Celebrations for the Lunar New Year continue through Tuesday and one local family has performed a traditional Chinese dance in Cleveland for more than four decades: the Kwan Family Lion Dance Team.
Like a lot of Lunar New Year traditions, the Kwan Lion Dance started with firecrackers, which caught everyone by surprise at a recent performance in a packed Chinese restaurant, Li Wah in Cleveland’s AsiaTown.
The Kwans have become a fan favorite performing at restaurants and recreation centers all over Northeast Ohio this time of year.
As some Kwan family members drum and beat gongs, others are in a multiple person lion costume with colorful legs and a long body. At the end of it there’s a lion's head with pulleys and levers inside to maneuver the eyes and mouth.
The lion paraded through dinner tables collecting “hongbao,” red envelopes of money traditionally given as Lunar New Year gifts. This day, they were tips for the dancers.
It’s a holiday scene that would be common in many East Asian Countries, like Taiwan, where Yih-Ting Merk grew up. She’s been taking her kids to see the Kwan Lion Dance team in Cleveland since they were born.
“I want to bring the culture back to my children because we don't get to go back during the new year so it's really nice that we have it over here so they will understand the culture,” Merk said.
For others in the restaurant, it’s an opportunity to learn about these cultures. Joyce Chang is a Korean American college student from Texas, who said she never saw a Lion Dance until she moved to Cleveland.
“We’ve been going since our freshman year,” Chang said. “It’s a must. It’s like a tradition at this point.”
In addition to the lion and the drummers, the team has a character they call “Little Buddha,” who wears a bright yellow jumpsuit and a helmet with a painted face of the religious buddha character.
Little Buddha’s antics include stealing phones to take selfies, faking high fives with the kids and will even do some modern dances. Ever heard of the “griddy?”
Under the helmet is Allison, one the Kwan cousins.
“I feed off of other people's energy like that so when they're giving it to me it just makes the performance even better,” Allison said. “I just love when people can have fun with it too.”
The now 27-year-old has been performing since she was 5.
“I was just watching some film watching me drum and I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, I've come so far,'" Allison said. "I used to be like messing up all the time and all that, but now I almost can't even recognize my drumming versus my dad’s."
Her cousins Alexander and Christopher are the legs of the operation.
“They say, ‘Hey, what is that?'” Alexander said. “I'm like, 'A lion dance, a Chinese lion dance.' They're like, 'Really? How long have you been doing that?" I said, 'For about 18 years, and I'm never tired of it.'”
Christopher said they spent their entire teen years and now twenties prioritizing the family tradition.
“They ask me all the time they're like, 'How do you feel getting rid of your weekends for a whole month?'” Christopher said. "I'm like, 'Well I get rid of my weekends and I get to spend time with my family and participate in something that enhances my knowledge.' When we have kids and we get them old enough that they're going to be in that costume because we want to take care of the tradition that they started all those years ago.”
That mindset was passed down by their father George and his brothers and sisters but really started a generation earlier.
“My father started this off," George said. "We went to a lion dance, one of the very rare things that Cleveland ever had. He said, ‘One day you guys are going to do that. I'm going to get you guys trained.' We were probably seven, eight years old. So, we started off with a laundry basket or a fortune cooking box with a sheet in the living room.”
The lion dance stems from Chinese folklore, which George said suggests the lion wards away evil and allows for prosperity in the new year.
Fast forward almost fifty years later and the Kwan family is performing about 30, 30-minute shows during the 15-day holiday. Sometimes they perform as many as seven in a single day, which takes endurance and swapping out roles between drumming, being in the lion costume and getting a breather.
It's well worth it for the Kwan family, keeping a culture alive and a family tradition alive. George even said some toddlers in the next generation are already getting involved.
“Every new year you just go through the same traditions and you try to remind them, hey, we can't let our traditions go away," George said. "This is what we do. We pray to the gods, we honor our ancestors, and if you keep it alive, then you'll keep the spirit alive so nobody will forget.”
