A Soul in Two Languages: The Story of Benji

Benji was born in 1982 in Denver, Colorado, the fifth of seven children in a devout Mormon family. It was a household built on structure - daily prayer, scripture reading, no coffee, no alcohol - and on near-constant movement. Over the years the family relocated from Colorado to Delaware, to Utah, to England, and back again to Pennsylvania, dragging young Benji through one new school and one new culture after another.

Underneath all that structure, though, something quieter was unfolding. As a teenager, Benji wrestled privately with a part of himself he didn't yet have words for - a conflict between the boy his faith expected him to be and the person he actually was. At seventeen, he finally said something to his parents. Not a clean confession, not a dramatic announcement - just enough of the truth to let them see his struggle. His father's response was simple and unconditional love, and that single moment planted something in Benji that would take years to fully grow into acceptance, both his parents' and his own. It would be another eight years before he came out publicly, at twenty-five. By then, five of his six siblings had identified as LGBTQ+ as well, and the family - against every assumption people might make about a strict Mormon household - had become a place defined less by judgment than by loyalty.

Benji's relationship with Chinese culture began in a place that had nothing to do with China at all: Melbourne, Australia, where at nineteen he was sent for missionary service. Before his work could begin, he had three months to learn Mandarin from scratch. There were no apps, no smartphones - just flashcards, drills, and a missionary companion he was required to speak only Chinese with, day in and day out.

What happened over those three months felt, to Benji, like more than ordinary learning. He has described the sensation as almost mystical, as if some part of him already knew this language - as if he'd spoken it before, in another life entirely. Whatever it was, it took hold. By the time smartphones eventually entered his life, he was using recordings and audiobooks to deepen what had already become a genuine fluency, and a friendship with the language itself that would shape everything that came next.

Back in the United States, he enrolled at Brigham Young University to study accounting, mostly to satisfy his mother. But his real pull was toward the stage. He joined the university's touring performance group, singing and dancing in Broadway-style shows across the world, and in 2005, a tour through China changed the direction of his life. He has called it a visionary moment - the kind that doesn't ask permission before rearranging your priorities. He walked away from accounting and toward an entertainment industry that, at the time, had no real space carved out for someone like him.

He moved to Shanghai in 2006 with no contacts and no clear path. Foreign actors didn't get cast in lead roles in Chinese television - that was simply understood. So Benji found other doors: reality competitions, talent shows, a stint on a male beauty and singing contest that functioned as part pageant, part showcase. He climbed high enough in Taiwan's "Super Idol" competition to start working with established stars, eventually performing a duet with Taiwanese pop icon A-Mei - likely making him the only American artist to ever share that particular stage with her.

Then came the role that would define his public life. Legendary producer and writer Qiong Yao cast him as the male lead in her highly anticipated reboot of "My Fair Princess" - without ever asking him to audition. It was historic: no foreign actor had ever been cast that way in a production of that scale. The honor came with a brutal cost. The script ran over two thousand pages, dense with classical Qing-dynasty vocabulary that had to be delivered with word-for-word precision. Filming stretched across ninety-eight episodes and nine months, with eighteen-hour days that sometimes bled into twenty-four-hour shoots. Benji remembers one stretch that lasted thirty-five hours straight. He survived on little money and even less sleep, questioning more than once whether he'd made the right choice. But the role transformed him into one of the most recognized faces across Greater China - and decades later, he still describes it less in terms of fame than in terms of what it proved was possible.

The physical toll of those years didn't disappear when the cameras stopped rolling. Cold sets, exhaustion, and illness had worn him down, and strangely, it was his own scripts that pointed him toward healing - the show's dialogue was thick with references to classical Chinese medical texts, and that exposure sparked a curiosity that outlasted the production itself. While in Beijing, he sought out a respected acupuncture master who helped him recover, and something about that experience stayed with him. By 2012, with no comparable acting opportunities left in China, Benji left the country altogether - and enrolled in a master's program in acupuncture in New York City.

Around the same time, he turned to yoga, despite describing himself as mentally driven rather than naturally athletic. He trained at a Bikram studio in Los Angeles, then advanced to a higher level of training in Mexico City - taught entirely in Spanish, a language he picked up specifically for that purpose. He placed first in a Utah state yoga competition and fifth nationally. But behind those achievements sat something harder to talk about: the disorienting grief of stepping away from a career and a level of public recognition most people never experience, and learning to live with the quiet that followed it.

It was during this New York chapter - walking home one evening from his acupuncture studies - that Benji passed a building and heard something through an open door: Hebrew songs drifting out into the street. He hadn't planned to go in. He just did. The building was a Kabbalah Center, and what he found inside wasn't a religion in the traditional sense but a mystical philosophy built around the relationship between light, representing divine energy, and the vessel meant to receive it. He noticed almost immediately that the Tree of Life at the center of Kabbalistic teaching - ten interconnected points - echoed the ten Heavenly Stems he'd just spent years studying in Chinese medicine. Two ancient systems, built continents apart, somehow speaking a strikingly similar structural language.

For someone raised on Mormon scripture, fluent in Mandarin, and now studying the human body through a Chinese philosophical lens, Kabbalah became one more language to learn - and, like the others, one that felt oddly familiar rather than foreign. It also offered him something his upbringing had struggled to provide: a community where the parts of his identity he'd spent over a decade reconciling weren't treated as a contradiction to faith, but simply as who he was.

That community is also where he met his fiance, during a meal celebrating Sukkot at the Kabbalah Center. Benji doesn't describe their meeting as luck so much as recognition - two people who had each done their own quiet work arriving, almost inevitably, in the same place at the same time. Their relationship grew alongside shared participation in Jewish holidays - Purim, Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot - each one deepening a bond he frames in spiritual as much as romantic terms.

His parents, he says, showed up for that relationship the way they'd shown up for nearly everything else in his life - with love that took its time but never wavered. He's candid about the fact that his mother's acceptance didn't arrive instantly; it came after real spiritual wrestling on her part. But he doesn't hold that against her. He sees it as part of what real love looks like in a family still working things out - patience extended in both directions, and a trust that everyone eventually arrives.

Today, approaching forty, Benji runs two organizations born out of the very intersections that have defined his life: one focused on Torah literacy across English, Chinese, and Hebrew, and another teaching the language of Chinese medicine to practitioners who need it most. He still credits vision over luck - the belief that you build the door yourself when one doesn't already exist for you. His story, in the end, isn't really about any single identity he settled into. It's about a man who kept learning new languages, literal and otherwise, and discovered that fluency in one never required abandoning another - only the willingness to keep translating, for as long as it takes, until all the pieces of a life finally speak as one voice.