I definitely have regrets here at Galileo, particularly not joining a club earlier. However, when I did join LionDanceME (LDM) in the spring semester of my junior year, it was such a memorable experience because of the performance opportunities, despite only doing it for not even a full year.
It was during lunch time when the entire LDM team showed up to our classroom. They said that they needed members to participate in the upcoming tournament. Since I wanted more extracurricular activities for my college applications and that I was never in a club before, I decided to join.
I remember right after joining the club, I got to try out the music cymbal for the first time and it came full of struggles and awful rhythm. At that time, nervousness was all throughout my mind with a tournament (3rd Annual Inter-League High School Lion Dance Competition) coming up in 6 weeks. Obviously that comes with huge commitment and being really dedicated to fully hone the skills needed for the tournament, which meant going to a lot of the practices.
During these practices, I met some of my closest friends still today. Everyone was so supportive of each other and helped everyone improve. I’ve never been a part of this kind of teamwork anywhere else.
This also helped me get to know my younger brother more, since he was our club leader, which also felt weird in a sense. He joined at the start of the year as a freshman due to his friend forcing him, while I joined later in the spring year. It felt weird to be in a club where my younger brother is better than me at everything. I had already heard of his reputation of being a really good lion dancer, which I didn’t know before. However, he still supported me a lot, especially at home. He helped me learn how to count the rhythm correctly. Because of this supportiveness, I ended up being very confident going into the tournament.
We ended up winning and as the prize, the entire school was given pineapple buns. On that day, we had a huge line at the courtyard and distributed the buns to everyone. We had over 500+ buns and many students and staff were filled with happy faces. Nothing at school has ever felt greater than this moment, since it was my first tournament ever, and I was able to do something for the Galileo community.
When my senior year started, I was even more eager to do lion dancing and take it to the next level. Lion dancing has gotten a lot more serious as I had to do both the lion and the dragon. This didn’t stop others from encouraging and supporting me. I eventually got the hang of it and debuted my first lion performance at the 2024 fall assembly. I felt very happy and excited to show off my hardwork as I was looking forward to it ever since I started the actual lion dance.
LDM has undoubtedly shaped me as a person. It taught me resilience, determination, and simply to ask for help when needed. LDM has brought me opportunities that I can find nowhere else, like performing in Las Vegas, doing 5 straight back-to-back lion performances on Chinese New Year’s Day, and many more. LDM has not only accomplished all these feats, but it has also provided me the chance to be recognized by my school community and not feel like a nobody.
