I Am What I Am (雄狮少年): what a lion dance movie taught me about endurance, friendship and miracles

If you want one film about carrying on when the money problem never gets solved, watch I Am What I Am. I went in expecting an underdog sports story with a clean ending. I got something harder and far more useful, and I have been thinking about it since. This is what I took from it as a marketer in Phnom Penh who builds a lot, publishes very little, and is trying to be honest about which of my own effort actually counts for anything.

Fair warning before you read on. I discuss the ending, because the ending is where the real lessons sit.

What the film is

I Am What I Am is a Chinese animated drama released on 17 December 2021, about 104 minutes long. Its Chinese title is 雄狮少年 (xióng shī shào nián), which translates roughly as "lion boys". It follows three poor teenagers in a Guangdong village who form a lion dance team and enter a national competition.

It helps to know what the dance actually is. Southern lion dance is called 醒狮 (xǐng shī), the awakening lion, and Guangdong lion dance sits on China's national intangible cultural heritage list. The climax ritual is 采青 (cǎi qīng), "picking the greens": a head of lettuce with a red packet inside is hung high, and the lion has to climb to take it. It works as a pun, because 菜 (cài, vegetable) sounds like 财 (cái, wealth), so taking the greens means taking fortune.

The film also rests on 留守儿童 (liú shǒu ér tóng), left-behind children, meaning kids raised by grandparents while their parents work in far cities. The main character is one of them. His parents have not come home for years. We know that pattern well in Cambodia under different names, with parents in Thailand or Korea instead of Guangzhou, so this part of the film travels better here than most people would expect.

The last piece of background is the one the film saves for its closing line. The lion dance exists because of 年兽 (nián shòu), the New Year beast. Ancestors were afraid of it, so they put on a lion head to drive it off and to drive the fear out of themselves. The costume was never really for the beast. It was for the people wearing it.

The story in short

Gyun is bullied at a New Year lion dance. A girl with the same name beats the bullies, hands him her red lion head, and tells him to stop being a puny cat. He recruits two friends who are just as broke, one cocky and one who works in a beef ball shop and joins mainly because meals are included. They find a teacher, Qiang, a 45-year-old salted fish seller who was once the best lion dancer in town and quit to pay bills.

They win their qualifier. That same night Gyun's father falls at a construction site and does not wake up. Gyun puts down the lion head and goes to the city to earn money for the hospital. The teacher enters the national competition anyway, at 45, with a short team, mainly because the event is live streamed and Gyun might be watching.

That is the shape of it. What makes the film unusual is what it refuses to fix. The father never wakes up. Winning does not pay the medical bills. There is prize money and the family is still poor when the credits roll.

The joke the whole film runs on

咸鱼 (xián yú) means salted fish, and in slang it means a person with no ambition, someone lying there going nowhere. 咸鱼翻身 (xián yú fān shēn), "the salted fish flips over", means a written-off person turning their life around.

The teacher literally sells salted fish. The team names itself Team Salted Fish. Early on, one of the boys watches him flip a fish with his footwork and asks whether that means they can turn their own lives around too. The thesis of the film is delivered as a throwaway joke, which is exactly how the best ideas usually arrive.

The second pairing is 病猫 (bìng māo), a sick or puny cat, against 雄狮 (xióng shī), a fierce lion. The instruction is never "become strong". It is quieter than that: listen, and decide which of the two you hear in yourself.

There is a moment where one of the boys quotes Li Bai at the teacher, 天生我材必有用, "heaven made me, so my talent must be good for something". The teacher tells him to stop quoting poetry. The boy's answer is the line I keep coming back to. If what Li Bai said was not true, why do I feel so alive when I say it out loud?

I write taglines for a living, and that is the most honest defence of a slogan I have ever heard. A slogan is not proof of anything. It is a permission slip for what you are willing to attempt today. That is a smaller claim and a much more useful one.

The most dangerous advice is the sensible advice

The character I actually watched the film through was not the teenager. It was Qiang, 45, married, running a fish business, once the best in town, told by everyone including his wife to be realistic.

Nobody sabotaged him. He was given correct, caring, practical guidance about paying the bills, and he took it, and it cost him 25 years. His wife has the sharpest line in the film when she tells him she is the reason people call him a loser. She is apologising not for being cruel but for being sensible.

This is the part I would tape to a wall. Sensible advice is only safe if it comes with a return path. So before you accept any compromise, name the condition under which you pick the thing back up. A date, a number, a milestone, an event. Without that condition, "later" quietly becomes never, and nobody has to be the villain for it to happen.

The other half of it is more encouraging. Qiang does come back at 45, half fit, in front of a live stream, and he places. Age was a real handicap in the film, not an illusion, and it was still not a disqualifier. Late is worse than early and much better than never.

Name the number

The most frightening thing Gyun says in the city is not about how hard the work is. Someone asks him how much money he needs. He says he does not know, and that not knowing is the terrifying part.

I build forecasts as part of my job, and I recognised that instantly. Most of my own stress has the same shape as his: an unnamed amount of money, an unnamed standard, an unnamed level of approval. A large number you can name can be planned against, even when the plan is painful. A number you cannot name will eat everything you have, and then keep eating.

If one thing in your life currently has no defined size, give it a figure and a date this week. The fear does not disappear. It converts into a plan, which is a much better thing to carry around.

Do not spend strength while no judge is looking

In the first mass round of the competition, a hundred teams perform at once and the teacher simply sits still. He explains that with that many teams on the floor, there is no point burning strength before a judge is actually looking at them.

That is not laziness. It is understanding that effort has an audience-dependent value, and it is the line from this film that genuinely stung.

Almost everything I have built over the past year has been seen by close to nobody outside my own company. I have systems, workflows, decks, sites and playbooks. Building capacity was never my constraint. Being visible to somebody who can decide something was. The team in this film gets nothing at all from months of training until it stands in a competition where the results are recorded and streamed. Skill that never enters a scored room stays private forever.

So the honest test I now apply before starting anything new is simple. Who outside my employer is going to see this? Publishing, pitching and naming a price are the scored room. Everything else is practice, and practice is not evidence.

Some of your weaknesses are hidden under the lion head

The teacher does something that most managers I have worked with never do. He does not tell his team to get better at everything. He assigns roles by trait. Gyun is light so he goes on top and needs stamina. Kat is agile and balanced so he carries. Doggie is heavy and strong so he anchors. Then he names the one thing all three share, tenacity, and calls that the real asset.

Then he tells them their weakness is their faces, and that it does not matter, because their faces are hidden under the lion.

I would trade a lot of general feedback for one round of that. The most useful review I ever received named where my actual strength was, instead of listing my gaps. Some of your weaknesses are genuinely hidden under the lion head, invisible in the work you actually do, and every month you spend fixing them is a month you did not spend on the thing you are already good at.

Friendship in this film is money sent without being asked

The three of them are recruited badly and for bad reasons. One joins to meet girls, one joins for the free lunch. Nobody has a noble motive at the start, and the bond gets built afterwards, by doing the work together. I find that more believable than any speech about brotherhood.

Watch what the friendship actually does, though. They are called stray cats and dogs as an insult, and they adopt it as a team name. When Gyun leaves for the city, the other two keep the team alive and quietly send his family money he never asked for. Nobody guilts him for leaving to support his mother, and the teacher's public position is that Gyun has his own path. When Gyun finally comes back, he does not return after a speech. He turns up holding a flag at the end of a lane, in the middle of a round they are losing.

That is a much higher standard than the one most of us keep. Real support is not encouragement. It is money sent without being asked, a place kept open while you are gone, and a pair of hands under you at the moment of the jump.

Ask for the throw

The last thing Gyun does before the impossible jump is ask for help out loud. He says only one person can make it, so will you give me a hand. He does not hint, and he does not wait to be offered. He names the person, names the help, and asks.

The jump is not a solo feat, and the film is careful about that. Somebody still has to throw you. I am bad at this part, and most capable people I know are bad at it too, because we have quietly decided that needing a throw disqualifies the jump. It does not. It is the mechanism.

There are two kinds of miracles and the film keeps them separate

Early on, Gyun goes to a shrine and asks for a miracle for his father. It does not come. Later he works out that his wish was badly specified. He asked for his parents to come home soon, and left out healthy and safe. That is a bitter joke about vague goals, and it is also just grief.

The second miracle is the sky pillar, 擎天柱, a pole set in front of the stake array whose stated purpose is humility, a physical reminder that 山外有山, there is always a mountain beyond the mountain. The commentator announces that the judges have confirmed it cannot be jumped. Gyun jumps it anyway, and the film calls that a miracle out loud.

The distinction is clean, and I think it is right. Miracles you request do not arrive. Miracles you perform with your own legs, on a day you happen to be standing there prepared, sometimes do. Notice how much had to already exist for the second kind: a competition to enter, a teacher who trained him, a friend willing to throw him, and months of stake practice. It was earned slowly in advance and spent in a single second.

The ending gets two things right

First, reaching the pole changes nothing material. His father is still in a coma. The family is still poor. There is no montage where the prize fixes anyone's life.

Second, it still mattered, because the point was never the pole. It was settling the question of who he was, for himself and for three specific people who were watching.

That reframes what a big goal is actually for. It is not "aim higher". It is closer to this: pick the one thing that would settle the question of who you are, train for it while nobody is watching, get yourself into a room where it can be scored, ask someone to throw you, and accept in advance that succeeding will not fix your circumstances. Do it anyway, because the version of you that made the jump is the one who has to handle everything that comes next.

What I am actually doing with it

Endurance in this film is not gritting your teeth. It is refusing to accept somebody else's classification of you as final, for years, quietly, while still paying the bills. The teacher's parting instruction is the rule for the stretches when you cannot practise at all: as long as the drumbeat still echoes in your heart, we are still a fierce lion. The identity survives the interruption if you keep the rhythm in your head.

So here is what I have taken out of a 104-minute cartoon about teenagers in lettuce-chasing lion costumes. Write down one number and one date for the thing in your life that currently has no defined size. Name the return condition on whatever sensible compromise you are making right now. Ask one specific person for one specific piece of help, out loud, this week. And pick one arena in the next 30 days where your work gets scored by somebody outside the building.

I am doing all four. If you watch the film, tell me which of the two you heard in yourself, the puny cat or the fierce lion. That question is the whole movie, and it is a better prompt than most of the ones I get paid to write.