NEW YORK—A golden dragon, a float of fairies seated atop large lotus flowers, and a full Western marching band were part of a contingent of thousands who marched through midtown Manhattan for a yearly celebration.
The New York parade, with 5,000 attendees, marks one of the largest of its kind in the world to commemorate World Falun Dafa Day, which also marks the anniversary of the spiritual discipline’s introduction to the public 31 years ago.
In the 1990s, the spiritual practice, also known as Falun Gong, spread rapidly in China, drawing, by some estimates, up to 100 million people to the practice. But it has been violently persecuted since 1999, when the Chinese communist regime unleashed a bloody campaign aimed at eradicating the faith.
During the nearly 24 years of repression, an untold number of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed through torture, slave labor, and forced organ harvesting, but survivors—and those who took up the practice in more than 100 countries around the world—said the communist repression and cruelty can’t make them bend their will.
“It’s adding fuel to the fire,” Cathy Han, a Falun Gong adherent at the parade, told The Epoch Times. “The more you try to suppress, the more people will want to break out of it.”
‘Going Against the Tide’
Han was speaking from personal experience.In July 1999, Han was a graduating college student in the northern Chinese city Taiyuan when, all of a sudden, state media started vilifying Falun Gong around the clock.
Han had a good friend and several schoolmates who practiced the meditation discipline.
Her friend, whom she would later marry, was imprisoned by the regime for one year as punishment for his refusal to give up his belief. She had known him as a kindhearted and gentle person since high school, someone who never quarreled with others but treated people with kindness no matter what happened.
“How could such a person do anything bad?” she recalled asking herself.
She peppered him with questions about Falun Gong the next time they met. “How come you are so brainless and keep on doing what the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t allow you to do?”
He said that he was simply following the practice’s tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance to be a good person. He cited a list of people he knew who benefited physically and mentally from the practice.
Han could come up with no counterargument. “What kind of party would persecute people for reading a book, exercising to keep healthy, and following truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance?”
Her friend was “going against the tide,” Han said, finding herself respecting the man even more.
About a year later, Han married him despite pushback from her family that he had a “bad reputation” because of the prison sentence.
“He stayed in prison not for any wrongdoing but for his faith. He strove to be a good person. Do you not allow someone to be a good person?” she told them.
For their belief, the couple experienced constant police visits to their home and the workplace. Their downstairs neighbor, upon moving away, told them that the police had tasked him with monitoring them.
“I’ve been watching you guys, and you both seem fine,” he told Han, she recalled. “You have nice manners, you don’t disturb others with your coming and going, and you helped us repair things whenever we asked. Why do the police want to keep an eye on you?”
“It’s to create a kind of mental pressure, to make you unable to keep your head up,” Han said. “‘Just look: Everyone’s watching you.’ They want you to live in that gloomy climate every moment. This is how evil the Communist Party is.”
A Sense of Peace
The practice’s set of core values is one thing that adherents repeatedly came back to while speaking at the parade.Eliseo Dardon, who worked as an insurance agent for MetLife, has been practicing Falun Gong since 2009, after he came across a group of meditators in a park in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens.
“Now I have truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—my life is complete,” the 70-year-old told The Epoch Times. “I know what I do in life has a purpose.”
Bystander Cristina Nolasco, originally from Mexico, said she was struck by the sense of peace from the parade even as participants raise awareness about the abuses happening in China.
“I think it’s really brave of them, and I love how they’re doing it with this peaceful spirit,” she told The Epoch Times. “I think that’s what they’re transmitting—peace—right now.”
Zhai Deyun, a former math and physics tutor from Nanchang, a city in eastern China, joined the parade from near Times Square in a show of support for the practice.
While in China, Zhai initially bought into communist propaganda about Falun Gong, until he started using a software program that adherents developed to circumvent the regime’s censorship machine, the Great Firewall, allowing him to access unfiltered information from the outside world.
He described Falun Gong adherents as “heroes.”
“The evil nature of the Chinese Communist Party means that it can’t tolerate truthfulness and compassion; they can’t tolerate for such a group to exist,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that he believes the regime will one day be “swept into the dust bin of history.”
Han came to New York in 2016 to escape the police harassment in China. She said that persevering was worth it.
“It was fearful and depressing, but in my heart, there was light.”
