The Oakland Chinatown lion dance teacher whose students' grandparents he taught

On Eighth Street in Oakland Chinatown, in the basement of a benevolent association building, Sifu Tony Wu has taught lion dance to children every Friday afternoon and Sunday morning for 43 years. He has had, by his own count, somewhere between 700 and 900 students. He has lost count exactly because, he says, “the children become the students of the students, and now I am training the lions made by the lions.”

The basement is concrete and fluorescent. The walls are painted red. There are six lion heads on a rack against the back wall: three traditional, two large, and one small one for the youngest students. The drums sit on a low platform in the center.

Sifu Wu came to Oakland in 1973 from Toishan in southern China. He worked for sixteen years as a restaurant cook on Webster Street. He taught lion dance at night and on weekends starting in 1982 because, he says, the kids in Chinatown needed something to do that was not a video arcade.

A typical class is about fifteen children, ages 7 to 16. Sifu Wu charges $40 a month. He has not raised the fee since 2003. The benevolent association lets him use the basement for free in exchange for the association’s lion performing at every Lunar New Year on the block.

The drum is the spine of the dance. A traditional lion is operated by two people: one inside the head, one as the tail, both moving as the drum tells them to. Sifu Wu teaches the drum first. He says you cannot dance until you can drum. He teaches the drum for three months before he lets a student touch the lion head.

“The lion is two people,” he says, “but the lion is one. The drum tells them they are one. Without the drum, two people. With the drum, one lion.”

A boy named Bryan, age 8, has been in Sifu Wu’s class for fourteen months. Bryan’s grandfather, Mr. Lin, was Sifu Wu’s student in 1985. Mr. Lin learned the drum at age 11 and the lion head at 14. Mr. Lin’s daughter, Bryan’s mother, danced as the tail of a lion in the 1999 Oakland Lunar New Year parade. Bryan is currently learning the drum. He has another six weeks before he is allowed to touch the head.

Sifu Wu’s living-room shelf has a Polaroid of every Lunar New Year parade since 1983. The parades are mostly the same image: a lion mid-leap on Eighth Street, drums in the foreground, the same association building behind. The faces inside the lion are different from year to year. The lion is the same.

In 2023 a developer offered Sifu Wu $42,000 for the rights to use his class footage in a promotional video for a luxury condo project two blocks away. Sifu Wu said no. He did not need the money, he said. The drum was his thing. The drum was not for sale.

On the Friday I visited, six-year-old Audrey was tapping out a basic three-beat pattern. She missed the third beat about half the time. Sifu Wu sat on a folding chair across from her, watching, not correcting. He waited. By the end of the hour she had it. Sifu Wu nodded once. He has a particular nod that means: now we can begin.