Dance Show: What Makes Us Great Again?

Please join us for Bay Area Independent Chinese Dancer's 3rd annual dance show. Through dance and music, we will tell the story of the Ming Treasure Fleet voyages from all points of view to explore what patriotism can mean as a minority and what building a moral relationship to the state looks like in an imperfect world.

Get tickets at https://our.show/great

What Makes Us Great Again? 

The Hajj of Syed Muhammad Shamsuddin Al-Bukhari (Admiral Cheng Ho)

Have you ever been told, as an Asian-American, a good Muslim, or as an American visiting overseas that you have to behave a certain way? That only if you conform to the imperial culture, or you must cast yourself solely in the anticolonial resistance can you honor your histories? 

In the US, China, and across the world, we are seeing movements that answer that question with a firm “Yes.” There are stories that the only way to make America great again, to achieve our national rejuvenation, is to look back to our past, and force everyone to conform to what that past looked like.

But what did it look like? In our story, we tell the story of the last great Han dynasty’s Treasure Fleets: 40,000 soldier expeditions, sent by the new Ming court to secure tribute in southeast from Vietnam to Tanzania. This fleet was led by Sayyid Muhammad Shamsuddin (Zheng He), a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and spread Imperial power and Islamic evangelization hand in hand, in the Malay World, Sri Lanka, and beyond. 

Here was a man, and a fleet, whose diversity advanced imperial greatness. People on all sides of this encounter, in the treasure fleets, in the nations it visited, and the people left at Home, they recognized the complexity of what they were doing, whether it's interfering in a Sri Lankan civil war, or following in his grandfather’s footsteps to Mecca and Medina. 

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Bay Area Independent Chinese Dancers