The colors were near-neon and unnatural they reminded me of the glowing hues of Photo Hunt, the tabletop bar game. Behind the stage was an enormous screen upon which digital backdrops-ancient temples, royal gardens, the cosmos-appeared, along with digital dancers who would walk to the bottom of the screen and then pop out, via the appearance of a living dancer, on the stage. After we took our seats, two hosts with animatronic smiles, speaking both Chinese and English, began introducing a series of dances, which were called things like “Goodness in the Face of Evil” and “The World Divinely Restored.” The female dancers moved in hypnotic swirls the male dancers jumped and flipped. My family drove to the fancy concert hall downtown, where the lobby was full of people in suits and cocktail dresses. On the day of Shen Yun, I developed chills and a fever, which I immediately decided to ignore in the interest of seeing Shen Yun. (Why look up a figment of your own imagination?) I was seeing a lot of search results that involved the word “cult.” I clicked on one link, and then closed it, realizing that I did not want to spoil what lay ahead of me-a free journey into the fantastic unknown. “Is it like Cirque du Soleil?” I asked, furiously Googling Shen Yun on my phone, something that had never occurred to me to do before. On Christmas Day, my dad told me that he had something special planned for the family. Then, over the holidays, I went home to Houston, where my parents live. Shen Yun greeted me silently at the bus stop and loomed over highway exits, following me around on the physical plane of existence the way anything you shop for on the Internet starts to follow you around online. 1 show in the world.” These posters were so uncanny and contentless that the easiest explanation for their existence was that my brain had simply glitched and invented Shen Yun the way John Nash invented his roommate in “ A Beautiful Mind.” Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere. The year before that, the Shen Yun poster featured two women dancing, wearing birthday-cake-frosting colors, and for months I sat in the subway reading but in no way processing the phrase “ Absolutely the No. Last year, the ads were goldenrod yellow, like dehydrated urine, and they said “ Reviving 5,000 Years of Civilization.” The year before that, the ads (“ Experience a Divine Culture”) were green. Shen Yun has lived in the pink fluffy insulation of my mind for a while now. And, for many Americans who live in or around the ninety-six cities where the Shen Yun Performing Arts troupe is set to perform this year, the words “Shen Yun” conjure an indelible yet incomprehensible image: a flat, bright shade of lilac, a woman leaping in the sky with a fan-shaped white skirt and billowing pink sleeves, and the enigmatic phrase “ 5,000 Years of Civilization Reborn.” New Yorkers know the Cellino & Barnes hotline better than they know their Social Security numbers. When Texans hear the name Jim Adler, their souls reply with “ Texas Hammer.” Michiganders know that God filled the sky around the Detroit airport with clouds and with billboards for Joumana Kayrouz. The most pervasive forms of local advertising often feel like this-like nursery rhymes or urban legends, or something implanted in your most tender consciousness by a social version of natural law. Just as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun.
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