Threats and intimidation forced the cancellation of a Shen Yun performance in Toronto, a first for the CCP’s campaign to stop the group.
The cold reality sank in when Nancy Zhang was an 8-year-old waiting for her parents to pick her up from school.
There was no one coming for her.
The ever-present Chinese police, stationed just next to her school, had arrested both her parents that day for practicing Falun Gong. They sent her father to a Chinese brainwashing center—a facility designed for the namesake purpose of instilling hate propaganda against their faith and inculcating Party loyalty. Zhang’s mother ended up in Chinese jail for three years.
Zhang waited for hours. The day turned dark as her classmates went home one by one. In the end, it was just her and a security guard.
“It felt hopeless and helpless,” she told The Epoch Times. “But when I knew what I was waiting for, it made me feel even worse.”
Grief, fear, darkness—words almost antithetical to a normal childhood—shadowed Zhang for as long as she was in China. Her grandfather died without being allowed one last moment with his daughter. Two years after Zhang’s mother was freed, police again forced their way into their home and dragged her off as Zhang watched, terrified.
“For a child, this kind of fear becomes normal. But it should never be,” Zhang later said.
The family eventually fled to the United States, and Zhang embraced her newfound freedom. She joined New York-based dance company Shen Yun Performing Arts, which spotlights communist China’s persecution targeting her faith, the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.
But now, despite being far from China’s borders, Zhang and others at Shen Yun are facing another campaign of fear aimed at stopping them.
By Eva Fu
