I Thought I Would Never Dance Again

So this is a picture of my foot right after I ruptured my Achilles. I remember looking at my doctor and asking him, do you think I'll ever be able to dance again? He took a long deep breath and said Okay, so I never wanted to... I don't want to talk about it because it's not like something happy or cheerful that we usually do. It's pretty intense and I know people are going to wonder why I'm even talking about it. But I think it was one of the most important things that's ever happened to me and changed me as a person. So I think it's important I share it with you guys. So after my surgery, every morning when I wake up, my Achilles is really, really tight. So I have to stretch it out or I end up just limping the whole morning. It's especially bad during the winters. So now whenever I dance, I have to constantly keep my Achilles warm or it just stiffens and I can't dance the same. And I envy the other dancers because they can just kind of get up and start jumping and flipping. While I have to warm up for like 5 to 10 minutes just to be able to do simple jumps. Sometimes I really feel like it's a curse. Okay, so let me try to show you guys what it was like after I ruptured my Achilles. So this picture was taken right after I ruptured my Achilles. And if you can see, this foot was so swollen that it was almost two times bigger than this. Do you see this big lump right here? What happened was that day I was practicing flipping. Right after I took off the ground, I felt like someone kicked me in the foot. And I heard a loud snap sound. But when I landed, I looked around, there was nobody near me. So no one could have kicked me. And that's kind of where it got really scary because I looked around at the people around me and they were all staring at me in horror. Like something had happened. And I tried to play it off. I tried to pretend nothing was happening. So I got up and tried to walk. The moment I took my first step, I fell down again. I didn't have a foot. So I actually have a MRI scan right here. And if you can see, this is your Achilles. This is the bone of your heel. And what happened was, see where this arrow is pointed? Right after I hit the ground, this part snapped off the bone. So I had a really rare case where my Achilles completely tore off my heel bone. It was really, really painful at the time. Because I was in such a shock, I couldn't even feel the pain. And so at that point, I kind of knew that it was pretty much over. It was the worst timing too because it was one month before our 2018 touring season actually started. So I had to get taken off all the dances. All my fellow dancers were scrambling, trying to make the show work without me. And all I could do was sit there and watch. And I felt completely useless. Here's a shot of what I looked like at that time. This whole leg was unmovable. And the only way I could walk was with these crutches here. So this is when I left Shen Yun and went back to Los Angeles. After getting home, as you can see, I'm basically paralyzed. So my dad had to take care of everything. He had to cook for me. And I couldn't even shower because I had this cast. It was this time in LA that I realized you don't know what you have until you lose it. I didn't know how important my Achilles was or how important my body was as a dancer. I never took care of it until I actually got a major injury. And then I couldn't even walk, let alone dance. I also didn't realize how important or precious the environment in Shen Yun was until after I was forced to leave. Everyone in Shen Yun has a common purpose or goal. And they're all working together to revive traditional Chinese culture through dance and music. And once I left these people, I realized how hard it is to come by a group of people that have the same mission, the same goal, and are willing to work together to achieve this goal. I felt really empty and hollow inside. I remember before I used to complain, oh, dancing took the best years of my life. This is when I realized dancing in Shen Yun actually gave me everything that I had. And so at this point, I remember seriously asking my doctor, do you think I can ever dance again? And his reply was, not many people come back from Achilles rupture being the same. And he said, look, you're still young. You can still change your profession. You don't have to dance anymore. So at that point I was faced with two choices, either take the easy path and stop dancing because I was still young, or try to recover and dance professionally again, even though there was no guarantee that I could do it. Whenever I'm faced with tough decisions in my life, I always go to my spiritual belief Falun Dafa, which teaches me to look inwards for the answer. And after digging deeper, I realized I didn't cherish what I had before, and this was a huge wake up call for me. And even though there was no guarantee that I could dance again, I knew that I at least had to try to make up for my mistakes. So after trying so hard for a couple months, finally I was able to walk normally and I could do more dance movements and I took every opportunity to try to rehabilitate myself, try to get back into dance. It was not easy because like, if you guys can see here, I had a huge cast on my foot and I couldn't put any weight on this. And these are the crutches that I had to use for two to three months. It felt like a cage for me. So I couldn't really walk. All I could do is stumble. This is how much I could walk. I could only kind of like stagger around, but I really wanted to get back into shape. So my recovery journey was really hard. Let me show you what I did. This is me at home with an injured foot right here. I'm trying to do some upper body movements to get back into shape, even though I couldn't move. So everything I did, I had to do sitting down like this. So eventually when I could like walk, quote unquote walk, it wasn't really walking. It was more like me like stumbling around. This is the best I could do and it hurt a lot just doing this. And at this point when I was able to kind of like stumble around, put a little bit of weight on it, even though it still did hurt. So you see here, this is me trying my best to do barre with this cast on because I really wanted to come back and dance. I really wanted to make up for my mistake. I didn't want to sit down. So even though this was not recommended by the doctor, I tried my best to have barre and move around and still try to dance. you So you guys probably guessed the ending to my story. I made it back into Xinyuan and I'm dancing again. But without my faith, there's no way I could have made it this far. And I'm forever grateful to the teacher of my spiritual belief. I just want to tell you guys, do not make the same mistake that I did and cherish everything that you have. you