NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.—Heavy rain and cold winds did not deter hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners from parading down Brooklyn’s Chinatown on Oct. 2 to call for an end to the Chinese Communist Party's 23-year-long persecution of the spiritual group.
The wind and rain, however, were nothing compared to what adherents have experienced in China, said organizer Yi Rong, a representative of the Falun Dafa Association in New York.
“In mainland China, there’s no way that practitioners can hold a parade [like this],” Yi told The Epoch Times. “If you do the Falun Gong exercises, you will be arrested and sentenced, and even lose your life.”

A Broken Family
One parade participant, He Aishan, who recently arrived in the United States from the central Chinese province of Hubei, relayed her own experiences of persecution.“It might be very hard for someone from a free society to imagine this: that in China from 1999, a good person who has done nothing wrong and simply believes in Falun Gong and ‘truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance’ will suffer vicious persecution from the CCP,” she told The Epoch Times.
He started practicing Falun Gong while in high school before the persecution, a decision, she said, that helped with her studies and health. But after 1999, everything changed. Her mother, also a practitioner, was sent to labor camp twice, and detained and sent to brainwashing facilities multiple times, He said.

When He was in college, the university referred her to detention at a labor camp where she was forced to under brainwashing classes where she was psychologically tormented.
Ahead of a major party meeting in 2012, authorities stepped up their persecution of Falun Gong, seeking to round up known adherents. He’s family was targeted again. She was followed by police and her phone was tapped. The police ransacked her home and arrested her mother again. He avoided this fate as she was not at home at the time. But when her father returned home and found the apartment turned upside down, he collapsed, suffered a stroke and later died.
“In my family, we have been left ruined and broken from the CCP’s persecution,” she said.

Understanding the Persecution
Passerby Liu Aling was impressed seeing the Falun Gong practitioners brave the torrential conditions. Having grown up in mainland China herself, she said it was difficult for people there to get uncensored information about the spiritual practice hated by the regime.“In China, the websites only give you good news. They censor all the bad news,” Liu told The Epoch Times.
So Liu didn’t believe what was happening in China.
It wasn’t until she came to the United States, where she was able to access uncensored news sources and websites, that she slowly came to understand that the persecution of Falun Gong was real.
“It’s too horrific,” Liu said, describing the regime’s rights abuses targeting adherents.

She also quit the party not long after coming to New York, noting that she—like virtually all other children—had joined the CCP’s Young Pioneers in elementary school.
Liu hopes that more Chinese people in the United States can use the country’s freedoms to learn about the situation in China. For those in her home country, she hopes that they can be given more freedoms and the liberty to practice whatever faith they choose.
“I hope this kind of persecution can come to an end,” she said.
