By Trista Ngo, AsAmNews Intern
Albert Jang with Leung’s White Crane Dragon & Lion Dance Association provides an inside glimpse at San Francisco’s inconic Lunar New Year dragon.
The team consisting of 100 members from aournd the country gathered on Saturday, February 16 to showcase the city’s Lunar New Parade finale.
Albert Jang: The chief instructors for the White Crane School of San Francisco, and those White Crane and I have been doing this for since 1979.
We’ve been doing the dragon now for 46 years. This dragon alone takes about 110 people, including the head and tails. That’s not including the support on the side. The dragon is in storage most of the year.
Just about Chinese New Year it is taken out in storage and put together by another school.
First, they all set up 20 sections for the opening ceremony in Portland square. And then after that opening ceremony we’ll bring it back where we have a stage and then put the rest of the body together. So all together, we have about 52 sections.
Ideally, we have 120 people. We only have about 108 people today, but we will make do. So we have a set of member of Team leaders here that’s been with us for, I would say, 46 years.
We have some people doing for 50 and what they do is they call people in to participate. And it’s people from all over the United States. We have a doctor from Arizona, cancer researcher, he comes out every year. I’ve been doing this this long, 46 years. Now, I’m the dragon.
Like I said. I started in my school back in 79 and we didn’t have to pay anything. So kind of a payback, you know, I kind of kind of feel obligated to do this. Also, we have, I have a whole bunch of other classmates that do the same thing. We volunteer our time. So this is basically for the community. You know, we’re just doing things for the community. We’re volunteering our time. It’s part of a tradition or culture, and we’re happy to do it.
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