Failing #1213

You might know her as Red Panda.

If you've been to an NBA game, you may have seen her at a halftime or Season eight of America's Got Talent.

Crystal Nu was born in China into a family of acrobats.

When she was seven, her dad started teaching her a traditional bowl-balancing act.

By twelve, she was performing full-time.

By fourteen, she was touring the world with the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe.

At nineteen, she came to America.

Now, picture the act if you haven't seen it.

She's balancing on a towering unicycle about seven feet tall in high heels.

She flips bowls off her foot, and they land on top of her head.

One flip at a time, the stack gets taller.

When she came to America, she made a seven-minute highlight reel, ordered a thousand VHS copies, and mailed them to agents and venues all over the country.

A thousand tapes, and then nothing for a year.

Then the day before Thanksgiving 1993, the phone rings.

The Clippers' halftime act fell through, and someone remembered her tape from almost a year earlier.

She was on a plane to LA within hours.

She remembers four standing ovations.

By the next season, she was booked at more than forty NBA games.

Want to know her success rate? By her own estimate, seventy-five to eighty percent of her shows are perfect, which means roughly one night in four, a bowl hits the floor in front of the whole arena, and she gets back up on her unicycle anyway.

In 2013, at age forty-two, already a legend in NBA arenas, she walks onto America's Got Talent and auditions like a beginner.

She advances, and then she steps away to take care of her father, who has cancer.

She comes back as a wildcard and goes out in the semifinals.

Her dad died in May 2014.

After a year away, she went back to practice.

A bowl that fell caught under her wheel, and she went down hard and broke her arm.

You might know her as Red Panda.

If you've been to an NBA game, you may have seen her at a halftime or Season eight of America's Got Talent.

Crystal Nu was born in China into a family of acrobats.

When she was seven, her dad started teaching her a traditional bowl-balancing act.

By twelve, she was performing full-time.

By fourteen, she was touring the world with the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe.

At nineteen, she came to America.

Now, picture the act if you haven't seen it.

She's balancing on a towering unicycle about seven feet tall in high heels.

She flips bowls off her foot, and they land on top of her head.

One flip at a time, the stack gets taller.

When she came to America, she made a seven-minute highlight reel, ordered a thousand VHS copies, and mailed them to agents and venues all over the country.

A thousand tapes, and then nothing for a year.

Then the day before Thanksgiving 1993, the phone rings.

The Clippers' halftime act fell through, and someone remembered her tape from almost a year earlier.

She was on a plane to LA within hours.

She remembers four standing ovations.

By the next season, she was booked at more than forty NBA games.

Want to know her success rate? By her own estimate, seventy-five to eighty percent of her shows are perfect, which means roughly one night in four, a bowl hits the floor in front of the whole arena, and she gets back up on her unicycle anyway.

In 2013, at age forty-two, already a legend in NBA arenas, she walks onto America's Got Talent and auditions like a beginner.

She advances, and then she steps away to take care of her father, who has cancer.

She comes back as a wildcard and goes out in the semifinals.

Her dad died in May 2014.

After a year away, she went back to practice.

A bowl that fell caught under her wheel, and she went down hard and broke her arm.