Fame is just a tool for connection
Hello! This is the first time this newsletter will be appearing in your inbox, and I’m so delighted about that! I hope it’s something you enjoy. If by some chance you missed the premiere letter, which is quite possible, you can find it here.
What did Yibo do this week?
The first two episodes of Exploring the Unknown landed on Tencent!… alas without English-language subs. There are still no official plans to release it internationally, so fans have been resorting to the Old Ways: Bootlegging. If you get your hands on a copy, I recommend watching on your laptop and using your phone’s Google Translate app in camera mode to translate the subtitles in real time. It’s glitchy, but it works.
Or, for now, you can make do with a slightly edited version of the first episode with English fansubs on YouTube.
Yuehua released rehearsal footage of “Somebody Else’s Arms,” complete with Yibo getting all sexy and directorial about dry ice and lighting, and then bumping against his backup dancer like a kid. Also features 3/5 of Uniq clowning during the group rehearsals.
Yibo’s backup dancers for the Yuehua concert performance of “Somebody Else’s Arms” in August. The backup dancer who bumped Yibo was distracted by a waft of hair from the redheaded dancer. This dancer, omg. THIS WOMAN fell onstage during the performance and lost her shoe and then had to dance the rest of the routine flawlessly with only one shoe in front of 50,000 people — which she did, beautifully. She actually managed to make her fall seem so natural to the routine that I didn’t even realize she’d fallen until I’d watched approximately 800 fancams, and then wasn’t sure it was actually an accident until at least 20 more. She was so good, I’m obsessed with her.
(The most amazing thing about this is that absolutely no one in the audience even noticed because they were all glued to Yibo.)
WildAid is letting you donate specifically towards pangolin conservation in honor of Yibo and then sending people nice notes about Yibo and the documentary!
Lacoste is supposedly selling Yibo’s now-iconic green jumpsuit in stores and select online locations! It’s not yet available in their online U.S. store, as far as I can tell, but hopefully soon!
What will Yibo do next!
Reports are that Yibo will start filming a new project in the fall — after promo for his upcoming film Intercross is done, perhaps? — and all the gossip points towards that movie being Stephen Chow’s upcoming highly anticipated Shaolin Soccer sequel, Shaolin Women’s Soccer. We know the film is real — Chow has had the script drafted since last year, and he publicized a global talent search for the female leads. Rumors have circulated for a while now that Yibo “lobbied hard” to get a part in the film, and even though he won’t be the lead role — it’s a movie about women in sports! — this will be a huge potential opportunity for him, and could introduce him to a whole new international audience. I’m thrilled. Who doesn’t love Shaolin Soccer!
Unity + Having Fun = Love + Peace
I’m a classic ADHD-haver, in that when I’m given an assignment, I immediately start putting it off. Over the years I’ve spent writing for my day job, I’ve had my ups and downs in terms of how successfully I’m able to ward off this and focus on what needs to be done — but still, far too often, it takes a copious amount of teeth-pulling, looming deadlines, and panic to get me out of procrastination mode and into creation and concentration mode.
In this era of the constant deluge of social media, that’s even more difficult. While writing this letter, I got waylaid by a book challenge, a mineral contest, making a cup of orange cinnamon tea (though that’s less a distraction than a necessary writing accessory), two different rabbit holes which I shall come on to shortly, and a difficult teal test. If it weren’t for the expectations of my editor, my collaborators, or my colleagues, and now you all, I would be procrastinating still.
I desperately need other people to get me to the end of the road map when it comes to my projects and my goals for myself. When I was a little kid, I was fascinated with the entire concept of human connection, because it just seemed so big and profound — and still does — that one human in a lone sea of other humans could reach out and find something in common with any other human, someone to unite them, even if briefly; something to tether them and pull them down the road towards someplace. I still long for that today, still seek those moments of unity and grace with other people.
I think this is a big reason that Wang Yibo’s relationship to and with his backup dancers, teammates, and bandmates continually fascinates me. It’s not just because he’s endlessly loyal to his friends and colleagues. He’s endlessly giving, endlessly in search of that same sense of joy in human connection.
At the end of Street Dance of China’s fifth season, Yibo performed a big splashy routine for the final show, a classic breaking number with a group of B-boys and one adorable B-child.
As dance routines go, to me this is one of Yibo’s weaker ones — but that’s arguably intentional. He spent most of the summer of 2022 prior to SDC5 filming One and Only, the breaking movie which the director, Da Peng, created with him in mind. As you probably already know, Da Peng famously made the rounds of professional breakers, asking them which idols or actors they knew who had the skills to play the lead role in a film about hip-hop dance. All of them, according to Da Peng on multiple occasions, said Yibo.
As a kid, Yibo’s first interest as a hip-hop dancer was in breaking, but he had to give it up early on due to injury. He pursued hip-hop instead but clearly wanted to do more floorwork and more B-boy moves. One and Only finally gave him the time and opportunity to focus on developing his breaking skills — but it also let him in for more injury.
Yibo hasn’t had the greatest luck with injuries recently; in 2020, he spent most of SDC3 nursing an injured ankle and most of the summer of 2022 battling battered knees; you can see him limping stiffly in this behind-the-scenes clip when he flops on top of his friend (and fellow SDC4 teammate) Xiao Hai. By the time the SDC5 finale rolled around at the end of October, he was in recovery, but it resulted in less time to prep for his finale routine.
That’s what makes this performance so special in a bunch of different ways. It’s one of the few times we ever see Yibo perform at less-than-his best; his floor work is much slower and less polished than that of the other b-boys around him. His toprock is much more confident, the kind of dancing we’re used to from him, yet this is a challenging, strenuous routine, and his energy level flags midway through before he rebounds for the finish.
That doesn’t detract from the innate skill he shows here. His footwork is superb; as an SDC judge he’s always emphasized the importance of getting basic skills down before moving on to flashier moves, and that’s what this dance was showcasing. Yet throughout he’s also doing complicated, tricky moves, and he worked his ass off to nail them. Wang Haichao, the choreographer for this routine as well as Yibo’s now-famous opener, said that Yibo had just 2 days to learn the entire number.
Yet not only does Yibo not shy away from the difficulty level of these new moves in this unpolished style, he clearly loves doing this. He’s having the time of his life. Even more clearly, he loves doing it with everyone else on stage. In fact, when the performance starts, Yibo isn’t even on stage; the lights come up on a group of dancers just vibing and showing off their skills before Yibo’s enormous sea of fans, before he saunters up in his own group and the party starts. Most of the routine is focused on letting each of the other dancers have a moment in the spotlight; Yibo solos for about 15 seconds at the very end; the rest of the time, he’s either dancing with the ensemble or drawing your attention away from him to everyone else onstage.
This was also by design — not because of injury but because Yibo loves big group numbers with old-school hip-hop dancers. But it’s extremely hard to get breakers to perform at that level of synchronicity. In SDC3, as a captain, he observed, “For an all-breaking team, it’s very difficult for the speed of moves and angles to be synchronised, it’s really very difficult. Go see for yourself — how is it possible to have a full breaking group performance? There really isn't any.” One of his goals with this performance was to challenge not only himself but his dancers to achieve the kind of visual unity that demonstrates the words of the song they’re dancing to: “Peace, unity, love, and having fun.”
Yibo really believes in that mantra; he’s said, over and over, in countless interviews, that the key to happiness is to pursue what you love and have fun. In the first episode of SDC3, when the other captains talk about how they want to win, Yibo talks about how he wants to win, but he also wants to make friends and improve his dance skills. After the first exhilarating captain’s battle in ep 2 — arguably the real moment when the world sat up and took notice of Wang Yibo, as he exploded with first one, then another absolute banger of a group battle — he says, beaming with joy, “I haven’t battled for a long time — I haven’t felt so nice for a long time. I had a great time.” The key here is that his exhilaration didn’t just come from dancing, but from dancing and collaborating with his teammates.
Yibo has held onto that spark of creative collaborative joy in everything he does. “Peace, unity, love, and having fun” is an equation: Unity and having fun are, to him, the keys to achieving peace and love. You can feel all this in the actual performance. You can hear how much energy there was in that stadium while all these b-boys did their thing, even when Yibo is just looking on proudly.
China’s b-boy community recognized all of this in Yibo’s SDC5 stage. They responded by amplifying his performance across social media, praising it, sharing footage, and memeing it with their own versions.
“I want to say that breaking is not only about difficulty levels or tricks,” Wang Haichao wrote after the performance. It is also, if not more, about ‘styles’ and ‘aesthetics.’ When people talk about breaking, I hope they no longer label it ‘spins,’ ‘high-difficulty levels,’ or ‘intense.’ It can also be ‘art,’ ‘natural and unrestrained,’ ‘romantic,’ and ‘pure love.’” The implication is that Yibo brought all of this to his stage — because he did.
This was the first time we saw Yibo’s dancing become a massively viral social media trend, spawning memes of Yibo’s breaking performance and eventually of both his SDC5 finale performances that spread to hundreds of accounts across all of China’s social media platforms. The memes and dance performances and flash mobs lasted for over a month after the SDC5 final. The public, galvanized by the street dance community, the excitement surrounding breaking, and admiration for Yibo himself, couldn’t get enough of this dance — not because this was Yibo dancing at his absolute best, but because his spirit and his sense of community inspired something bigger than himself.
Which was, of course, the essence of the routine all along.
Now it’s basically normal that Yibo’s latest big dance number spawns viral memes, because everyone wants to keep the energy going that he brings to the stage. This is a huge part of his superstardom to me; he’s so in love with dancing that he makes everyone else want to celebrate dancing, too.
(Rabbit Hole #1: What is this song????
Side note: I went on a minor spiral trying to find the full song from the clip above that Yibo’s opening performance was famously remixed with, the version that the meme of this performance was also set to. It’s become so familiar that I’m always startled when I watch the performance and realize the song Yibo actually danced to is totally different. It then got re-memed when the One and Only dance craze came around last year — so clearly people have come to associate it with Yibo. What is this song!!!!
I came up empty; it may or may not be a song called 《拉个勾说永远爱我 (拉个勾说永远爱我)》(“Promise you’ll love me Forever”) by an artist named 十三春 / Thirteen Spring, but it also doesn’t seem to exist in entirety. The fullest official clip I could find is just the part you hear all the time, with an added remix of “Don’t Cha” thrown in, which makes me think the entire song is just remix.
Clearly this song sprang into existence so it could become the unofficial soundtrack to Wang Yibo’s entire dance narrative: “If I get on the floor, then you get on the floor, get freaky on the floor — everybody’s on the floor!” That’s exactly the Wang Yibo way. 😂 )
Anyway. On to the reason I made this post.
After the performance ends, Yibo brings two of his dancers over for the after-interview. The interviewer asks him what he wants to say. He responds (this is a paraphrased translation taken directly from Youku) that each time (each SDC final) he likes to say something different; he’s danced to hip-hop, locking, and now breaking. “I didn’t have many styles when I picked up breaking [again], but now I have many different styles.”
“I said from the beginning that I wanted to have an old-school breaking show.” He says he likes the clothes, the dance, the music from the original days of hip-hop culture. (His outfit for the routine was a homage to legendary dance crew Rock Steady — specifically the outfit worn by crew member Kuriaki in the 1984 hip-hop movie Beat Street.)
Yibo thanks his choreographer and then hands the microphone over to him to let him talk. The whole time he’s standing next to another one of his backup dancers — this guy.
(Rabbit hole #2: Who is this guy???
This guy is Astro Hoi. He is a venerated breaking veteran and national coach who’s worked with SDC and done choreography for One and Only. It took me hours to find out his identity because the English-language fandom seems to have misidentified him as this guy, Wang Shenjiong aka Danny, who’s also a venerated breaking veteran and national coach who’s worked with SDC and done choreography for One and Only. In fact, they’re in multiple photos together throughout the One and Only set, which is probably where the confusion started. Anyway! His name is Astro and he’s very good at street dance!)
The birthday boy
After Yibo’s other choreographer Haichao gets done, the interviewer asks Astro to speak, and Astro says lovely things about breaking and then thanks Yibo.
Yibo, for maybe the first time ever in his life, grabs the microphone to add more. The first time I saw this I started like full-body vibrating: What in the wide world could be so important and urgent that Wang Yibo, famously brusque, one-word-answers-only, get-me-out-of-this-spotlight Wang Yibo, would actually take the mic in order to add more to the conversation? Especially after he’d already been so eloquent about the routine and how much thought and care he put into it; that was a year’s worth of monologuing from our boy.
What was it??????
Yibo grabs the mic, points to Astro, and grins, “And it’s his birthday.” Then he invites the audience, the whole sea of green-lit fans who have come for him and only him, to applaud for the guy standing next to him instead.
When they do, when the audience bursts into applause, Yibo sends this soft, sweet smile out to the crowd.
Wang Yibo has so little care for showiness that he stood excitedly onstage enduring small talk for like ten minutes straight all so he could wish his friend a happy birthday. This GUY.
It’s obvious that he likes attention, adores praise, soaks in accolades like a starving puppy. But I’m increasingly convinced he genuinely doesn’t give a shit about fame except as a tool to gain more and more autonomy, the freedom to do whatever comes next. And what comes next is usually making some new exciting collaboration happen with people he can’t wait to work with, again or for the first time of many.
After this moment passes, the host starts prattling away about a fangirl’s wishes for Yibo, and you can see the old restless unease enter him immediately. He starts shifting from foot to foot; the adrenalin is wearing off to the tune of a fangirl wishing he’ll be persistent in his passion. As if he could do anything less.
When her soliloquy is done, and the fan screams have subsided, the interviewer asks what Yibo wants to say to his fans.
Yibo takes the mic, says: “Thank you.”
And that’s all.
