ATLANTA— Falun Gong practitioners celebrated World Falun Dafa Day on May 13 with poetry, music, conversation and food at a Chinese cultural school. Crystal Wang, age 10, played the violin. The group of about 40, mostly Chinese, read poetry and sang songs in Mandarin.
The event marked both the birthday of Falun Gong’s teacher, Mr. Li Hongzhi, and the anniversary of his first time publicly teaching Falun Gong in China in 1992. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice that includes a set of five traditional qiqong exercises and teaches following the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
The celebration had a bittersweet quality. Since 1999, the Communist Party in China has persecuted Falun Gong. One guest at the party took part in a pivotal event before the persecution began, the April 25, 1999 appeal in Beijing, and discussed her experience.
Shortly before the regime banned the practice on July 20, 1999, thousands of Falun Gong practitioners went to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice Falun Gong peacefully in China without harassment. In the two years prior to their appeal, acts of official harassment had intensified.
She asked that her name not be used for this article, because her relatives and the boss who helped her in China were still there. She was a university professor, and known as a Falun Gong practitioner. Her boss asked her if she had attended the appeal on April 25, and when she said “yes,” cautioned her not to tell anyone else.
“He protected me,” she said. The police came to her university to find people who had appealed, in order to arrest them. Her boss sent the police away.
She came to America in 2007. “So many [Falun Gong practitioners] in China were arrested,” she said. Even now, when she calls her relatives, “I know my telephone, they listen. I have to be very careful so the people who protected me would not be negatively impacted.”
Many of those present expressed concern for the people of China. Nai Nai Wu told a humorous anecdote about her efforts to convince people in China to quit the Chinese Communist Party and to oppose the persecution of Falun Gong.
Once, she was talking to a man who said he was afraid to speak in a normal voice, lest an eavesdropper hear him discussing such controversial matters. Wu told him not to be afraid, because “Eavesdroppers are human beings too. When they learn the truth they will do the right thing.”
On a later call, she was telling a woman about the movement to resign from the Communist Party. Suddenly a man’s voice came on the line. He wanted Wu to help him officially resign from the party. After making that arrangement, Wu asked the woman if that was her husband. The woman said she had no idea who he was—he was an eavesdropper.
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