Flushing Restaurant Faces Possible Closure for Discrimination

NEW YORK—A year ago, the Lucky Joy restaurant in Flushing, Queens, was ordered by the New York State Department of Human Rights to compensate patrons who had been ejected by the restaurant because of their spiritual belief. After not receiving the payment, the Department held an additional hearing at One Fordham Plaza on Nov. 9.

A representative of the restaurant, who had acted as the defendant and the owner of the establishment during previous legal proceedings, admitted to be a sham and said that he was ordered by the real owner, a woman named Mei-Jin Guen, to do so.

'They shoved [us] out'

 

When Sun Zhenyu, Huang Wei, and her eight-year-old daughter walked into the Lucky Joy Restaurant to have lunch one afternoon in June 2008, they never imagined that they would be shooed out of the door of the small Chinese restaurant on Main Street. The reasoning for the ejection had to do with the words written on Huang's yellow T-shirt, which indicated that she is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that has been banned in China and persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since 1999.

The waitress's cold words, “We don´t serve Falun Gong,” left Huang´s daughter in tears. Little explanation was provided other than, “The boss said so.”

“Even at the door, we wanted to explain a little bit about what Falun Gong is, but at that time, they just weren’t very patient—they just [said], ‘I don’t care,’ and they shoved [us] out,” Huang said.

Sun and Huang sued the restaurant, and on Oct. 2, 2009, the court ruled in their favor. The Lucky Joy restaurant was ordered to pay $7,000 to each of the three victims.

“It’s disgraceful that a person would be refused service in a restaurant for doing nothing more than exercising their right to wear clothing with a religious message,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, according to a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ).

On Aug. 18, USDOJ ordered the owner of Lucky Joy to educate staff on the non-discrimination requirements and post non-discrimination policies in both Chinese and English inside the restaurant, as further investigation had revealed that six additional Falun Gong practitioners experienced similar treatment by Lucky Joy.

The New York State Department of Human Rights has not received the payment, however. The mandated non-discrimination trainings were also not conducted and no policies were posted in the restaurant. The Department, therefore, called for two additional hearings—one in September, to which the defendant did not show up, and another on Nov. 9.

The Hearing

At the hearing, a man whose real name is Xiaolong Hu admitted that he had signed his name as “Rongwu Xiao” on legal documents and acted as the owner of the restaurant in relation to the case for the past two years. He also conducted interviews with Chinese language media in New York as Rongwu Xiao.

Hu claimed that he had been ordered by the actual owner to conduct the sham. However, although he has been a manager of the restaurant for four years, he claimed that he could not provide contact information of the real owner, a woman named Mei-Jin Guen. He said he does not know her phone number because “she is the one who calls me.”

Hu also revealed that during his conversation with Guen that she told him that “she cannot afford to pay the fine, so whoever wants to sue her can go ahead.”

Hu has committed perjury, said Bellew McManus, senior attorney of the New York Human Rights Department, who was in charge of the case at the hearing.

If the fine is not paid, the restaurant will be in danger of closure or property confiscation, he also said.

About Falun Gong

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a Chinese qigong practice disseminated publicly by Li Hongzhi starting in 1992. Five slow-motion exercises and the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance constitute the core of the practice.

Group exercises of Falun Gong could be found in almost every park in China until Jiang Zemin—the former leader of China´s communist regime—began a systematic persecution campaign against Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. Jiang ordered all Falun Gong literature to be burned, and practitioners have been arrested, battered, and tortured in forced labor camps.

More than 3,000 practitioners are confirmed to have been killed as a result of the persecution in China, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

The communist regime continues to drive propaganda against Falun Gong through state-controlled media both inside China and overseas.