“It brought tears to my eyes,” Ms. Poppleton said, “I did feel like it very much had a message [that] there is a God, there is an afterlife, and we'll get to be with the people we love after this life.”
To honor her late father, who recently passed away unexpectedly, Ms. Poppleton and her sister bought tickets to see the performance after rediscovering her father’s email about his experience seeing Shen Yun in 2019.
“A few weeks after he passed away. … I pulled up emails, and one of the first emails that I opened up was an article about Shen Yun that he had sent to me,” she said, “it was an article where they had interviewed him talking about Shen Yun … and how it has a positive spiritual message.”
“That just really hit me,” she said, “I genuinely felt like it was a message from my dad.”
“I texted it to my sister, and I was like, … ‘we got to go see this’,” she said, “So we bought tickets that night.”
China was once known as “The Land of the Divine,” and Shen Yun presents this culture by drawing upon the Middle Kingdom’s Buddhist and Daoist philosophies. As such, the performance often includes spiritually uplifting messages, according to the company’s website.
“I think the show is a really good example of [persevering] and I think it’s really important for us all to do that,” she said.
Since Shen Yun’s inception in 2006, its mission has been to revive the traditional culture of China and to share it with the world. The age-old culture has been on the brink of extinction since the Chinese communist regime seized power in 1949. Shen Yun says its performance demonstrates “China before communism.”
“That definitely brought tears to my eyes … [and] gave me chills,” Ms. Poppleton said, “this is still happening today, and that’s crazy to me because it’s so far from where I am that it’s hard for me to sometimes even imagine that that’s really happening.”
“It’s really important to stick up for what we believe in because it’s not people’s opinions that matter, it’s God’s opinion,” she said, “God will bless you for sticking to what he wants you to do and not listening to all the people around you.”
“It made me want to learn more about the Chinese culture,” she added.
Ms. Poppleton felt connected to her late father through Shen Yun, and it brought her a renewed sense of hope.
“I’ve just been doing a lot of stuff trying to keep him in my life … trying to still have a relationship with him even though he’s moved on,” she said, “ I know he’s probably here with us right now.”
