It was a rough year in Flushing. Police were on alert for months due to attacks against practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese meditation practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
In June 2008, Ms. Huang was with her daughter and was meeting a friend, Ms. Sun Zhenyu, for lunch. Despite the attacks against people of her beliefs, Ms. Sun was wearing a yellow tee shirt with Chinese characters meaning "Falun Dafa is good” and with the guiding principles of the practice, “Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance,” written beneath in English.
“We just wanted to have lunch so we went into Lucky Joy,” Ms. Huang said.
The restaurant was empty, which Ms. Huang notes as being “bizarre” given it was around lunchtime. She asked a waitress if they were open. The woman approached them, and after seeing Ms. Sun’s tee shirt, marched to the door without a word before saying, “We don’t serve you.”
Ms. Huang asked why, and the waitress responded, “We don’t want your business because you’re Falun Gong.”
They asked who the order came from, and the waitress replied that it came from the boss, who was not present at the time. A waiter joined her, and they shooed the three out the door.
“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 go ‘I don’t care’ and they shoved [us] out,” Ms. Huang said.
At that point, her daughter, Xinye Feng, began crying. “Even now if we’re walking in Flushing she doesn’t even want to go close to that side [of the street]. She wants to go to the other side when we pass by,” Ms. Huang said.
For practitioners of Falun Gong, facing discrimination in Chinese communities is a known problem. Lucky Joy has kicked out at least 10 practitioners, although it is among the first known cases of a New York restaurant kicking Falun Gong practitioners out for their belief.
Eradicating a Group
The discrimination practiced in Flushing comes from the persecution taking place in China.
Prior to the persecution, Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, grew to become the most popular meditation practice in the country. Taught for free, the practice has a moral component, as practitioners seek to become honest, kind, and tolerant, which was very appealing in a China dominated by a get-rich-quick ethos. Its practitioners also claim extraordinary health benefits, something very important in a nation with little in the way of a social safety net.
Falun Gong’s popularity was the spark that led to the Chinese regime’s persecution.
After Falun Gong books became bestsellers in 1996, they were banned by the regime. According to the New York Times, in early 1999 a state agency estimated there were at least 70 million people practicing. Falun Gong practitioners in China at the time say the actual number practicing was over 100 million. The persecution began in July.
According to a 1999 Washington Post article, former head of the CCP, “Jiang Zemin alone decided that Falun Gong must be eliminated.”
Continued on the next page…
