[2] At the age of ten, Lui took up the study of classical stringed instruments, namely the pipa (a four-stringed lute) and the guqin (sometimes called the qin, chin, or "Chinese zither").
[8] In 1961 a full U.S. tour included university engagements at Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Wesleyan, and Yale.
[2] He also traveled to London, where he cut a record for the BBC's permanent collections[4] and soon gained a reputation as the premier ambassador of solo pipa to the West.
[7] Lui briefly fell in with the American popular genre known as exotica and played as part of a Las Vegas stage show called "Oriental Holiday".
[2] In March 1961, Lui accepted a position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught in the Department of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology.
[2] In 1964 he began lecturing on the history and theory of Chinese music,[3] and eventually sat on committees that reviewed theses and dissertations for masters and doctorate degrees in ethnomusicology.
His teaching work was interspersed with performances at the Guggenheim Museum, Hollywood Bowl, Library of Congress, and a tour to Europe, as well as recording sessions that amounted to five albums of music during the 1960s.