Zhu Xiaoyan is a young girl from northern China, who is now studying in Western Europe. She started to practise Falun Gong in 1996 in China, and her hobby is dancing. A little more than a year ago, she started to perform the dances with Dafa’s connotation. Earlier this year, she once performed a solo dance dubbed "Dunhuang’s Dancing Rhythms" at the Chinese New Year Gala organised by the New Tang Dynasty Television company in Paris and at a concert organised by a human rights organisation in Geneva. The audience was carried away by her graceful and elegant performances with classic flavours, and perceived the holiness, harmony as well as the gracefulness and beauty of the paradises. It is said that she was arrested in year 2000 when peacefully appealing for a stop to the persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing, and that she was forced-fed while staging a hunger strike in a detention centre. At our request, she talked on the following topics:
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Question: How did you start to practise Falun Gong?
Answer: I used to have serious bronchopneumonia since my childhood, so my parents spent a huge amount of time and money trying to find a doctor or medicine that could cure my illness. When I was little, I had tried a great diversity of western and Chinese medicine. During my school days, it was not uncommon for me to ask for sick leave, and my parents were greatly worried about my situation. In 1996, prior to the college entrance examination, due to my heavy schoolwork, I frequently suffered from migraine. When the situation was serious, my eyesight was puzzled and blurred, coupled with vomiting. Therefore, once I had migraine, I was unable to continue my homework. Afterwards I was recommended reading the book that contains the teachings of Falun Gong called Zhuan Falun.
Once I had read Zhuan Falun broadened my horizon so much that I immediately felt that no other books could ever appeal to me. I instinctively felt that this cultivation practice is very righteous, and is a great path leading us back towards our original true self. Within a few days, whilst I was reading the second lecture of Zhuan Falun, my body started to feel light and very comfortable without the added feeling of dizziness any more. Whilst I was at school during the daytime, it was quite easy for me to concentrate on the teachers’ lectures. I took advantage of the self-studying session every evening to read Zhuan Falun lecture by lecture. Before and during the entrance examination, my mind was always very peaceful. In the September of the same year, I was admitted to an institute of foreign languages in northern China.
Question: You were once imprisoned in a detention centre in China. Please talk about the situation there.
Answer: I was once illegally imprisoned when I went to appeal for a stop to the persecution of Falun Gong in Beijing in 2000. I was imprisoned in Beijing’s Mentouguo Detention Centre and Shenyang’s Longshan reformatory respectively. In the Mentouguo Detention Centre, I staged a hunger strike along with other illegally imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners to appeal for release without condition. On the fifth day of our hunger strike on which we didn’t eat any food and water, the prison authorities brutally forced-fed us. The warped police tied our hands and feet to a chair, and opened my teeth with a pair of pliers so as to inject a full pot of Glucose mixed with soybean juice, which nearly made me suffocate. Among the Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted to death as reported on the Internet, many died of ruptures to the trachea and oesophagus, or stomach perforation resulting from forced-feeding. The people who were imprisoned in the Longshan Reformatory ranged from the elderly in their 70s to high school students in their teens. Because they insisted on practising Falun Gong, we were once threatened to be punished with more serious penalties several times. I (also) met a 27-year-old lady there, who had been beaten and abused by the police of Qianmen Police Station in Beijing for four straight hours. During the course, she passed out twice, and her entire back was bruised. Though her situation was so serious that she could hardly breathe, the prison authorities still transferred her to the notoriously evil Masanjia forced labour camp in Liaoning Province to continue the persecution, regardless of her critical condition. Not only did the prison guards persecute Falun Gong practitioners in such an inhumane way, they also unreasonably forbid practitioners’ family members to visit them. On the other hand, the guards often used these practices to shamelessly extort goods from their family members. In order to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up their belief in “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance,” they have actually used up all kinds of practices available.
Question: What do you think of your performance of the solo dance "Dunhuang’s Dancing Rhythms"?
Answer: Most of the statues and fresco paintings in the Dunhuang cave were painted to depict Buddhists’ cultivation stories. The "Dunhuang’s Dancing Rhythms" manifest not only peacefulness and warmth but also the flavours of joyfulness and colourfulness. It made me perceive the goodness and bliss of the beings in the paradises as well as the honour of a new life in the Fa [law or principles in the Buddha school]. I was also moved by the hope that Dafa has brought to all sentient beings.
Question: What do you think are the main characteristics of the dances that show connotations with Dafa? And what is the most significant understanding you have had?
Answer: When looking at them from their subject matter, the dances performed by Dafa practitioners mostly demonstrate the goodness in the Buddha world, the pureness and peacefulness of Dafa practitioners who had completed their cultivation and ascended to a high level as well as their gratitude to our Master [referring to the founder of Falun Gong] for His kind salvation. In the meantime, the creation of these dances also contains Dafa practitioners’ blessing and expectations of ordinary people. They want to pass Falun Dafa’s goodness to all the members of the audience. As a result, their performances are gentle, harmonious, elegant and solemn, without the use of complicated techniques or arbitrary vent of personal emotion.
When participating in the rehearsal of some dances, such as "Lotus Flowers", I perceived that not only can these dances stimulate the audience’s admiration for holiness and goodness and inspire their inborn quality of kindness, but it can also enable performers to purify themselves. From the initiating ideas and rehearsal of a dance to finally presenting it to the audience, it is a process of rectifying themselves. Performers' mentality, manner, movements and skills have a direct impact on the audience; therefore, they should be responsible to the audience. Moreover, it struck me that as a Dafa practitioner, whatever we do, even simply a trivial matter or a minor detail of something, we should always be responsible to others, and to the society so as to make others truly benefit from it.
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