Catherine Zhang

Young girls often dream of becoming a ballerina or doctor when they grow up. My dream was to end the persecution in China. Shen Yun was founded (in 2006), when I was 3 years old. I grew up watching the performances in Australia and wishing I could be a part of it. Throughout my childhood, I saw photos of practitioners who had been tortured, or heard stories about their experiences in prison. I would feel sad and hopeless in the face of such widespread horror.

I always thought that classical Chinese dance was beautiful and profound, so I had the wish to be able to join Shen Yun as a dancer. But one day when I was 8 years old, I heard the sound of the violin for the first time. As soon as I heard the beautiful singing tone, I knew it was my destiny to play the violin. Although I started violin quite late compared to other children, I had the burning desire to fulfill my dream of becoming a professional violinist, in the hopes that one day I would be able to use my violin playing as a way to spread awareness about the persecution. It is this aspiration which enabled me to push myself to work harder than others, and catch up with the other children who started violin earlier than me.

My mother started practicing Falun Dafa in China in 1996. When the persecution began in 1999, my mother was affected in many ways, the first being the pressure from her workplace to give up her faith. As my mother was the only person in her family who practiced Falun Dafa, she also received pressure to give up her faith from her husband and his family. My mother’s faith never wavered, but as a result, she was coerced into a divorce. Her husband was told that if he didn’t divorce her, he would never get a promotion at work.

She immigrated to Australia afterward to escape persecution. In 2001, my mother tried to enter Hong Kong, and was detained at the airport for three days. She had been blacklisted, and was denied entry into Hong Kong, and she knew that this also meant she could never return to China. While she was being detained, she and some other Falun Dafa practitioners went on a hunger strike for 60 hours to protest their unlawful detainment. Later, she was repatriated back to Australia. Afterwards, my mother focused on spreading awareness of the persecution in Australia, but she was very lonely, as her entire family consisting of her parents, brother and nephew were still in China. She knew she could never return.

After I was born, my grandparents came to visit my mother and me in Australia on two separate occasions. Other than those two brief visits, our family has always been separated. The only contact we’ve had has been through phone calls. But even those were not safe. I remember our calls would always have all kinds of background noises and echoes, and I once even heard an unknown man’s voice over the phone. My mother told me our calls to China were being monitored. The workers from the Ministry of State Security of Tianjin also called on my grandparents at their house many times, to “drink tea”, which in China is a sign that the state security agents are watching you and monitoring your behavior. They threatened my grandparents many times, and asked about my mother’s whereabouts. My mother had a friend who was a Chinese businessman. On one occasion, he went back to China, and was met by Chinese state security officials asking him to try to convince my mother to go back to China.

The hardest thing my mother and I had to face was in the year of 2021, when my grandfather passed away. Before he died, his dying wish was to see my mother and me one last time. But as my mother was on the blacklist, and I was performing in Shen Yun’s tour as a practicum student, there was no way we could go back to China safely to see him one last time. Now, my grandmother has only my uncle looking after her. She, too, wants to meet me one last time before she dies. Whenever my mother calls her, she always asks, “When can you come back?” My mother and I have not seen our relatives in China for a decade now.