(Clearwisdom.net) The Fa-rectification has progressed for eight years. During these eight years I have been maturing step by step during Fa-rectification, and it is our Teacher who has been guiding me from being an ignorant child to maturity.
I was still a teenager when I learned about Falun Dafa. I was on a vacation in 1999 when I picked up a Falun Dafa book and started carefully reading it. After I finished reading the book, I felt the content was immense and boundless. I had never read anything like it before. I could not wait to read more books like it and I wanted to read them all. I felt that I had found my destiny in life and I decided to genuinely cultivate Falun Dafa.
I found the Falun Dafa exercise site that was closest to my home. I was so excited that I went to the site early and not one else had arrived yet. I walked around the exercise site as I waited, and finally the other practitioners arrived. When the exercise music started, I immersed myself into the stream of practitioners. I felt like a lost child who had found my way home. It felt very pleasant. After we finished the exercises it began to get dark. On my bike ride home, I saw many shining law wheels, and my confidence was raised. In the days after that, rain or shine, I never missed a group practice.
Just before July 20, 1999, the date when the persecution began, it often poured rain when we did the exercises, and raindrops beat against my face and ran down my cheeks. After the exercises, we were wet from head to toe. This kind of weather had rarely been seen before. Practitioners all felt that something big was looming.
On July 20, 1999, police officers surrounded the exercise site and didn't allow us to do he Falun Gong exercises. Whoever stepped out to do the exercises was arrested. Crowds of curious people circled the exercise site to see what was going on. Fellow practitioners went en masse to Beijing to defuse the situation and to request that the freedom to practice Falun Gong be restored. I also got on the train to Beijing. After I arrived at Tiananmen Square I saw many practitioners coming from various places in China, and we discussed strategies together. Our determined hearts to guard the Fa moved heaven and earth. At that time, many residents of Beijing knew that Falun Dafa practitioners were coming to Beijing to stand up for the Fa. One time when I was buying my lunch, the lady who was selling boxed lunches recognized that I was a practitioner and she gave me a lot more food. Other people asked her why she gave me so much food. The lady said, almost crying, "You are not the same as he is. They (practitioners) work hard. He came to Beijing at such a young age to tell the truth about Falun Dafa. How could you compare with him?"
At night, we slept on the lawn at Yuyuantan Park. We did not have a change of clothes, so we washed our clothes with water from the pond in the park. We put on our clothes after we squeezed out the water, and we dried the clothes with the warmth of our bodies. We also ran the risk of being arrested at any time. Frequently, we saw practitioners leave the park in the morning and they would not return at night. A little sister from Tongji University in Shanghai stayed with me. One morning, she said she would go to appeal for Falun Dafa, but she never returned. I still have the towels she used.
I was arrested by the police from Tiananmen Police Station and was sent back to where I came from. On the way back, they constantly tried to persuade me to give up my cultivation. I told them that Falun Dafa taught people, "Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance," and to be kind people, and that it is not wrong. I told them my experience of how I benefited from practicing Falun Gong. In the end, they all became quiet but they all knew the truth in their hearts. They took me to the police station, and later I was sent to a detention center. The room I was put in held over 20 people, and we all slept on one big bed made of wooden boards. We could only sleep by standing up and there was no room to turn. Even in this situation, we never skipped doing the Falun Gong exercises. One time, the prison guard saw me practicing the exercises, and he told me to stop. I paid no attention to what he said and continued doing the exercises. He threatened that he would whip me with a leather belt and put handcuffs and shackles on me, but he could not intimidate me. After 15 days of isolation, they asked me if I still wanted to practice Falun Gong. I replied that I would still practice and I did not write the guarantee statement. I was then sent to a forced labor camp. While there, they tried to force me to write a "new realization" of Falun Dafa and to slander the Dafa that I believed in and practiced every day.
When the persecution of Falun Dafa began, I silently said to myself that no matter what happened, I would not slander Falun Dafa, and that I would remain true to Falun Dafa, and I have not broken that promise to myself. To find excuses for the persecution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fabricated one lie after another on TV. Faced with the Party's huge propaganda machine, all we could do was to try our best to clarify the truth about Falun Dafa. Whenever I heard people saying something slanderous about Falun Dafa simply because they did not know the truth, I was very worried for them. I wanted to stand up and stop them from saying it. After I calmed down I realized that they were deceived by the propaganda. I would then first send forth righteous thoughts for them, then peacefully tell them the truth about Falun Dafa. They generally could understand. There were people who did not want to listen to the truth and who had a bad attitude, driving me away or even calling me names. Sometimes I felt depressed and was scared of clarifying the truth. After I studied the Fa peacefully, I realized the importance and urgency of saving people, and those obstacles counted as nothing.
I told myself that the mouth that was given to me was not just for eating. I must let it fulfill its function and use it to save people. I should try my best to do what Teacher said,
"From your mouths, sharp swords all at once shoot forth.
Piercing through the lies of rotten ghosts,
Seize the moment to rescue and save--hurry up and speak."
("Hurry Up and Speak" from "Hongyin" II Translation Version B)
The more everyday people learn the truth about Falun Dafa, the easier it is to clarify the truth. After the past stormy eight years, people more or less have learned the truth. Especially now, with the wave of the "three withdrawals" (withdrawing from the Communist Party, the Communist Youth League, and the Young Pioneers), many people in China choose to quit. When the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party was first published, if you tried to persuade people to quit the three Party organizations, people had never heard of it. Now if you just ask them if they have quit the three CCP organizations, you have to work hard to find one who has never heard of quiting. Now when you ask them to quit, they most likely will.
After so many years of cultivating during Fa-rectification, I had a wish to access the Clearwisdom.net website. I always felt that I did not understand how to use the Internet and was afraid that it was not be safe. I had the wish but did not have the courage to try. One day, I found an article on "Minghui Weekly" explaining step-by-step instructions on how to [break through the CCP Internet blockade] and get on the Internet. I carefully wrote down the steps. Actually, in every issue of Minghui Weekly, the dynamic web addresses were published. After those web addresses were typed into a computer, you could access the main page of the website, and from there you could select Clearwisdom.net. After I got on the website, the first thing I saw was the portrait of our Teacher quietly watching the world from amidst the mountains after leaving New York following July 20, 1999. I was so excited. I realized that I could get on the Clearwisdom website and that the steps to get on the Internet were actually very simple. I was limited by the notion that it was too difficult. Thus, a small resource site for clarifying the truth about Falun Dafa was born.