WP1: Dancing Lions, Commodifying History

When you were a child you were deathly afraid of lion dances. The thundering gongs and Chinese drums, the firecrackers, the way the lion appeared larger than life and moved its head up close to you when it walked past. One year, at your paternal-side relatives’ Lunar New Year gathering, you hid in one of the side rooms with your aunt’s Schnauzers (of which you were also fidgety around) while the lion troupe strode across the living room to deliver their blessings. You forget if the firecrackers come at the beginning or the end — according to your parents, they were used to scare away the nian monster when it attacked the villages thousands of years ago.

Genshin Impact’s newest character, 嘉明, is a lion dancer — he dons his costume consisting of a massive head meant to imitate the appearance of the mythical nian monster and a glittery cape to represent the beast’s elongated body. The costume is intricately designed, with several mechanical parts on the head for the dancer to control the mouth and eyes. Commonly performed during Lunar New Year and other Chinese festivals, not only within China but in Chinese communities worldwide (I saw it at, of all places, USC’s School of Gerontology during last year’s Lunar New Year festivities), the lion dance is seen nowadays as a performative ritual to ward off evil spirits and bring in wealth and good luck (Loo & Loo, 2016). The specific variation of the lion dance presented in Genshin — the “Southern lion dance” — originated from Guangzhou, and is also the version I’m most familiar with (many early Chinese immigrants to Malaysia came from the southern shores of Guangdong). The Shanghai-based team behind Genshin pays homage to the dance’s Cantonese roots, most evidently seen in the way the English localization team uses the Cantonese pronunciation of the name, which just very unfortunately happens to be “Gaming”. I swear I’m not making this up.

In a time where even video games aren’t impervious to cultural erasure, such as when Pokemon (perhaps unwittingly) changed its Cantonese localization to align with their Mandarin Chinese transliterations, I find Genshin’s reverential portrayal of the lion dance to be admirable. It’s clear that the team behind it sought to introduce an international audience to their culture, while simultaneously immortalizing the performance through its inclusion in the game.

As you grew older, the organized chaos of the lion dance became something to look forward to, having entwined itself so deeply with the Lunar New Year you’d constructed in your mind that it was difficult to imagine a new year without these joyous dancing beasts. In turn, it felt as though the dances you watched grew with you: one year, they gave the lion a can of beer while it was peeling the mandarins and the lion got tipsy, swaying to the drumbeats before finally slumping onto the ground. Another year, you swore you remember watching the lion dance to K-pop.

In modern Malaysia, the lion dance has become a symbol of Chinese-Malaysian identity after decades of ethnically-motivated scrutiny and attempts at whatever the Malay equivalent of whitewashing is (Loo & Loo, 2016). Having been at the forefront of Chinese cultural controversies in the nation, its survival has paved the way for the continuation of other Chinese arts and traditions, and as such, it’s commonly seen as the protector of Chinese culture in Malaysia (Beng, 2007). Malaysia would eventually rise to become the modern capital of lion dance, with talented troupes that are constantly iterating on radical ideas — most famously performing the lion dance on elevated poles (turning it into an almost parkour-like experience) — as well as hosting some of the largest international lion dance competitions.

It’s the lion dance’s resistance towards commodification (at least that’s the case in Malaysia) that places it in direct conflict with Genshin’s core motives as a multi-billion-dollar-grossing video game. Because, beneath all the (likely sincere) cultural representations that the development team continuously work into the game’s flourishing world, Genshin is ultimately a free-to-play live service game riddled with microtransactions, with their new character releases serving as one of their main modes of income. It’s hard not to be cynical about this: 嘉明 (no I will not call him “Gaming”), along with the rest of Genshin’s cast, is designed to be marketable to the widest audience possible such that the playerbase, or at least the highest spenders, will part with their wallet for the chance of obtaining the elusive character. Within Genshin, 嘉明 exists as a commodity, to be traded or otherwise obtained; his characteristics contribute to his “value” and is consequently commodified too, lion dance and all. This isn’t the first time Genshin has drawn on Chinese cultural artifacts as the basis for their highly-commercialized characters: 魈 (“Xiao”) — Genshin’s 2021 Lunar New Year representative — is derived from the yaksha (of Buddhist/Hindu origin), and embellished with references to other imperial-era Chinese texts (HoYoverse, 2021).

But the lion dance is dying outside of China. In Hong Kong, Singapore, and even Malaysia, the number of active troupes is dwindling, as the lack of young blood and economic hardships make it difficult for these performing troupes to continue their intensive training regimes and expensive operational costs; one Malaysian troupe reports their yearly expenses as bordering a million Malaysian ringgit (approximately 200k USD), while their only source of income comes from invitations for performances (mostly during Lunar New Year) and competition awards (scarce and cutthroat) (Ng, 2019). And things have only gotten worse since the pandemic started.

At some point, you were surprised to find out that the lion dance troupe your uncle always hired had a new Malay performer; you had only ever seen Chinese dancers donning lion costumes before this. Talking to your extended family after the performance, the troupe leader expressed how excited he was by the prospect of people from other ethnic backgrounds joining the troupe. The new fellow quickly introduced himself in Mandarin, to the cheers of the audience. But you vaguely recall, amidst rapturous celebrations, whispers of how that same troupe may not be returning for a performance the year after.

Perhaps, then, Genshin’s sensationalization of the lion dance can help revitalize this dying art. After all, Southeast Asia, and Malaysia in particular — houses a significant portion of the game’s playerbase. Perhaps this was their intention from the beginning: in writing one of their earlier characters 云堇 (“Yun Jin”, not to be confused by the K-pop idol of the same name), the developers sought to utilize the gamified world of Genshin as a vehicle to “expose people to the artistic crystallization of Chinese traditional opera, and even generate interest in the art itself” (Jiang, 2022). In recent years, evolving beyond the confines of the traditional lion dance, Malaysia’s performance troupes have incorporated aspiring Malay and Indian dancers who, like many of their peers, have grown up watching these lion dances in an era where they have been less culturally stigmatized (Looi, 2023). Back when I was in high school, our school’s lion dance troupe was primarily spearheaded by international students from Thailand who were engrossed in our local culture. Who knows? This really might just work.

Still, Genshin’s commercialization of the lion dance, Chinese opera, and its miscellaneous cultural inspirations don’t sit quite right with me. Because for all their talk about cultural representation, it appears the team is more interested in using Genshin’s fantasy world as a medium to craft their fantasy of an ideal Chinese culture, and their cherry-picked references all serve to contribute to that ideal. As an example, the erasure of bodies that don’t fit in the mold of the fair-skinned hourglass-shaped ideal is apparent in the lack of diversity of playable characters — an artifact, perhaps, of the colorism and unrealistic beauty standards that permeate Chinese society today. This, too, is a form of commodification: a commodification of the self. When we choose to project our culture in this manner, we end up inviting that discriminatory, Eurocentric gaze that has long ensnared this part of Asia (Chen et al. 2020).

Genshin’s Chinese identity is thus diluted by its nature of being beholden to unrealistic ideals and capitalistic forces. Self-colonizing while colonizing the other: portraying only parts of the self that is deemed acceptable by (international) societal standards while simultaneously subjecting others to this same standard. Because Genshin isn’t just a project on China and its representations; the main protagonist adventures through seven regions, each “drawing inspiration” from real-world ethnocultural groups. In that sense, 嘉明‘s Cantonese reference in his localized name feels like a hollow victory when other Arabic names have previously been intentionally mispronounced in the English localization. It’s an intentional selection of what is allowed to exist in their video game utopia, of what will sell the best. In pursuit of maximum marketability, the commodification of culture has consumed Genshin whole, as much as they try to stick to their roots.

One of the last times you watched a live lion dance performance was at the heritage festival, the year before you were slated to depart for university in America. You had snuck away from the booth you were volunteering at (you were demonstrating the dying Hokkien tradition of duo zhei, a divination usually performed during a toddler’s first birthday) and traversed the heritage quarters, almost unrecognizable amidst the bustling festival, searching for the source of the unmistakable gongs. You understand that this is simultaneously a celebration of your culture and a marketing practice; though nothing is being traded here, the festival is itself sold as an event to attract visitors to your hometown.

Perhaps this is just a reflection of our late capitalist society in general. Growing up in Penang, one of the heritage centers of Malaysia, I’ve heard stories of the lengths we’ll go to for economic motives at the expense of cultural preservation. Even before I was born, our state capital George Town (named after our colonizer George) saw numerous attempts at urbanizing the old town, replacing colonial-era homes and shoplots with high rises and shopping complexes.

But I’ve also come to witness firsthand the way the commodification of culture and heritage has saved my hometown’s identity. After Komtar — skyscraper megacomplex cum “slum-clearing” project in the center of the historic district — failed spectacularly (by that I mean they ran out of money to complete the 68-storey building), the state government began to heed the warnings of local heritage preservation groups. The city’s historic core would be instituted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, and the economic machinery shifted to capitalize on its position as a cultural artifact: rather than tearing down old homes, with all their unique architectural designs, the state sought to market the heritage quarters as a tourist destination.

A few months later you would return to the heritage quarters with your Malaysian-American friend for some cendol (a Southeast Asian jelly dessert) and, while taking a stroll through the historic streets under the blistering sun, decide to try and find the location where you had set up the booth at the heritage festival. The mosque almost glistens in the daylight and the shoplots (mostly clothes and souvenirs) lining the streets, albeit battered and bruised, look as though they had been lifted straight out of another era.

I can go on about the perils of cultural tourism but the truth is, by co-opting the heritage sites as a commodity to be sold to the masses, it’s given us an economic incentive to maintain these artifacts that may have been left to rot otherwise (I hate that we even need an economic incentive to motivate something as fundamental as cultural preservation, but for now, it is what it is). Even as chic cafes, restaurants, and inns came to inhabit the interiors of anachronistic Chinese heritage homes. Even as we let Lithuanian artists draw “Instagram-able” murals depicting their notion of our daily lives on the brick walls of these buildings (seriously, what?). In a way, George Town is selling some idea of Penang culture that’s at once authentic to our colonial roots and colonized by modern capitalist forces. In a way, this is our heritage: a constantly-evolving amalgamation of everything that has come to our shores in search of riches. I’m supposed to be grateful about this. In a way, I am.

Works Cited

Beng, T. S. (2007). The Lion Dances to the Fore : Articulating Chinese Identities in Penang and Medan. Senri Ethnological Reports. 65. 63–78. https://doi.org/10.15021/00001522.

HoYoverse. (2021, February 10). Developer Insight #4: Character Stories (I) — “Vigilant Yaksha” Xiao. Genshin impact — step into a vast magical world of adventure. https://genshin.hoyoverse.com/en/news/detail/103849

Jiang, S. (2022, January 15). Genshin impact’s latest controversy shows games can be powerful ambassadors for art. Kotaku. https://kotaku.com/genshin-impacts-latest-controversy-shows-games-can-be-p-1848364714

Loo, F. Y. & Loo, F. C. (2016). Dramatizing 1Malaysia in Contemporary Chinese Lion Dance. Asian Theatre Journal. 33. 130–150. 10.1353/atj.2016.0008.

Looi, F. (2023, January 24). Malaysian lion dancers bring new spirit to ancient tradition. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/24/malaysian-lion-dancers-bring-new-spirit-to-ancient-tradition

Ng, K. (2019, January 29). Beneath the cape of the lion dance: A dying art of the soul of a culture. FirstClasse. https://firstclasse.com.my/lion-dance-khuan-loke-association/

Toby C., Kristina L., Daniella L., Naima S., & Reinesse W. (2020). Occidentalisation of Beauty Standards: Eurocentrism in Asia. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4325856