Zhao Jiheng’s life turned upside down when he was just 8 years old.

“One day, I came home, and my parents had disappeared,” Zhao said. His parents, like tens of millions of others in China, had been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because of their religious faith. Overnight, the estimated 70 million to 100 million adherents of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, would go from being known to the general public as kind people who practiced meditation and followed “truthfulness, compassion, tolerance” to being branded enemies of the state in 1999.

Zhao’s father would be subjected to torture and then spend the next several years on the run, and his mother would be illegally arrested and detained for varying lengths of time, randomly and frequently. This meant Zhao could come home from school one day and find the door locked, only then realizing that the police had taken his mother again. Homelife had been upended; Zhao stayed with his disabled grandmother at times and also, at other times, with any relative who could take him in.

The 8-year-old Zhao would ask, “Why is my mother gone? Why is my father gone?”

Zhao’s miraculous turn toward health was one of his first encounters with Falun Dafa. The spiritual practice includes five meditative exercises in addition to adhering to the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, tolerance,” and when it was introduced to the Chinese public in the early 1990s, it caught on like wildfire. There were mental, spiritual, and physical health benefits, and Zhao was one of many who reported that the illnesses that long plagued him all but disappeared.

It certainly hadn’t been an easy life back when he knew that he could blackout and hit his head on the ground at any moment. With sincerity, Zhao said, “Falun Dafa gave me a second chance at life.”

When his parents took up the spiritual practice, he did too, because the three principles of Falun Dafa made it clear to him that this was teaching people how to be good and kind. It made the sudden persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners all the more confusing and heartbreaking for Zhao. It’s not uncommon for people in China to know someone who practiced Falun Dafa and was killed by the CCP for it, he added. Eleven of his mother’s friends have died.

“I knew it would be dangerous, but I don’t think I could have imagined what the experience would be like,” Zhao said. In the dead of night, dozens of people packed into the back of a truck, lying flat under cargo, and would be dropped off in the middle of nowhere to wait for who knows how long for the next vehicle to pick them up. He should have been scared, Zhao acknowledged in retrospect, but he felt, somehow, that he was being protected by God. Even when he was waiting in the dark out in the wilderness, not knowing whether the next person he met would be the police or the smugglers, or if the next leg of the journey would proceed at all, he thought the risk was worth it. Life without the freedom to practice your faith is not life at all, he said.

Imagine the emotions Zhao felt when he saw a tale that could have been his own played out onstage.

It was a culture with a saying that there are gods three feet above one’s head, Zhao said, meaning that the heavens are always watching, and thus people strove toward a high moral standard.

He has even played a part in one of the storytelling dances that touches on the persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners in China—but not in a role resembling his own life.

“Everyone has a good side in their hearts, which is just covered up by the evil CCP. When they understand the truth, I think they will wake up. They will not choose to do this kind of thing [the CCP’s bidding],” Zhao said.

“Audiences leave our performances with joy and an uplifted heart, because this divinely inspired culture shows something upright and full of beauty.”