Our idea of a typical magician is a man wearing a top hat, and a rabbit being pulled out of said hat. But Nash Fung, who is a magician, has a much different look.
On Friday, Fung drew a crowd to Fresno State’s Satellite Student Union to perform a magic show. He stepped onto the stage wearing glasses, a black shirt, a black blazer, light blue pants and red shoes.
It’s a casual men’s look, right? Except, Fung had a few tricks up his blazer sleeves.
He introduced himself and used light humor to get the audience’s attention before beginning his first trick. He asked the audience members to pull out their cell phones and take a picture of him holding a sign with a question mark on it.
As he spoke to the audience, Fung made his way behind a banner that had all of his social media accounts listed.
When he returned, Fung was no longer wearing shoes, his shirt had changed colors and a pair of glasses he was pretending to clean did not have lenses.
The crowd glanced at their phones and back to Fung. They realized that he, in fact, now had no shoes and was wearing a white shirt.
This was just a taste of Fung’s magic show.
Fung has been featured on shows such as “Penn and Teller: Fool Us,” and he has his own YouTube channel.
It was the first time Fresno State alumnus Roman Covarrubias had seen Fung.
Even though he hadn’t seen Fung perform before, Covarrubias liked Fung’s magic show and said he likes to watch “Penn and Teller: Fool Us.”
While the show’s main focus is on magic, Fung incorporates cultural and family anecdotes into it.
Fung said he was born and raised in Hong Kong and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 14 years old. As a kid, he had concerns about fitting in, always afraid that people would “look down” on him.
“That’s why I learned magic,” Fung said. He also shared the influence his grandmother had on him.
And as he dropped five razor blades into a shot glass filled with soda, Fung said his grandmother would tell him: “No matter how hard life gets, we fight, we fight, we fight.”
With that, Fung drank the soda with the razor blades. Then he pulled the blades, stuck on a piece of string, out of his mouth.