“When I told them my dream, my classmates laughed their heads off. ‘If they let you join, I’ll go jump in a lake!’” And his father just shook his head and sighed: “Stop dreaming!”

The speaker on the stage, sharing the story of how he realized his dream with the students in the audience, is Simon Chen, who recently retired from the ­Cirque du Soleil and has just come back from accompanying President Ma Ying-jeou on a diplomatic tour of Africa.

Simon Chen’s crystal ball routine is mind-boggling! The ball seems to be attached to his fingertips, and the attention of his mesmerized audience is likewise unwavering. This is the product of ten years of dedication.

When the Tainan-born Chen was 10, his parents divorced, and his mother, worried that she wouldn’t be able to raise him alone, enrolled him in the free but super-strict National Kuo Kuang Academy of Arts (one of the predecessor institutions to today’s National Taiwan College of Performing Arts).

Students at Kuo Kuang started classes at 5:30 in the morning and didn’t stop until 8:30 at night. Day after day, Chen did traditional Pe­king Opera workouts involving stretching, bending, tumbling, and voice exercises, and under the rigorous conditions at the school, corporal punishment was just another part of the day’s routine. In eight years of strenuous effort, Chen gained a deep grounding in basic skills, but also amassed a slew of physical injuries. Then when he was 17, the teacher in a course on performance theory played videos of internationally renowned performing groups, including the musical theater group STOMP, the Broadway show Cats, and—most importantly for Chen—the Cirque du Soleil.

His interest sparked, Chen began to collect videos of Cirque performances.

In order to broaden his performing skills and experience, he spent a year preparing to test into the Department of Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, starting from scratch on the study of ballet, modern dance, and gymnastics. He also returned to his alma mater to ask for advice about juggling from an older classmate who specialized in it—but unexpectedly was turned away because his classmate was bound not to reveal the tricks of the trade to outsiders.

“Since no one would teach me, I decided to be my own teacher!” He went online and did a search for “juggling,” coming up with over 20,000 hits. He proceeded to plow through these one by one, practicing whatever each one taught, and poring over dictionaries when he ran across English words he didn’t understand. It was hard going all the way.

As he proceeded along this line, he also went to see every foreign performance troupe that came to Taiwan. Despite his faulty English, he found the courage to go backstage and ask advice from these world-class artists. He even put himself forward to act as a guide to La Compagnie Jérôme Thomas simply to spend time with them, and some of them began to teach him techniques and tricks for “contact juggling” using a crystal ball.

When Simon Chen lectures, he repeatedly emphasizes: “So long as you are willing to make the first baby step, there is every chance that your dream will eventually come true!”

In 2006 the Cirque du Soleil came to Taiwan on a recruiting tour, and Chen applied. He went so far as to have himself filmed doing a somersault from the second story of a building just to prove he could do aerial routines, putting his teachers from TNUA, who were watching from the sidelines, in a cold sweat.

Chen moved smoothly through the selection process, and became a reserve member of the Cirque. But at that time they had no actual openings, and all he could do was stay in Taiwan and wait. His chance finally came four years later. After repeated evaluations, in November 2010 the group notified him to come to Las Vegas, and his 11-year dream of going on stage with the Cirque du Soleil finally came true.

Chen was a much respected member of the company, and his peers were very impressed by the range of skills he possesses, including traditional opera, juggling, and even ballet.

During his year of performing overseas, there were many highs and lows, and it was really a learning and growing experience for him. His contract having expired, Chen has returned to Taiwan, but he plans to keep looking for opportunities to perform with other international troupes. He is far from ready to drop the ball on his career yet!