My Cultivation Journey While Persistently Clarifying the Truth About the Persecution in Front of the Chinese Consulate

(Minghui.org) Greetings, venerable Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!

I’m a Falun Dafa practitioner from San Francisco. I immigrated to the US in 1998. In March 1999, I went back to my old workplace in Guangzhou, China, and that’s where I began practicing Falun Dafa.

Firm Faith and Perseverance

On October 21, 2000, Master came to San Francisco to give a lecture at the Western US Fa conference. That was the first time I saw Master in person—I was so moved I couldn’t speak—I just wept. After the conference, we kept hearing news from China about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was persecuting Falun Dafa. Practitioners in San Francisco and the Bay Area held sit-ins in front of the Chinese Consulate and called on the CCP to end the persecution.

At first, many practitioners came. Over time, some began working for The Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty TV, or Sound of Hope Radio, and spread the truth to the world through media. We also set up a truth clarification booth on the street beside the consulate. Since that’s where people go to handle visa paperwork, people passing through every day for visas and other consular business could see our display boards.

We offered people many truth clarification materials: some introduced Falun Dafa and how Dafa is practiced around the world; others were about how Dafa is practiced in San Francisco or about Dafa’s remarkable health benefits. Some flyers were about how the US House of Representatives unanimously passed Resolution 304 on October 4, 2004; others were about the more than 450 million Chinese people who have withdrawn from the CCP and its affiliated organizations. Some had information about how the CCP tortures practitioners; and some exposed the CCP’s crime of forced organ harvesting which targets practitioners.

We displayed two banners that faced the street, each were about 5 meters long—one blue with white text reading “Disintegrate the CCP, End the Persecution,” the other was yellow with red text: “Falun Dafa Is Good.” Both were written in Chinese and English, and were visible to passing cars.

From 2000 until now, 26 years have passed. Besides San Francisco practitioners, people from Oakland and the South Bay gradually joined us. We’ve been there to validate Dafa—some do the exercises to show people what Falun Dafa is, some hand out truth clarification materials, others talk to people and encourage them to quit the CCP organizations. Why did we keep this up for so long? Because that’s the Chinese Consulate—the CCP’s stronghold in San Francisco. San Francisco has 180,000 to 200,000 Chinese residents. Every year, roughly tens of thousands of people go from here back to China to visit family, do business, or travel. When they go to China, they bring with them the truth about Falun Dafa they see here and share it with friends and family, exposing the CCP’s smears against Falun Dafa and this helps more people learn the truth. That’s why we’ve kept this truth clarification location going for so many years.

My wife helped people from out of town with their visa paperwork. One time while processing a visa, a staff member asked her, “Is that old man who’s always out there your husband?” My wife said yes. The person said, “Tell him to stop coming, or we won’t process your paperwork anymore.”

When she got home she told our daughter about it. That evening when I got home, my daughter said to me: “Dad, please don’t go there anymore. Otherwise not only will Mom not be able to go back to China, I won’t be able to either in the future. You need to think this through carefully.”

I said, “No, I have to go.” We each held our ground, and the disagreement grew. My son-in-law, seeing how this affected his own interests, said he wanted to divorce my daughter. The family was in an uproar.

When my daughter saw things had gotten this bad, she said, “Fine—you leave this house and don’t come back.” I stayed calm and didn’t argue with her. I just said, “Okay, I’ll go. But give me two days to find a place to stay—you can’t expect me to sleep on the street tonight.” She thought about it and said okay.

I went outside not knowing what to do or where to go. I thought of the coordinator from our Fa study group and went to talk to her. I told her everything that happened, from start to finish. Her mother was there.

They comforted me, saying, “It’s okay, we’re all Dafa practitioners. Stay with us for now, and we’ll figure something out.” On my way home I thought about how small her place was, and how inconvenient it would be for a man like me to move in. But there seemed to be no other option. I was still thinking it over when I got home. No one spoke to me. I washed my face and went to bed. That night I had a dream: I was in a wheelchair, moving forward along a track. Suddenly an arched bridge appeared ahead of me. I got out, carried the wheelchair with my hands, and crossed the bridge. When I woke up, the dream was vivid and clear. I realized Master was giving me a hint—that me being in a wheelchair wasn’t real disability, but a false appearance. What was this false appearance?

At midnight I got up to do the exercises. My daughter suddenly came over, knelt down in front of me, wrapped both arms tightly around my legs, and said crying, “Dad, don’t leave. I was wrong.” I asked, “What about your husband? Didn’t he want a divorce?” She said, “He said never mind, forget he ever said it.”

I touched her head and helped her up, and said, “I understand how you feel. Dad’s not leaving.”

After I did the exercises and lay in bed, I thought it over carefully and suddenly understood—this whole thing was a test, a major hurdle I had to get through in my cultivation: when the consulate issue pushed my family to the brink of falling apart, would I continue cultivating or not?

I maintained firm faith in Master and in Dafa, and firmly kept up my commitment to validating Dafa in front of the Chinese Consulate. I got through this test, I passed this trial—and because of that, my daughter’s and son-in-law’s attitudes changed.

Studying the Fa, Cultivating My Heart, and Being a Diligent Practitioner

Master said, “Almost every time when I’m teaching the Fa I painstakingly tell you to read the book, read the book, and read the book. As long as you read the book you will attain things better than you’d expect.” (Teachings at the Conference in Europe)

Suddenly I understood what cultivation really means. Aren’t all of a person’s various attachments, desires, and human attachments—aren’t all of these human notions—reflected in one’s thinking and shown through one’s behavior? When I reject them, when I refuse to hold onto them, isn’t that exactly looking within to work on my own heart? Isn’t that cultivation itself? From then on, I put studying the Fa and cultivating my heart first. The moment I noticed a bad thought arise in my mind, I would immediately reject it—and this kept me constantly in a state of cultivation.

I will always keep Master’s teachings firmly in my heart. I firmly believe that as both Master and the Fa exist, we—as Falun Dafa practitioners of the Fa-rectification period who have come through great storms—will surely walk the final stretch of the cultivation path well. Because we are lives created by Dafa. Because we are a particle within the universe’s great Fa. Because we are Master’s true cultivating practitioners!

Thank you, Master! Thank you, everyone!

(Presented at the 2026 San Francisco Fa Conference)