Jon Stojan“Music speaks where words fail,” Hans Christian Andersen once said. Especially during the turbulent times, our souls crave comfort, and a children’s choir can be the most healing medicine of all. For Qiubo Sun, those words have become both mission and melody. Splitting her time between New York City and China, she has quietly built a career at the intersection of music, management, and cultural communication. Yet if you ask her how it all began, she’ll tell you it started with a coincidence.
“I was just chatting with a friend from Shanghai who worked in culture and tourism during the pandemic,” she recalls. “He asked what I was doing in the U.S., and when I mentioned arts management, he wondered if I knew any performance groups who might want to come to China.” In 2022, as Shanghai suffered from months of lockdown, the city was eager to watch international performance. At that time, her background in both the U.S. and Chinese cultural sectors made her uniquely positioned to take on the challenge.
After that conversation and weeks of searching, she discovered the One Voice Children’s Choir, a Utah-based ensemble founded by conductor Masa Fukuda. Known across Asia for their uplifting performances and viral covers, the choir’s mission immediately resonated with Sun.
Her instincts were right. Though they have over 5 million subscribers on YouTube, the group had never toured internationally. Sun handled everything from government coordination to venue logistics. Though managing visas and paperwork for so many children was daunting, her patience and professionalism carried the project through.
Trained originally in recording arts, when asked why she’s so dedicated in this area where needs loads of patience and communication, she reflected, “I met so many artists while working at the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its summer MISA Festival, from The Matrix composer Don Davis to local musicians, I learned how to balance an artist’s mindset with institutional needs.” When scheduling conflicts once arose, she crafted a creative solution that satisfied both sides. “That’s when I realized: I’m good at being a bridge. I understand how artists think, and I also understand systems.”
That belief and personality shaped the One Voice tour. Under Sun’s coordination, the December of 2023 saw an extraordinary moment in China: One Voice was so popular among people, from the young generation to the elders.
Besides performance, the choir seized every opportunity to soak into Chinese culture. In Wenzhou, the children tried paper-cutting and water-opera; in Hangzhou, they explored infrastructure projects with Zhejiang Jiaogong Group; in Beijing, they sang for students at No. 11 High School and visited cancer patients at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, receiving hand-made panda gifts. Choir by choir, voice by voice, they dissolved the barriers and culture conflicts.
Just like the founder conductor Masa Fukuda said, “Our mission as One Voice Children’s Choir is to inspire the world through the power of children’s voices. We believe every child has a voice that is unique and deserves to be heard. We also believe in the power of music to bring people together. In a world where divisions often make the loudest noise, music offers us a sanctuary—a place where we can come together, not despite our differences, but because of them.”
Today, Qiubo Sun continues to move between continents, guiding young artists and building programs that merge creative vision with real-world structure. It’s a reminder that beneath our differences, we share the same hopes, dreams, and emotions.