mình" ("I am very proud of my Vietnamese culture"); Phillip Tran remembered that growing up "we always watched lion dancers perform at temples and at Tết".¹⁰⁹ Falls Church's Eden Center, the largest Vietnamese commercial centre on the East Coast, hosts lion troupes, firecrackers and lì xì (red envelopes) on the first day of Tết and the weekends after.¹¹⁰ Not everyone sees the lion as Vietnamese: the VOA columnist Bùi Văn Phú wrote that "múa lân mang nét sinh hoạt văn hoá Trung Hoa nhiều hơn là Việt" (lion dance "carries more Chinese than Vietnamese cultural character"), noting nothing Vietnamese in the troupe's costumes or banners.¹¹¹

These teams now lead much of American competition. In Watford's 2018 sample most performers were Vietnamese American, and the Vietnamese-led Denver team adopted Sar Ping after its leader attended a 2014 Seattle seminar.¹⁸ The first national traditional champion in 2018 was the Teo Chew Association Unicorn team from Texas; GDPT Linh Son won the 2025 Phoenix traditional title and Soaring Phoenix took second to fourth places and the high-pole title.¹¹²⁹⁸ Many 2023 national entrants were Vietnamese-American temple or youth groups.¹¹³ Two young members of Leung's White Crane describe the result as "a big melting pot of Asian culture from Chinese to Vietnamese to some Cambodian teams, church teams, temple teams", with everybody "very mixed in all the styles".¹¹⁴ For the Vietnamese tradition itself, including the Ông Địa (Earth God) figure who leads the lion, see Chapter 12.

Lion dance in America today

The national bodies

The United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation (USDLDF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit "created to preserve and promote the arts of Dragon and Lion Dance ... within the United States".¹¹⁵ Its founding story begins abroad: two future board members, Phong Vo and Nelson Ferreira, went to the 2016 Genting World Lion Dance Championships in Malaysia and met the International Dragon and Lion Dance Federation's first vice-president, Leong Lik Thong, and its secretary, who explained how to set up a national federation that could join the international community. A preparatory committee of coaches, team leaders and school owners formed, registered a non-profit and elected a seven-member board.¹¹⁵ The federation dates its inauguration to 2017; Watford reports an inauguration gala in Denver on 6 August 2017, 22 teams in 13 states at the time, and dues of $35 for individuals and $150 for schools.¹¹⁵¹⁸ Its mission is to preserve and promote dragon and lion dance "as a cultural tradition and sport", with opportunities "for all styles"; its reasons for existing include raising member teams "to an international level", certifying national judges and coaches, sanctioning competitions and sending teams abroad. It notes that dragon and lion dance has been practised in the US "for over a century" in "Chinatown associations, traditional martial arts schools and college campuses".¹¹⁶

Its president is Nelson Ferreira of the Zhong Yi Kung Fu Association in Madison, Wisconsin; other officers come from Nebraska, Texas and Wisconsin. Its international honorary advisers are Leong Lik Thong and Albert Fong Kong Yip of Malaysia and Chan Siew Kee of Singapore, and it runs judge certification (a national course in 2022) with rules advisers from Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.¹¹⁵¹¹³ Fong's own blog lists an undated appointment as honorary overseas adviser to a US dragon and lion dance federation, and it documents an earlier US lion dance seminar: photos with that caption sit beside letters from the mayor of Seattle and King County dated 2013, four years before the federation's 2017 inauguration.¹¹⁷ It has run seminars in both main styles: a "Fut San Style of Lion Dance and its Martial Roots" seminar with Grandmaster Lee Kam Wing, planned for the University of Texas in October 2020 with "Seven Star Beat and Drum Flowering techniques" and "Traditional Chengs used for businesses", was cancelled because of COVID;¹¹⁸ the "2023 Fundamentals of Sar Ping Lion Arts Seminar" was held on 1-3 September 2023 at the Vien Thong Buddhist Temple in Houston, taught by Hiew Yun Cheong of Singapore and Albert Fong Kong Yip of Malaysia, covering stances, basic drum, gong and cymbal beats, steps and posture, at $200-275 with a cap of 80 places.⁹⁹ On 5 June 2020 it published "USDLDF Believes that BLACK LIVES MATTER", committing dancers to their local communities "be them of Asian descent or not".¹¹⁹

A second national body is Texas-based: the USA Dragon and Lion Dance Sports Association (全美國龍獅運動協會), which hosted a national championship at Asia Times Square and The Epic in Grand Prairie, Texas, on 24-25 June 2023 (traditional on the first day, a new high-pole day on the second), with prizes of $1,500, $1,000 and $500 for traditional and $2,000, $1,500 and $1,000 for poles.¹²⁰ It held national traditional and high-pole championships again on 11-12 July 2026 in Grand Prairie, where Leung's White Crane won both events.¹²¹¹²² The description of Lei's November 2022 lecture lists him with a board role in this association. A third body, the USA Sar Ping (Lui Pai) Lion Dance Federation (美國沙坪（呂派）獅藝), was inaugurated in Madison on 1 July 2019.¹²³

American competition has its own feel. At the 2019 nationals in Madison the 17 teams opened by circling the arena waving the red, blue, green, yellow and pink flags of their kung fu schools; drummers played a tanggu drum, gong and cymbals, and Zhong Yi's supporters chanted "Zhong Yi, Jiayou!" Ferreira described the event as outreach: "We see lion dancing as sort of an outreach to the community, where we help them celebrate martial arts culture."¹²⁵¹²⁶ Traditional routines are built as stories. Watford lists 12-minute freestyle stories of a lion searching for food, drinking wine or helping a bird into its nest.¹⁸ Zhong Yi's 2019 story, "A Crack in the Boulder", had the lion brave a centipede to reach a "flower of immortality"; Ferreira explains choi cheng in competition as the lion being "the agent of transformation ... It eats the flower, but expels fortune onto the people."¹²⁶ Its 2023 traditional entry, announced as "Hidden Treasure at the Fishing Village", scored 9.03 less a 0.10 deduction for 8.93, which shows the IDLDF-style "deserved score minus deductions" scoring the federation uses (see Chapter 14).¹²⁷¹¹²

Team USA selection follows the international model: the highest-ranked USDLDF member team at the qualifier gets first refusal on invitations, which have included Genting in Malaysia, Tian Fu Gong in Singapore, the MGM Macau invitational, a Hong Kong championship, Penang's stilt event, Taiwan's water-stilt event, Indonesia's Belitung Cup and a Chilean championship. Past US representatives named by the federation are Sing Yung (Hawaii), Lion DanceMe and Spring Rock Lion Dance Troupe.¹²⁸ At Genting itself, the "Western Lion King" (西方獅王) award went to Australia in 2002 and to Leung's White Crane in 2006 and 2010, the only US honours in the table.¹²⁹ Zhong Yi says it placed third at the 2019 international championship in Macau, "first time the U.S. has gotten the top three".¹³⁰

Hawaii

Hawaii's scene is old and distinct. Gee Yung (Honolulu), founded in 1941 by its own account, claims to be "the first school to introduce the Hok San Sar Ping Lion Dance style to Hawaii" (no date given), trains with Siow Ho Phiew's Kun Seng Keng (關聖宮) and is headed by Harlan Lee, who inherited it from his father Arthur Yung Sung Lee in 2013 and leads an "International Sar Ping Dragon and Lion Dance Sport Association".^13140132 Honolulu hosted the "First Hawaii World Invitational Lion Kings Competition" at the Blaisdell Arena on 13 October 2002, with six teams and Team Hong Kong taking the top score.¹³³ Sing Yung and the Hawaii Lion Dance Association won national titles in 2018 and 2019.¹¹²¹²⁴ One of Watford's Hawaii informants put the generational split plainly: "Newer generation groups that were created after 2005 tend to play Hok San style while older generation groups will play Fat San style"; he could tell which group was performing "by listening to the music", and in Hawaii a black lion marks a young group and a white lion a senior one.¹⁸

High poles

The high-pole lion (高樁, Cant. gou1 zong1, "jongs" in American usage) came to America late. Watford's informants date American "homogenization" to stacks (the head dancer lifted onto the tail dancer's head) from the late 1980s and to "adding jongs routines in 1994".¹⁸ Leung's White Crane has competed internationally since 1992 and is known for high-pole work.⁶³ In 2012 San Francisco's LionDanceME took pole stacking to America's Got Talent, where Howard Stern called it "metal against skin" and Howie Mandel said he "got bored".¹³⁴ On the East Coast poles were still rare in 2018: the host of the first nationals, Connie Wong, said "the East Coast has rarely if ever seen a jong performance", and the jongs event was cancelled on the morning of 27 May because some of the 22 metal poles (from just over 2 feet to over 8 feet) wobbled.¹³⁵ Poles have since become part of Chinatown spectacle as well: at New York's 2026 New Year firecracker festival a Choy Lee Fut team's two lions climbed high poles to unfurl New Year couplets before professional pyrotechnicians lit a million firecrackers at noon.¹³⁶ Lei does not teach poles in the US because of insurance and parental permission, and dislikes the form as storytelling: posts are "fine for entertainment but if you want to tell a story there's deeper stories".⁹⁴

Malaysian heads and Sar Ping

The Malaysian and Singaporean influence on American competition is strong and recent. Watford writes that "many groups in the United States perform a style that is based out of Malaysia", that Sar Ping grandmasters "have based their schools in Malaysia", and that Chan Siew Kee (陳紹箕) is the master of "the Denver group and many other groups in the US". A 2014 Sar Ping seminar in Seattle drew teams from around the country; Denver members later trained in Malaysia for eight to ten hours a day under a famous champion coach and visited Genting in 2016.¹⁸ Nelson Ferreira of Madison studied with Chan Siew Kee from 2013 and became his disciple in a 拜師 (baai3 si1, discipleship) ceremony in Singapore in 2017; his school teaches 18 drum patterns with cymbal and gong played within them, 18 core steps matching the patterns, seven postures, eight lion actions and six traditional sets (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 7).¹³⁰ His team captain, Andrea Fernandez, who studied with him in Singapore, says of Malaysia and Singapore: "You'll find the best masters in the world there."¹²⁶ Phoenix's Golden Phoenix Lion Dance Arts and Athletic Association switched from Futsan to Sar Ping with guidance from "a shifu from a sister school in Wisconsin".¹³⁷ Lei makes a similar claim: "The best Chinese lion dancers are in Malaysia today since the 1980s ... not in China, not in Taiwan, not in Hong Kong."⁹

Women

Women were long kept out. Lei: "at one point women were banned" because lion dance was "a male macho thing".⁴ Watford's informants gave the menstruation taboo as the reason, and said that women who joined in the 1990s mostly played cymbals or gong.¹⁸ The decisive change in America came from Boston. Gund Kwok (see the New England section), founded in February 1998, was the first Asian women's lion and dragon dance troupe in the US.¹³⁸ The New York Chinese Freemasons are said to have been among the first to train women.⁶⁰ At the 2018 nationals one team was all-female including its musicians, and the Denver team had an all-female lion; a San Jose team leader recalled that in 2005 rival teams called his female head dancer "a cheat code": "It's not a cheat code. It was a they-can-do-it-too code."¹⁸ The USDLDF added a Female category in 2023.¹¹³ In Los Angeles, Cassandra Lee, captain of a "very female heavy" troupe, says traditional audiences still "look down upon female Chinese lion dancers", asking "are you even strong enough".¹³⁹ A 2026 Chinese-press survey credits the Los Angeles troupe 廣勝強舞獅隊 with "the first all-female head-and-tail lion pair in the US"; a World Journal report names a Los Angeles team 冠勝強, which may be the same group.¹⁴⁰¹²² Leung's White Crane describes itself as the "only North American school to win multiple worldwide competitions with an all-female team champion".⁶⁴

Colleges, schools and the wider public

Lion dance is now a campus activity. MIT's team has performed since 1994 and became an official club in 1997.¹⁴¹ Penn Lions at the University of Pennsylvania is a Hok San-style troupe of about two dozen undergraduates who practise twice a week; "You come for the lion dancing; you stay for the community."¹⁴² A Columbia University team appears in the running order of the 2017 East Coast competition filmed in the New York United documentary (the captions are unclear).⁷⁷ In San Francisco, the High School Dragon and Lion Dance Open, organised by PRIMED with LionDanceMe, held its fourth edition at Portsmouth Square on 3 May 2025 with more than 150 students from seven public high schools; nearly 1,000 students had taken part since the first edition, and teams were judged on story, creativity, music and costume as well as skill.¹⁴³ Civic recognition has followed. Mayor Giuliani's Gracie Mansion reception for the Year of the Dragon (8 February 2000) featured "a traditional lion dance performance by Tony Chuy's Lion Dance Team", and he proclaimed a Lunar New Year Week.¹⁴⁴ New York City public schools closed for Lunar New Year from 8 February 2016; New York State made it a school holiday in September 2023; California made it an optional state holiday (effective 2023), followed by Colorado and Washington; and 2024 was the first year Boston recognised Lunar New Year as an official holiday.^14514614742

The dancers are no longer only Asian American. Watford argues that US lion dance has become "a multicultural, pan ethnic, and diverse art form".¹⁸

"Lion dance has become a world culture. It is not only an Asian culture anymore."

Danh, Denver team member, quoted in Watford (2019)

The Chinese Historical Society of America's 2026 "Lion Dance Across America" survey for the US 250th anniversary counted nearly 50 troupes in more than 20 states, including Kuna Kung Fu in Idaho, an all-non-Asian team led by a veteran, and Las Vegas Lohan Shaolin, now led by an Irish-American sifu; it also names a New York troupe (泰樂舞獅隊) said to be more than 70 years old.¹⁴⁰ In July 2026 the Chinese community joined Lower Manhattan's Independence Day parade for the first time with "one dragon, nine lions" (一龍九獅).¹⁴⁸ Oakland Chinatown's 2026 New Year parade of more than 10,000 people was led by lion and dragon dancers and joined by Vietnamese, Korean and Thai cultural groups.¹⁴⁹

New England: Boston, Malden, Quincy, Worcester and beyond

Boston's Chinatown was "primarily from Taishan" until after the Second World War.¹⁶ Its institutions follow the national pattern. The Boston lodge of the Chee Kong Tong says it dates to about 1868, was the first Chinese organisation in Boston to buy its own property (6 Tyler Street, 1909) and hosted Sun Yat-sen on his Boston visit.⁴⁴ The CCBA of New England (紐英崙中華公所), which runs the New Year parade, gives its founding year as 1913.¹⁵⁰ The Chinese American Civic Association (華美福利會), co-founded in 1965 by Amy Guen (阮陳金鳳), who was born in Boston in 1924 and partly raised in Taishan, later gave rise to Sampan (舢板), the bilingual newspaper that became the main English-language chronicler of Boston lion dance.¹⁵⁰

The Boston Chinese Freemasons Athletic Club (波士頓致公體育會), also called Hung Ching (洪青), began as the Gung Ho Club, founded in 1948 by eight Chinese teenagers as an alternative to the Chinatown YMCA, then "the only social and athletic facility in the Chinese community". It took the Hung Ching name and became a pipeline into the Chee Kong Tong "father club"; one of the eight founders later became national Chee Kong Tong president. The club calls itself "the oldest Chinese athletic club in Boston", teaches lion dance "alongside our athletic programs" in a "traditionally southern style", teaches martial arts free (members know Tai Chi, Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, White Brow, White Crane and Uechi-ryu) and is funded "mainly by performing the lion dance". It keeps a close bond with the New York chapter. In August 2023 its five lions led the opening parade through Chinatown of the Ng family association (伍胥山公所, Cant. ng5 seoi1 saan1 gung1 so2, Mand. Wǔ Xūshān gōngsuǒ) at its 18th national reunion, and a Chinese-language report on that weekend lists representatives of the Hung Mun Chee Kung Tong, On Leong, Hip Sing and the Wong association among the traditional Chinatown bodies present.¹⁵¹ The sources do not say when lion dance began at the club.⁴⁴ Taishanese immigrants also brought "nine-man" volleyball to American Chinatowns, and the same athletic clubs often ran both: Edmonton's Hung Mun club lists volleyball beside lion dance and kung fu.⁵²⁷

The parade and its calendar. In 2006 the CCBA of New England's New Year parade had eight troupes and more than 200 performers, including the Waltham-based On Leong lion dance troupe, Gund Kwok and Wu Qing, and troupes visited every Chinatown business for red envelopes.¹⁵² The 18 February 2024 parade had nine troupes.⁴² On 9 February 2025 thousands of firecrackers were set off together on Harrison Avenue and lettuce was kicked into the crowd.⁴³ The 2026 parade, on Sunday 1 March, had about ten groups, including Gund Kwok (dancing a brown horse costume for the Year of the Horse) and the Wong Family Benevolent Association; lions caught lettuce and tossed oranges, and "many restaurant owners leave offerings to 'feed' the lions to secure good luck".⁸⁸⁸⁷ A second, newer Lunar New Year parade reached its sixth edition on 15 March 2026; after opening at the Chinatown Gate it travelled to Malden, Cambridge and Belmont.¹⁵³ The CCBA's August Moon Festival (中秋聯歡會) reached its 56th edition on 9 August 2026, so it began around 1971; lion dance with choi cheng opens the stage show, and dancers throw oranges to the crowd.¹⁵⁴ Family and district associations, many rooted in Taishan, open their spring banquets with lion dance and choi cheng while guests "feed" red envelopes (利市) to the lions: Woo Ching White Crane (胡清白鶴) opened the 至孝篤親公所 banquet on 28 February 2026 with six lions, and Wah Lum performed for the Yee Fung Toy (余風采堂) and Sam Yick (三益公所) banquets.^150155156 Hung Goon (阮鴻燦), a former CCBA-NE chair, is credited with coordinating a parade that draws "tens of thousands".¹⁵⁷

As of 2023, Massachusetts was the only US state where consumer firecrackers were illegal, yet the Boston parade sets off thousands on Harrison Avenue; the sources do not say how it is permitted.¹⁵⁸⁴³ Brian Ma has filmed Boston Chinatown lion dance since February 1999, and his channel's 100-plus videos are, in Gund Kwok drummer Ken Morin's words, "a historic record of Boston's Chinatown".⁸⁵¹⁵⁹ Boston also keeps practices that Hong Kong has partly dropped. A Hong Kong resident told Sampan that the Big Head Buddha "does not often appear in Hong Kong lion dance nowadays. It is appreciated that Boston can retain the tradition."⁸⁵

Gund Kwok. The troupe was founded in February 1998 with ten women by Sifu Cheng Imm Tan, who grew up in Penang, Malaysia, where her parents would not let her learn kung fu "because girls were not supposed to be strong". She came to the US in 1978, earned a Harvard Divinity School MDiv, became a Unitarian Universalist minister, started the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence, and in 1998 became founding director of Boston's Office of New Bostonians.¹⁶⁰ The name means "heroine" (the characters are probably 巾幗, Cant. gan1 gwok3, as in 巾幗英雄, though the sources read do not write them out).¹³⁸¹⁶¹ Eddie Lau, former chief instructor of Wah Lum, taught the group the basics for about a year and a half; Tan and her husband Ken Morin then studied in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia with Lum Jong Jyh and Richard Chua (Singapore), the Singapore Wong Loo Choh See Shee Choong Association, a course with Siow Ho Phiew and "most notably" Mah Yoke Seng of Penang. Tan is a certified US national judge.¹⁶⁰

"Traditionally lion dance was forbidden to women as a sport, because people thought women were weak and did not have discipline."

Cheng Imm Tan, Sampan (2013)

In 2013 the troupe had 24 women, practised weekly at the China Trade Building at 2 Boylston Street, required a 10-week trial class, a graduation routine and 75% attendance, and gave 18 to 24 performances a year, with fees going to equipment and charities for women and girls.¹⁶¹ Its site now offers an 8-week trial for women of Asian descent and a "Cubs Troupe" for children of any Asian heritage aged 6 and up; Avaunt notes that membership is limited to women who identify as female and Asian American and reads the troupe's "sisterhood" as a way of articulating Asian American identity outside the dance's patriarchal tradition.¹³⁸¹⁶² AARP reported members aged 12 to 66 in 2024, and early audiences "were shocked because we were doing actually harder moves than the guys were doing".¹⁶³ NPR followed a rehearsal in 2014.¹⁶⁴ The troupe has been central to the Peabody Essex Museum's Lunar New Year festival in Salem for at least 15 years, staging narrated story-lion shows such as a 2020 Year of the Rat plot in which the lion crosses a river, a stream and a waterfall to save a panda.¹⁶⁵¹⁶⁶ On style, Gund Kwok is the clearest statement of the American mix:¹⁶⁷

"Gund Kwok's style is mostly Fat San style but we often use the Hok San heads because they are cuter."

Gund Kwok, Our Lion Heads

It calls the combination "Fat Hok", describes the Fat San head as having a pointed horn, curved mouth and traditionally long tail, and the Hok San head as having a straight mouth, curved horn and shorter tail, "more like a cute cat", with Hok San moves softer but more acrobatic. It also dances a Hakka lion learned in Sarawak and a Five Directions set modelled on Taoist altars in Malaysia.¹⁶⁷ Boston now also has the Nuwa Athletic Club (2017), another women's group.⁴²

The wider Massachusetts map. The table below gathers the troupes named in the sources. Pioneer Valley, Lowell and Quincy festival troupes could not be documented, so their absence here means nothing either way.

Massachusetts is also unusually central to national competition. The USDLDF's senior adviser (Bob Rosen) and general counsel (Connie Wong) are from Massachusetts, the 2023 programme listed Mai Du as a vice-president, and the first nationals were held in Quincy.¹¹⁵¹¹³ At those nationals Mai Du was described as championships director and a federation co-founder.¹³⁵

After 2020: COVID, anti-Asian hate and Monterey Park

COVID stopped the street rounds. Boston's Nam Pai team had not danced since February 2020 when it performed in Chinatown on a Saturday in June 2021, the first of four planned June Saturdays organised by City Councilor Ed Flynn, Chinatown Main Street and the CCBA-NE. The context was 96 reports of anti-Asian hate or discrimination in Massachusetts between March 2020 and February 2021.¹⁶⁹

"We try to use this symbol to signify we are chasing the coronavirus away."

Gilbert K. Ho, a director of the nonprofit Chinatown Main Street, which co-organised the series with Nam Pai performing, Boston Globe (2021)

Los Angeles's Thien Hau Temple cancelled its New Year services in 2020 for the first time.⁹⁰ The USDLDF moved online, with webinars ("Brief History of Lion Dance", November 2020; "Fundamentals of Dragon Dance", February 2021) and a Discord server, and cancelled its Fut San seminar.¹⁷³¹¹⁸ In San Francisco, the Chinatown History and Culture Association was founded in 2020, in the worst days of the pandemic and of violence against elderly Chinese, to revive Chinatown with public events; in summer 2026 Chinatown ran eight Saturday afternoons of lion dance and kung fu street shows on Grant Avenue to draw tourists, many of the martial artists over 60.¹⁷⁴¹⁷⁵ The Stop Asian Hate movement is dated from about 13 March 2021; the Atlanta spa shootings of 16 March 2021 killed eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, and rallies followed on 27 March. In the sources found, lion dance's visible role in this period was mainly the "chase the virus away" reopening event rather than protest.¹⁷⁶¹⁶⁹ Wah Lum's Mimi Chan, director of Make Us Visible Florida, helped pass a 2023 Florida law requiring Asian American and Pacific Islander history in K-12 schools as a response to anti-Asian hate.⁶¹

Then came Monterey Park. On 21 January 2023, Lunar New Year's Eve, at about 10:22 p.m., a gunman opened fire at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio on West Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park, California, killing ten people; eleven died in total, including the gunman, Huu Can Tran, 72, who killed himself the next day in Torrance, and nine were injured. Brandon Tsay, 26, disarmed him at the Lai Lai Ballroom in Alhambra about 17 minutes later. It happened on the first night of the city's two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the largest in Southern California, which had ended at 9 p.m.; the ballroom party was not officially part of it, and the second day was cancelled.¹⁷⁷ Monterey Park had become, in the 1990 census, the first mainland US city with an Asian-descent majority, about 65% Asian.¹⁷⁸ Police in New York, Philadelphia and Washington increased security at Lunar New Year events.¹⁷⁹ Vietnamese-language press reported that the Vietnamese community felt "scrutinised" because the gunman was of Vietnamese (Chinese-Vietnamese) origin; a local nail-salon owner who first mistook the shots for New Year firecrackers still took his family to the temple the next morning to watch firecrackers and lion dance.¹⁸⁰ Two years later, in 2025, a shooting at the Tết fair of Mary Queen of Vietnam parish in New Orleans East wounded two people.¹⁸¹

The style split in America, explained

Putting the evidence together, American southern lion dance arrived in four overlapping waves, and the style a team dances today usually tells you which wave its teachers came from.

How American dancers describe the difference is worth knowing, because students will meet both views. Watford's informants said Fat San is "about power": strikes are strong, "rooting" (a pause that shows restraint) is central, the dancer can improvise between stances and the drummer finds beats to fit. Hok San "is about artistic expression", with "techniques and strict motions ... that must be followed", and "you become the lion"; some Fat San dancers dislike Hok San heads as "cute and fluffy". One informant argued that "becoming the lion" is a modern idea, since old kung fu films show two people doing martial arts under a costume. Preference, she found, tracks personality and "which style you were taught first".¹⁸ Fat San leaders worry about the trend: "Every Fat San group I talked with saw the creation of Sar Ping Hok San as speeding the process of homogenizing lion dance", and an Austin leader was sad to see groups move to Hok San "as it is not as strong as Fat San".¹⁸ A Boulder master took the opposite line:

"Fat San. Hok San. It doesn't matter. We all move the same."

Jiaolong, Boulder, quoted in Watford (2019)

Labels are loose in practice. A Houston school markets "Traditional Futsan (Foshan)" lion as its traditional brand; Gund Kwok dances Fat San moves under Hok San heads; Leung's White Crane, a 1971 Hong Kong-era school, also performs under a Kun Seng Keng (Malaysian Sar Ping) name, 美國梁舘白鶴關聖宮; and many Hawaii teams can do both, depending on the gig.^18216718318 The term "Hong Kong style" is especially ambiguous in America: it can mean a Fut San-type lion, a head made in a Hong Kong workshop, or, in at least one vendor's usage (not verified), a Heshan-type head. Ask what someone means before you use it. The drum is the clearest marker: Watford's Hawaii informant identified groups "by listening to the music", and drum beats "denote a group's affiliation to a particular style or school".¹⁸

How American lion dance differs from mainland China and Hong Kong

The same lion has been given different jobs in each place. The table summarises; the prose below explains the main contrasts. For mainland and Hong Kong detail see Chapter 12, Chapter 14 and Chapter 15.

The state's role. In Guangdong the Cultural Revolution placed Spring Festival under "five prohibitions", including "no dragon or lion dance" (不准滾龍舞獅); one Jiujiang master recalls his father teaching the family routine at night by kerosene lamp, with a bamboo basket for a head.¹⁸⁵ Since then the state has rebuilt lion dance as a sport and listed Guangdong's awakened lion as national intangible cultural heritage on 20 May 2006, for Foshan, Guangzhou and Suixi.¹⁸⁶ Hong Kong never banned it but licenses it: section 4C of the Summary Offences Ordinance, added in 1981, makes it an offence to organise or join a lion, dragon or unicorn dance in a public place without a police permit, and the government said in 2022 that the purpose is to keep "lawless elements" out and that applicants authorise criminal-record checks; permits fell from 2,421 in 2018 to 4 in 2021 during COVID.¹⁸⁷¹⁸⁸ Lion dance is item 2.1 on Hong Kong's first intangible heritage inventory.¹⁸⁹ The United States has neither a ban nor a heritage listing. What it has is local control (police permits in New York, firecracker rules everywhere) and a federation structure built by the dancers themselves.^78158115

The parade and the street. In Guangdong and Hong Kong the lion's traditional home is the village, the clan hall and the temple festival. In the Taishan villages many American families came from, video records show lion dance billed as "opening the year" (醒獅開年) by a clan team on the thirteenth day of the New Year, and, at one 2026 village celebration, the lion's eye-dotting as the last rite of a circuit of gods, wells, ancestral halls and temple (see Chapter 9).¹⁹⁰¹⁹¹ In America the lion's most visible stage is a parade that Lei calls an American invention "like chop suey" and the Chinatown business round, a commercial blessing economy Avaunt documents in a Vietnamese mall.⁹⁸²

Meaning. In America the lion carries identity more heavily than at home. It is how American-born children of Taishanese, Hong Kong and Vietnamese families find their culture, as one young New York dancer put it, and how Gund Kwok built "an Asian women's community where there wasn't such a space".⁷⁰¹⁶⁵ It is also an argument about explanation. Lei thinks the "ward off evil spirits" line does damage in an American context, where children are asked whether they really believe it, and that meanings have to be explained "in the American context so our kids can understand".⁴

Preservation and return. The diaspora sometimes keeps what the homeland drops. Asked whether overseas Chinese kept traditions alive, Lei said that overseas communities "absolutely" preserved traditions through the Cultural Revolution, as they did clan genealogies; Boston keeps the Big Head Buddha that Hong Kong has partly lost.⁴⁸⁵ But the flow is circular. The high-pole lion that American teams learned from Malaysia was also taken back into mainland China (see Chapter 15), and American Sar Ping teams now travel to Singapore for training and to the style's ancestral home in China: Nelson Ferreira's group photographed its master there, and Watford reports an ancestral ceremony for the Sar Ping founder, held in China every few years, to which teams worldwide send one or two lions.¹³⁰¹⁸

Mixed styles under one roof. In Guangdong, Foshan and Heshan remain distinct regional schools, and Hong Kong has its own drum lineages. American teams routinely mix them: a northern mantis school dancing southern lions, Fat San moves under Hok San heads, Hong Kong stances with Sar Ping drums. As the two Leung's White Crane dancers said, in the US "everybody is very mixed in all the styles", and the downside they named is teams learning from YouTube "but not actually learn[ing] these techniques properly".¹¹⁴ That is the strongest argument for teaching lineage explicitly, which is what the rest of this guide is for.

Houston: America's lion dance capital?

This section asks whether Houston can be called the biggest lion dance city in the United States. The sources support "a leading hub" but not "the biggest". No source counts lion dance teams city by city, and on the measures that can be compared Houston is strong but not first on all of them. Searches ran in English, Vietnamese and Chinese. The last two found almost nothing specific to Houston beyond one Malaysian Chinese newspaper report, so the picture rests mainly on English-language local press and federation results pages. Vietnamese-language community teams may be undercounted.

The community behind the teams

Houston became a major refugee resettlement site after Saigon fell in 1975. Greater Houston had fewer than 100 ethnic Vietnamese in early 1975 and about 25,000 by 1980, second only to Los Angeles.¹ Pew's analysis of 2017-2019 census survey data counts about 143,000 Vietnamese Americans in the Houston area, level with San Jose at that rounding and far behind Los Angeles at 346,000.² The newer Chinatown is on Bellaire Boulevard in southwest Houston, and the largest Vietnamese commercial district is in suburban Alief along the same boulevard.¹

Houstonia reports that Houston historically had only a few loosely organized lion troupes, mostly tied to temples, family groups or martial arts studios.³ Two bases are documented directly: Vietnamese Buddhist youth groups and temples (GDPT Linh Son, Vien Thong Tu) and the Teochew community (the Teo Chew Association and Temple; Teochew, 潮州, Cant. ciu4 zau1, Mand. Cháozhōu, is the Chaozhou area of eastern Guangdong). Other labels would be guesses, because the Houstonia articles do not sort teams by background.

The teams

No source gives a team total. This table lists the main named groups, with founding years where a source gives one.

Other groups appear in the sources. Nam Siu Lum Kuen, a kung fu school led by Sifu Christopher Scott with classes in Seabrook, Clear Lake and nearby towns (probably 南少林拳, "Southern Shaolin fist"; the characters are this guide's reading of the romanization), posted a lion it calls traditional Futsan style: Futsan (Foshan) Traditional Chinese Southern Lion Dance - Houston, Texas @ 0:00.¹⁴ Houston Shaolin Kung Fu Academy danced lion and dragon at Asia Society Texas in 2022.¹⁵ A Houston Police Department Lion Dance Team is listed in the city's 2023 Thanksgiving parade.¹⁶ A Lavang Lion Dance Team performed at Children's Museum Houston events; the pages do not say what group it belongs to.¹⁷ Counting groups named in sources from 2022 to 2026, at least a dozen are active. That is a floor, not a census.

New Year and the rest of the year

February 2026 listings show where audiences meet the lions: festivals at the Chinese Community Center in Asiatown and at Asia Society Texas (both 14 February), downtown Market Square Park, and POST (15 February).¹⁸¹⁹ Show counts are the clearest sign of demand. Unity booked about 140 shows in two weeks, roughly ten a day if spread evenly. Soaring Phoenix does 150+ shows in three to four weeks, so its routines are cut to 7-10 minutes, against 7-12 minutes for a competition routine.⁵ Outside New Year the teams work business blessings, weddings, quinceañeras (Latin American fifteenth-birthday parties), baby showers and sports games.³⁴

Competitions, and Houston teams at national and world events

No lion dance competition held in Houston turned up in any search. The nearest local event is a showcase: listings from OCA-Greater Houston, a community organization, give a Lion Dance Exhibition of Houston's top teams on Saturday 1 November at the Marriott Westchase Grand Pavilion and another on Sunday 25 October 2026, with no mention of judging.²⁰ The national championships were held elsewhere (Quincy, Madison, Austin), and a second federation held its 2026 national in Grand Prairie, near Dallas.⁷²¹²² Houston did host a national-level course: the USDLDF's Sar Ping seminar (Sar Ping, 沙坪, Cant. saa1 ping4, Mand. Shāpíng, is a Hok San lineage) at Vien Thong temple on 1-3 September 2023, taught by masters from Singapore and Malaysia and capped at 80 people.¹¹

How the other big scenes compare

The figures come from different years and measure different things, so they show scale only roughly. Population is Pew's 2019 metro-area Vietnamese count.

So, is Houston the biggest?

Not on any measure the sources support. By Vietnamese population, Los Angeles is about 2.4 times larger, and Houston ties San Jose for second. By team count, nothing can be said: no city has a published count, and the parade figures above are not comparable. By shows, the reported figures (one San Francisco team about 300 in two months, Houston teams 140 to 150+ in two to four weeks) cover different periods and do not rank the cities. By results, Houston is strong but not dominant: a 2018 national title and most of one 2025 qualifier, but no podium in 2019 and no named place in 2026. What the sources support is that Houston is a leading competitive hub with a large Vietnamese-American base and strong 2025 results. "Biggest" would need a team count for each city, and nobody has published one.

Sources for this section

1. History of Vietnamese Americans in Houston - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia
2. Top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas by Vietnamese population, 2019 - Pew Research Center, English, chart (analysis of 2017-2019 American Community Survey data)
3. In Houston, Lion Dancing Goes Far Beyond Lunar New Year (page title "Lion's Den") - Erica Cheng, Houstonia Magazine, English, magazine (17 February 2026)
4. Lunar New Year (Lee's Golden Dragon) - Daniel Renfrow, Houstonia Magazine, English, magazine (5 February 2024)
5. Houston Public Media article on Soaring Phoenix (title rebuilt from the page address) - Houston Public Media, English, public media news (2 March 2026); facts taken from an earlier reading, because the page could not be reopened (HTTP 403)
6. Houston Chronicle article on the Houston teams at the Genting championship (headline not captured) - Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle, English, newspaper (24 July 2025); this is the preview-host address of the article
7. 1st National Championships (2018) - United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, official results (not re-opened for this guide)
8. Lion Dance Eye Dot Introduction @ #MakFai45 @ 0:00 - wawawho18 channel, YouTube, English, event video (7:39); only the description was usable (event of 25 August 2019)
9. 3rd National Championships (2023) - United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, event page; results are image-only, and the entrant list is from the program booklet linked there (not re-opened for this guide)
10. Official results for 2025 Phoenix Lion Dance Championships - United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, official results (not re-opened for this guide)
11. Announcing 2023 Fundamentals of Sar Ping Lion Arts Seminar - United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, announcement (not re-opened for this guide)
12. About us - Hong De Lion Dance Association, Melbourne, English, team website (not re-opened for this guide; the address is as first recorded)
13. Sin Chew Daily report on the day-2 preliminaries of the 15th Genting championship (headline not recorded) - Sin Chew Daily, Chinese, newspaper (26 July 2025; not re-opened for this guide)
14. Futsan (Foshan) Traditional Chinese Southern Lion Dance - Houston, Texas @ 0:00 - siulumkuen1 channel, YouTube, English, performance video (7:00); only the description was usable
15. Asia Society Texas' Lunar New Year Festivities Return With a Roar to Celebrate the Year of the Tiger - Asia Society, English, web page (2022; seen in search-result text only)
16. 74th Annual H-E-B Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2023 Parade Participants: Houston Police Department Lion Dance Team - City of Houston, English, parade page; and 'It brings joy to us': Houston police's first-ever lion dance team makes its Lunar New Year debut - ABC13, English, TV news (both seen in search-result text only)
17. Children's Museum Houston partners with VCSA to celebrate Mid Autumn Fest and Mid-Autumn Fest at Children's Museum Houston - Children's Museum Houston, English, event pages (seen in search-result text only)
18. Celebrate Lunar New Year in Houston - Visit Houston, English, tourism event guide (seen in search-result text only)
19. Chinese Community Center 2026 Lunar New Year Festival (title rebuilt from the page address) - The Buzz Magazines, English, event listing (seen in search-result text only)
20. Lion Dance Exhibition listing (title rebuilt from the page address) and a second Lion Dance Exhibition listing - OCA-Greater Houston, English, event listings (seen in search-result text only)
21. 2nd National Championships (2019) - United States Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, official results (not re-opened for this guide)
22. Sing Tao Daily report on the 2026 Grand Prairie championship (title rebuilt from the page address) - Sing Tao Daily (USA), Chinese, newspaper (17 July 2026); and World Journal report on the same event (headline not recorded) - World Journal, Chinese, newspaper (both not re-opened for this guide)
23. Sing Tao Daily report on Leung's White Crane 55th anniversary (title rebuilt from the page address) - Sing Tao Daily (USA), Chinese, newspaper (1 August 2026; not re-opened for this guide)
24. Golden Dragon Parade (San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade) - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia
25. The world's most active lion dance group facing blowback in San Francisco's Chinatown - Yujie Zhou, Mission Local, English, news (17 April 2024, updated 18 April; title rebuilt from the page address)
26. 雲頂世界獅王爭霸賽 - Wikipedia, Chinese, encyclopedia (not re-opened for this guide)
27. Tet and Lunar New Year Festivals Bring Different Orange County Communities Together - cultureoc.org, English, news (seen in search-result text only)
28. Close to 50,000 Celebrate Year of the Dragon at 2024 OC Tet Festival at Mile Square Park - Orange County supervisor's office, English, press release (headline seen in search-result text only)
29. Super Saturday Lion Dance Parades 2024 (title rebuilt from the page address) - listed on the Asian American Arts Alliance events calendar, English, event listing (17 February 2024)
30. Chinatown's wilder Lunar New Year days remembered (title rebuilt from the page address) - amNY, English, newspaper (2014; not re-opened for this guide)
31. In Photos: Lunar New Year Parade in Boston's Chinatown - Joey Huang, The Harvard Crimson, English, photo essay (30 January 2023)
32. Mak Fai Kung Fu Dragon and Lion Dance Association - Mak Fai, English, team website (not re-opened for this guide)
33. Houston Is Home To One of the Biggest Lunar New Year Parties in the US. Here's How To Celebrate - repost on a Goodreads author blog, English (headline seen in search-result text only; original publisher not checked)
34. Hok San Lo Fu Chi Eye Dotting by Grandmaster Lim Meng Kok, Houston Texas 2023 @ 0:00 - White Lotus Dragon and Lion Dance (Portland, Oregon), English; the description places it "at Soaring Phoenix, USA Xuan Long Headquarters in Houston"

Boston: lion dance in Chinatown from 1870 to today

Lion dance in Boston is easy to see today and hard to date. This section starts from a photo book on Chinese Boston, 1870-1965, then adds what public photographs, newspapers, club and school pages and community press show. It adds to the New England overview earlier in this chapter. Lion dance is 醒獅/醒狮 (Cant. sing2 si1, Mand. xǐng shī), the "awakening lion". Where only a search-engine summary of a page was seen, the source list says "excerpt only".

The book: Chinese in Boston, 1870-1965

Chinese in Boston, 1870-1965 (Images of America series, Arcadia Publishing, 2008) is by the Bridgewater State historian Wing-kai To with the Chinese Historical Society of New England (CHSNE).¹ It is a photo book: a Massachusetts Historical Society reviewer says the text is brief and the captioned photographs carry the history. The pictures come from the Bostonian Society, the Peabody Essex Museum and CHSNE, and run from the first known photographs of Chinese in New England around 1870 to present-day images. The review counts seven chapters; a grant proposal for the book described six.²³ CHSNE lists community organisations, merchant activities, education and civic protests among its themes.¹

What could and could not be seen. Neither the review nor the CHSNE page mentions lion dance, dragon dance, New Year, parades, kung fu clubs, On Leong or a Chinese Merchants Association.²¹ Google Books offered only page 85 as a preview and returned no hits for a search on "lion".⁴ The Internet Archive has a lending copy of 134 page images, but it is access-restricted, and a search-inside request returned "Item not available".⁵ So this guide cannot say what any caption in the book says about lion dance, and gives no page numbers from it.

Before 1965: what the record shows

The earliest image of a Chinese street dance in Boston that has been found is a Leslie Jones glass negative at the Boston Public Library, titled "The Boston Chinese celebrate by having a dragon dance in Chinatown" and dated September 1929.⁶ The library says the title and date came from the negative or its sleeve. September is not New Year, and the image itself has not been seen. Librarians later retitled a Spencer Grant photograph of Chinese New Year in Chinatown from "dragon" to "lion" after a user pointed out the mistake, so a "dragon dance" caption from this period may hide a lion.⁷

Some of the associations that sponsor lions today are old. A University of British Columbia history blog says a Boston Chinese Merchants' Association elected a president in 1924 (the blog names the group two ways).⁸ Kwong Kow Chinese School, founded in 1916 and described as set up by a merchants' group, later fielded a youth lion team.⁹ On Leong (安良, Cant. on1 loeng4, Mand. ānliáng) is a Chinatown merchants' association whose New York body is called the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association.¹⁰ An On Leong lion troupe based in Waltham took part in the 2006 Chinatown parade, and On Leong lions danced at a Chinatown banquet reported in April 2022 and on the August Moon stage in 2025.¹¹¹²¹³ The 2020 Year of the Rat parade also listed a "Chinese Merchants Association" among its lion dance groups.¹⁴ No source found says the 2020 group and On Leong are one body, and none documents either dancing a lion before 1965.

Public festivals from 1970

The best early evidence of lion dance on a Boston Chinatown stage is a Sampan article on the first public August Moon (Mid-Autumn) Festival, held on 29 August 1970 (a Saturday, though the excerpt seen said Sunday) and co-sponsored by the Chinese community and Boston's Summerthing programme. On a Beach Street stage outside the Cathay House building, members of the Gung Ho Club demonstrated lion dance and the Bamboo Hut Club demonstrated gung fu, while students from "Quong Kow Junior High School" danced folk dances.¹⁵ No second source for that line-up and no 1970 programme were found. If it is right, it supports the Gung Ho Club's own 1948 founding date over WBUR's 1984 "first troupe" date discussed earlier, though it does not show when the club first danced. Chinese-language reports show the club, under its Hung Ching name, opening the August Moon stage show with lion dance in 2019 (the 50th festival) and again in 2023.¹⁹²¹⁹³ In 2019 the lion troupes of the martial arts schools first paraded with flags through Chinatown's streets before going on stage, and the schools performing lion dance and martial arts included a Wong group that the report writes as 黃氏 (Cant. wong4 si6, Mand. Huáng shì, "the Wong family").¹⁹²

Photographs and press cover the Lunar New Year streets from the 1970s. A Spencer Grant photograph at the Boston Public Library, dated 1972 in its record, is titled "Traditional lion seeks tribute on Chinese New Year, Chinatown, Boston".⁷ The Harvard Crimson reported in February 1978 that Chinatown welcomed the Year of the Horse with lion dances, fireworks and martial arts displays, a week late because of the blizzard.¹⁷ A Northeastern slide dated 1978 to 1989 shows a Chinatown dragon dance, and a Digital Commonwealth search lists 19 Chinese Progressive Association items at Northeastern (the titles seen describe New Year dragon dances; dates not shown) and ten Spencer Grant frames with the "lion seeks tribute" title.¹⁸¹⁹ The parade's own claim of "more than 70 years" comes from the CCBA chair, and no printed programme or report that dates its first edition was found.²⁰

Dated table of Boston milestones

Kung fu schools and teams: what the evidence shows

Boston lion teams are mostly kung fu schools and clubs, as elsewhere in the United States. The table gives what this guide found for each name that may come up, and says plainly when nothing was found. Women's lion dance in Boston (Gund Kwok, 1998, and Nuwa Athletic Club, 2017) is covered in the New England overview.

Eye dotting and the State House

Eye dotting (點睛/点睛, Cant. dim2 zing1, Mand. diǎn jīng) is the ceremony that wakes a new lion before its first dance. Malaysian reporting describes cinnabar soaked in water and applied with a bamboo brush to the mirror on the lion's head, called the third eye, and to other parts, usually by a ceremony master.⁴³ See Chapter 11 for what the lion's features mean.

No press report or official listing of an eye-dotting ceremony at the Massachusetts State House turned up in English or Chinese searches, but Wah Lum Kung Fu of Malden and Quincy posted a video titled Historic Dragon and Lion Eye-dotting Ceremony at the Massachusetts State House (see Chapter 9). Other New England examples: a Braintree Lunar New Year festival that listed lion and dragon dances with an eye-dotting ceremony in February 2024;⁴⁴ a Lunar New Year celebration at Boston City Hall that drew hundreds;⁴⁵ and an archive file that appears to be a 2010 state proclamation for Lunar New Year on 14 February.⁴⁶

Firecracker rules

Massachusetts treats fireworks as illegal to use, possess or sell without licences, certification and permits from the State Fire Marshal and the local fire department. A state summary says this holds even for fireworks bought legally in another state, and lists fines of $100 to $1,000, up to a year in prison and seizure for unlawful sales.⁴⁷ The PDF could not be opened, so this point comes from a search-result excerpt. In 2020 Boston formed a task force on illegal fireworks, and the fire commissioner said displays should be left to professionals.⁴⁸

Quincy, Malden and the rest of New England

Wah Lum's Malden academy opened the 14th annual Chinese Culture Connection Lunar New Year celebration at Malden High School on 14 January 2022, a four-hour programme with more than 20 groups; local reporting says the academy began as lessons in Mai Du's driveway.³⁰ In Quincy, a Hung Gar and lion dance academy appears in library listings with a team called "Yee's Southern Lions", which danced at the Thomas Crane Public Library's North Quincy and main branches in 2024 and 2025 and at North Quincy in the Year of the Rabbit (2023).⁴⁰ In summer 2022 lion dances ran weekly at the Chinatown Gate; one report names Wah Lum as running a weekly series there and another names the Hung Gar academy as opening Chinatown Main Street's Saturday series.³¹³⁶ MIT's team (see Chapter 16) says it generally dances in the Hong Gar style (see Chapter 4 for the style families).⁴⁹ Worcester, Cambridge and Dorchester troupes are in the overview table. Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine were not researched.

Sources for this section

1. "Chinese in Boston: 1870-1965" - Chinese Historical Society of New England, English, book description (opened)
2. Reference Collection Book Review: Chinese in Boston - Massachusetts Historical Society, Beehive blog, English, book review (Sept 2016; opened)
3. Summer grant record 66 (title not seen) - Bridgewater State University Virtual Commons, English, grant proposal for the book (2007; excerpt only)
4. Chinese in Boston: 1870-1965 - Wing-kai To and the Chinese Historical Society of New England, Arcadia Publishing (Images of America, 2008, ISBN 9780738555294), Google Books record, English (opened; one preview page, no search hits for "lion")
5. Chinese in Boston : 1870-1965 - Internet Archive lending-library record, English, book (record opened; text not accessible)
6. The Boston Chinese celebrate by having a dragon dance in Chinatown - Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth, English, photograph record (September 1929; excerpt only)
7. Traditional lion seeks tribute on Chinese New Year, Chinatown, Boston - Spencer Grant Collection, Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth, English, photograph record (title seen in the opened search list; the 1972 date and the retitling note are from an excerpt)
8. Moy Ni Ding: "The Grand Old Man of Chinatown" - University of British Columbia, Chinese Canadian history blog, English (2025; excerpt only)
9. Kwong Kow Chinese School - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia (excerpt only)
10. On Leong Chinese Merchants Association - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia (excerpt only)
11. Lions roar through Chinatown (title rebuilt from the page address) - Tufts Daily, English, student newspaper (Feb 2006; excerpt only)
12. 陳仕維榮膺中華民國僑務委員 僑界祝賀 - Epoch Times, Chinese (traditional), newspaper (13 Apr 2022; excerpt only)
13. 波士頓華埠迎第55屆中秋節 再現人潮盛況 - Epoch Times, Chinese (traditional), newspaper (11 Aug 2025; excerpt only)
14. Year of the Rat Festival - Boston Dance Alliance, English, event listing (2020; excerpt only)
15. The First August Moon Festival in Chinatown - Sampan, English, community newspaper (2021; excerpt only)
16. Chinatown's August Moon Festival celebrates its 50th year - Boston Globe, English, newspaper (11 Aug 2019; headline only)
17. The Year of the Horse (title rebuilt from the page address) - Harvard Crimson, English, student newspaper (24 Feb 1978; excerpt only)
18. Dragon Dance performance in Chinatown - Northeastern University Library, Asian American history archive, English, slide record (1978-1989; excerpt only)
19. Digital Commonwealth search: chinatown dragon lion dance chinese new year - Digital Commonwealth, English, search results (opened; 30 items)
20. Lunar New Year in Boston - WBUR, English, public radio (16 Feb 2024; read for the earlier section)
21. History, Gung Ho Club, Hung Ching and Chee Kong Tong pages - Boston Chinese Freemasons Athletic Club, English, organisation site (read for the earlier section)
22. Pui Chan - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia (excerpt only)
23. Voice of America profile of Pui Chan (title not seen) - Voice of America, English, news (excerpt only)
24. Chinatown History Directory, Wah Lum Kung Fu of the U.S.A. - Northeastern University Library, English, directory entry (excerpt only)
25. Profile of Calvin Chin's Martial Arts Academy (title not seen) - Fig City News, English, local news (excerpt only; page identified from a search listing and read through its summary)
26. Who we are - Gund Kwok, English, troupe site (read for the earlier section)
27. In Photos: Lunar New Year 2019 - Harvard Crimson, English, photo essay (20 Feb 2019; excerpt only)
28. Year of the Rat brings lion dance parade to Chinatown (title rebuilt from the page address) - Sampan, English, community newspaper (2020; excerpt only)
29. Kwong Kow Chinese School - school site, English (excerpt only; the youth lion team statement is as summarised from the site)
30. Chinese Culture Connection (tag page) - Neighborhood View, Malden, English, local news (excerpt only)
31. Lion Dances at the Chinatown Gate - Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, English, event listing (6 Aug 2022; excerpt only)
32. Wah Lum Kung Fu Athletic Association/Wah Lum Kung Fu New England Headquarter records - Northeastern University Library, English, archive record (title only)
33. Bow-sim Mark - Wikipedia, English, encyclopedia, and WGBH Open Vault record of a Chinese New Year programme - GBH, English, archive record (both excerpt only)
34. Chinese New Year lion dance workshop for children (title and date rebuilt from the page address) - Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, English, event page
35. August Moon festival in Chinatown (title rebuilt from the page address) - Boston Globe, English, newspaper (9 Aug 2026; excerpt only)
36. Chinese lion dancing at Boston's Chinatown with Hung Gar Kung Fu and Lion Dance Academy (title rebuilt from the page address) - Lita Kelley, English, photographer's blog (excerpt only)
37. 1st National Championships - US Dragon and Lion Dance Federation, English, results page (read for the earlier section)
38. Lion dancers perform in Chinatown to chase away coronavirus - Boston Globe, English, newspaper (5 June 2021; read for the earlier section)
39. Grandmaster Frank Yee - Yee's Hung Ga, English, school site (excerpt only)
40. Lion dance event pages (also ?p=3417 and ?p=2026) - Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, English, library event listings (2023 to 2025; excerpt only)
41. Roundup: Kickboxing Near Boston - Boston Magazine, English, class listing (undated; excerpt only)
42. How Wah May Lion Dance Team is preserving tradition while embracing modernity (title rebuilt from the page address) - Gobserver, English, local news (excerpt only)
43. Dotting ceremony: bringing the lion to life before its first dance - Free Malaysia Today, English, news (26 Jan 2023; excerpt only)
44. Braintree 2nd Lunar New Year Festival (title rebuilt from the page address) - The Boston Calendar, English, event listing (excerpt only)
45. Boston community crowds City Hall in celebration of Lunar New Year (title rebuilt from the page address) - The Huntington News, English, student newspaper (excerpt only)
46. Commonwealth of Massachusetts proclamation file (title not seen) - Secretary of the Commonwealth digital archives, English and Chinese, state record (excerpt only; read as a 2010 proclamation for 14 February)
47. Summary of Massachusetts fireworks law - Commonwealth of Massachusetts, English, state summary (excerpt only; the PDF returned an access error)
48. Walsh forms task force on illegal fireworks in Boston (title rebuilt from the page address) - Boston Globe, English, newspaper (26 Jun 2020; excerpt only)
49. About the MIT Lion Dance Team (title rebuilt from the page address) - MIT Lion Dance, English, team site (excerpt only)