Kasey Zhou

The first photo I’m holding shows my cousin Jing Li. Ever since I was young, I was often told that I had a very beautiful and smart cousin who was loved by all my family members—yet I never actually met her. Only after I grew up did I learn that she passed away half a year before I was born; she was only 21. Jing had started practicing Falun Dafa in university, after hearing about it from my parents. In 1999, the CCP, being intimidated by the growing population of Falun Dafa practitioners, launched a national persecution program against Falun Dafa practitioners—a group of kind people who live life according to Falun Dafa's main principles: truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. My cousin was warned by the school to stop practicing, and she refused. Not understanding why the government would not want people to be good and kind, she went to Tiananmen Square to peacefully seek an audience in 2001. She was then detained illegally by local police and was sent back to her hometown, Liaoning, with the threat that she was going to be expelled from her school and sent to labor camps where they would force her to stop practicing Falun Dafa. On the train back to Liaoning, she tried to escape by jumping out of the window of the running train, and immediately died from the impact.

The second photo is of my mum, who now practices Falun Dafa freely outside of China. My mum started practicing in 1996 and greatly benefited from the practice both mentally and physically. Starting from July 1999, however, her peaceful life was disturbed by the intense persecution that covered the whole country. She was illegally detained twice; the first time was in November 1999; the second time was in February, only two months after the first detainment. She was also sent to labor camps twice; the first time was in July 2000, and the second time was in September 2003 for a total of two years. While mum was pregnant with me, the police came to our house regularly to check on my mum and never ceased to disturb our life. Mum was therefore forced to leave our home to escape persecution; she wandered around the city, unsettled in her pregnancy all by herself. Luckily, in 2002, I was born healthy. When I was 18 months old, mum was detained and sent to labor camps again, for more than a year. I was told that after that day, I never left my dad's side and always had fear and insecurity in my eyes.  When my mum did come back after a year and a half, I no longer recognized her and would not call her mum. Later, my whole family moved abroad in order to live a normal life.

Although I wasn't persecuted personally, those family experiences shaped a lot of my beliefs and my character. I know to stand up to tyranny and wickedness for what's right and what I believe in. I know that hatred and jealousy are what's inside the heart of evildoers, and that they can devour all goodness in people and make them inhumane. Over the past century, CCP not only destroyed a lot of traditional Chinese culture, but also persecuted millions of good people like my mum and my cousin. They use force and violence to build their autocracy and deprive its people of all basic human rights. Shen Yun Performing Arts aims to revive the lost, destroyed culture and raise awareness of what's happening right now in China. What the CCP has done to my culture is irreversible, I could not stop them. Yet what it is doing right now to the millions of Falun Dafa practitioners is still ongoing and I feel the need to be a part of this to help those who are still in the detention centers and labor camps, to those who still suffer inhumane treatment even to this very minute.