Harry Guey-Lee doesn’t go into D.C.’s Chinatown much these days. Although he grew up there, he mostly returns for occasional Washington Wizards games.
Washington, D.C
How the annual lion dance draws Chinese Americans back to D.C.’s Chinatown
“We care about the little bit of connection we still have to our past and our parents and the cultural traditions that are part of Chinese culture,” said Guey-Lee, who lives in Silver Spring, Md. “It’s a little bit, but we hold on to that little bit.”
Guey-Lee, 73, is among roughly 50 members of the Chinese Youth Club who will step to a beat, play instruments and wave flags as part of a traditional lion dance at the parade Sunday. While several other lion dance troupes will also perform, the CYC’s team is the oldest in the District.
The dance is a family tradition for some. Guey-Lee’s father played the drums during the early years of the parade in the 1940s before passing the torch to his sons, who carried kung fu weapons, served as the lion’s tail and played the cymbals.
Now, the children of Guey-Lee and his brother also participate — and teach the next generation. People of all ages have a role: Toddlers carry flags, teens and young adults dance in the lion costumes, and older adults hold banners, play instruments and hand fortune cookies to spectators.
The origins of the lion dance, which dates at least from the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906), are disputed. One story tells of villagers scaring away a monster with an animal costume, firecrackers, and pots and pans. Another recounts an emperor who dreamed of an animal and ordered that it be re-created for festivals.
The resulting dance, which has roots in martial arts and is traditionally taught to boys, is an athletic endeavor that takes significant energy. During the parade’s half-hour performance, dancers rotate in and out of the lion costumes to give each person a break — especially from carrying the wooden heads, which can weigh up to 10 pounds.
“If you just jump in there and try to go 100 percent, you’re going to get tired really fast,” said Kevin Lee, Guey-Lee’s nephew and one of the co-directors of this year’s dance.
Technique is important, and the performers under each lion’s head and tail are instructed to make their movements lively, Lee said. The instrumentalists and dancers work in tandem, with the music cuing specific steps and the person under the lion’s tail following the dancer under the head.
The team rehearses eight to 10 times before the parade, with younger dancers practicing first at each session. When the older dancers get their turn, instructors teach more advanced moves and critique form. The performers do squatting exercises to prepare for some of their movements during the show.
Ada Stuyvenberg, 12, said the hardest part of being a lion in the parade is, well, acting like a real lion.
“You really have to do very quick movements, all while being smooth,” said Ada, who lives in Rockville, Md. “You can’t be like a robot.”
Her mom, Daphne Pee, learned about the dance troupe from a neighbor last year and was thrilled to find the kind of Chinese American community that she didn’t get to experience while growing up in Montgomery County. Now she plays cymbals in the parade while her children dance.
Pee, 46, said the activity helps her children stay connected to their Chinese culture.
“For the parents,” she said, “we’re trying to keep that alive in them.”
The old-timers ensure the troupe stays true to traditions, like “dotting the eyes” of each new lion head by dabbing red ink on various parts to bring it to life. When the team members leave a business after dancing there to bless it, they back out as a sign of respect, rather than turning away from the audience.
But in other ways, much has changed since Chinese immigrants established the CYC in Chinatown in 1939. When Guey-Lee’s father immigrated from Taishan, a city in China’s Guangdong province, the organization was one of few groups offering structured socialization opportunities for the neighborhood’s young people.
The CYC functioned like a Chinese YMCA, with volleyball tournaments and Chinese classes, among other activities. Each Lunar New Year, the organization’s lion dancers spent hours going store to store to bless Chinatown’s businesses while their owners lit firecrackers and gifted the performers cash in red envelopes.
Jack Lee, Guey-Lee’s brother, joined this tradition as a preteen and remains involved in the dance troupe decades later. While he doesn’t feel as Chinese as he would like, he said performing is a way of “staying connected to Chinatown, as well as staying connected to my culture.”
Unlike cities like New York and Toronto, D.C.’s Chinatown no longer feels particularly Chinese. Chinese architectural motifs still decorate shops and an archway celebrating the relationship between D.C. and its sister city of Beijing looms over H Street, but few Chinese immigrants live there.
Many residents began to move out of the area in the 1960s in search of better housing and business opportunities and lower crime rates, according to a report from the University of Maryland. The area became the focus of government renewal projects in the 1970s and ’80s, and after the sports arena now known as Capital One Arena was built in 1996, shops and restaurants catering to spectators flooded the area. Many long-standing businesses were priced out.
Lee and Guey-Lee felt those changes personally: The townhouse their parents lived in was razed for the arena’s construction. The neighborhood, Guey-Lee said, is “obviously a shell of what it once was 35, 40 years ago.”
Most people in Chinatown participated in the lion dance back then, he said, and attracting new performers was easy. Now, it’s harder to spread the word. The D.C. area’s Chinese Americans have scattered to the suburbs and don’t have as many organic opportunities to meet. Children are busier than in previous generations, and those who live outside the city need parents to drive them to dance practices.
Wally Lee, whose father was one of CYC’s founders, said many children a few generations removed from the immigrant experience feel more American than Chinese and may not know about the lion dance.
“It’s only through word of mouth or being involved in our club where they see it in person and they hopefully will have an interest to try it,” said Wally Lee, 75, who is not related to Jack Lee and his family. “So it’s tougher than back in the old days.”
The CYC tries to meet children where they are, recruiting players on the organization’s sports teams to the dance troupe and sharing the program at schools’ “international day” events. The lion dancers also perform at other events throughout the year.
Kevin Lee, 37, said the performance can be an avenue for young people to engage with their heritage in ways that feel less like work than learning Cantonese or Mandarin.
“There’s definitely Chinese school and things like that,” he said. “This is another way into the culture.”
The dance is also open to people without Chinese heritage. Organizers said they welcome anyone who wants to experience their traditions and have had people of other backgrounds join the group.
This year, one family of lion dancers is from Peru.
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(NEWS FROM THE STATES) – Visitors from across the United States traveled to the National Mall Thursday for the opening day of the Great American State Fair, a days-long event that is part of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
States and territories showed off cultural and agricultural exports at exhibits stretching nearly a mile. Attendees snapped photos on the small Grand Ole Opry stage in the Tennessee booth, kids tried putt-putt at Indiana’s miniature golf course and cowboys rode horses at Montana’s rodeo.
A 110-foot Ferris wheel slowly turned at the center of the freshly manicured lawn, framing the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol in the distance on either side. Nearby stood a model of Trump’s controversial “triumphal arch.”
People collected swag from each state — drawstring bags from Ohio, stickers from South Dakota, snacks from Tennessee — and could receive a stamp on state fair passports.
The fair is part of the larger Freedom 250 programming and kicked off Wednesday night with a rally on the mall featuring a speech from the president that closely resembled his remarks along the 2024 presidential campaign trail. The festivities will continue over Independence Day, when Trump will deliver a second speech followed by what is promised to be an impressive fireworks display.
The president will visit North and South Dakota as part of his Freedom 250 tour for the opening of the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library and Independence Day eve fireworks above Mount Rushmore.
Freedom 250 then extends into August with a high school athletic competition in Washington, D.C., dubbed the “Patriot Games” and a Freedom 250 INDYCAR race around the National Mall.
The administration’s celebration is separate from the America250 commission, created by Congress a decade ago, and which has its own nationwide programming this year.
From Lake Erie to the Ohio River
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and first lady Fran DeWine greeted guests in Ohio’s pavilion. The couple posed for photos in front of a map of the Buckeye State.
“We wanted to see on the wall all the different things, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, all the different fun things you can do in Ohio,” the Republican governor said, adding the state has local celebrations and initiatives planned for the 250th anniversary, including “Movies in Ohio” for community showings of films that feature the state.
Ohio’s first lady showcased a children’s literacy exhibit on the opposite wall and touted the roughly 427,000 participants in the state’s partnership with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a program that mails free children’s books monthly to households with kids under age 5.
“We’ve mailed out 27 million books. We know that a child’s brain is 80% developed by age 3, so we want to get them those books early,” she said.
Reflecting on America’s milestone birthday, the governor said, “We’re always a work in progress, Ohio’s a work in progress, this country is a work in progress.”
“I think you know the thing we need to keep in mind, all of us, is there’s some essential core principles that we all believe in. … We may disagree about different policies, but the core principles are the same,” he said.
Cartwheels on the lawn
People from various states walked from exhibit to exhibit, while stopped in the nation’s capital during road trip vacations.
Tanya Geders, 43, of St. Louis, Missouri, did a cartwheel in the mall lawn, trying to persuade her son to join in. The family stopped at the state fair on their way to Virginia Beach.
“We’re like, well, if we go to the ocean, we can go to D.C. and what a better time to be here than the 250th anniversary,” Geders said.
Robyn Toman, 71, of Severn, Maryland, escorted her 12-year-old grandson Miles to meet DeWine and grab a photo with the governor.
Toman said she remembers the country’s bicentennial.
“I was a kid about his age, and I came in 1976. I said, ‘We’re gonna go, let’s go down to D.C. for a couple days and see this,’” she said.
“We’ve enjoyed it. We went over to the archives yesterday, and saw the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. And, oh, that was so nice, that was fantastic.”
Not all states are there. A spokesperson for Washington state’s lieutenant governor’s office told States Newsroom the administration declined to join because of “the costs to the state associated with participating.”According to news reports, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont did not contribute exhibits, though many are still represented by flags outside the individual booths.The state officials did not immediately respond to States Newsroom for confirmation.
All states that reportedly did not participate, with the exception of Vermont, are Democratic-led.
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Washington, D.C
DC reaches settlement with man detained while protesting troops with Darth Vader song
The District of Columbia has reached a settlement agreement for an undisclosed amount of money with a resident who claims police illegally detained him for following an Ohio National Guard patrol while playing Darth Vader’s theme song from “Star Wars” on his phone — an act of protest against the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.
A court filing late Thursday says the plaintiff, Sam O’Hara, will drop his lawsuit’s claims against the District and four Metropolitan Police Department officers within three business days of receiving the settlement payment. The filing doesn’t specify a dollar amount for the deal between the district and O’Hara, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia.
In an email on Friday, an ACLU spokesperson referred to the settlement’s financial terms as “a significant amount” that O’Hara “is pleased with” but said they aren’t disclosing the dollar figure to protect his privacy. A spokesperson for D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s office declined to comment on the settlement.
O’Hara’s agreement with the district doesn’t resolve his related claims against an Ohio National Guard member. Attorneys for the Guard member, Sgt. Devon Beck, have asked a judge to dismiss O’Hara’s claims against him.
“He was there because that was his assigned duty,” Beck’s lawyers wrote. “This was not an accidental encounter or a one-time disagreement on a public sidewalk.”
An earlier court filing, in February, said O’Hara had reached a settlement agreement “in principle” with the district. In response, a judge agreed to suspend the case while they negotiated terms.
O’Hara sued the district last October, claiming police officers violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable seizures and excessive force.
The ominous orchestral music of “The Imperial March” from Star Wars movies was the soundtrack for O’Hara’s peaceful protests against President Donald Trump’s ongoing deployment of Guard members in Washington. Millions of TikTok users have viewed O’Hara’s videos of his interactions with troops, according to his lawsuit.
A series of major events tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations promise to bring big crowds and heightened security. On the News4 Rundown: That security is likely to include more National Guard troops as a new report says there’s a limit to their impact on safety in D.C.
O’Hara, an artist who works in the hospitality industry, says he didn’t interfere with the Guard troops during their Sept. 11, 2025, encounter on a public street. One of the troops summoned Metropolitan Police Department officers, who stopped O’Hara and kept him handcuffed for 15 to 20 minutes before releasing him without charges, according to the lawsuit.
“The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from shutting down peaceful protests,” the suit says.
Trump, a Republican, issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington last August. Within weeks, hundreds of Guard troops and federal agents were helping police patrol the city. The surge inflamed tensions with residents of the heavily Democratic district. Hundreds of Guard members remain deployed in the district nearly a year later, with no clear end in sight.
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