On a winter morning in Santiago, lion dancers gather for a masterclass with a visiting Malaysian delegation. Yellow shirts bearing the flags of Chile and Malaysia, overlapped by a cougar and a southern lion head, represent a transnational community of practice. As cymbals, drums, and gongs are arranged on red tables, the room hums with anticipation. What follows is more than a class in technique: it is a lesson in listening with the body, learning to become a lion. This paper examines Chinese lion dance in Chile as a site where musical, corporeal, and transnational processes converge. Drawing on ethnographic participation, I explore how performers learn to “become the lion” by internalizing rhythmic patterns, drum cues, and choreomusical entrainment that translate percussion into living gesture (Sager 2012; McGuire 2024; Csordas 2025). In doing so, participants cultivate an embodied sonic knowledge that produces a localized Sino-soundscape in contemporary Chile (Tan and Rao 2016; Wong 2019).  Rather than viewing lion dance as maintained through ethnic inheritance, I examine the Chilean case, where the practice unfolds outside diasporic frameworks and among non-Chinese performers, as a site where sound and embodiment, rather than ancestry, shape lineage and belonging. Rhythmic knowledge travels through pedagogy and digital mentorship linking Chilean troupes to masters in Guangdong and Malaysia, constituting a transnational social field (Basch et al. 1994) sustained as lineage outside diaspora. In Latin America, where imaginaries of China have often been mediated through Western projections (Montt Strabucchi et al. 2021), Chilean practitioners inhabit Chineseness through affective resonance, negotiating their performance between orientalist imagery and sincere engagement (Metzger 2020). By tracing how performers become the lion, this paper foregrounds sound and embodiment as the grounds on which cultural lineage and belonging are enacted beyond ancestry or diaspora.