(Minghui.org) I’ve practiced Falun Dafa (also called Falun Gong) for nearly three decades, and my life has been completely transformed. Looking back on my cultivation journey, I’m filled with such deep gratitude for Master Li and the Fa. I now know that my rough upbringing and all the hardships I suffered in my youth paved the way for me to begin practicing Falun Dafa.
Despite the relentless persecution by the communist regime in China, I’ve kept strong righteous thoughts and validated Falun Dafa by petitioning the central government and spreading the truth about Falun Dafa in my area. This is the only way I can repay Master for his compassionate salvation and fulfill my sacred vows to help him save sentient beings.
I was born into a poor farming family in Shandong Province. My mother became ill and passed away when I was nine months old. When I was six, my father remarried, and our stepmother made life miserable for my older sister and me. She scolded and beat us every day.
Soon after they married, my stepmother had a baby. She didn’t let me got to school and kept me home so I could babysit. I carried my baby brother around all day and was regularly peed and pooped on. One time, he slipped through my arms and fell, scratching his face. I was terrified—my stepmother would kill me if she found out. I tried to hide the mark on the baby’s face, but my stepmother saw it. She beat my sister and me so severely that my sister attempted suicide. I didn’t see the point of living either.
I started working in the fields alongside the adults at the age of 10 and quickly became skilled. I earned more points than most adults in our production team at the end of each work day. When I was 19, my stepmother started looking for someone to marry me. Malnourished and worked to exhaustion every day, day after day, I had yet to have my first period. I didn’t want to marry, but my stepmother made an arrangement and married me off.
Although I no longer had to take her abuse, my misery didn’t end. I was small and thin—not a desirable prospect for marriage—which meant only the poorest family in the village agreed to the arranged marriage.
My husband had chronic lung problems and suffered from severe shortness of breath. My father-in-law and his two brothers all had some degree of mental illness. I was the only able-bodied person and worked myself to the bone to support the family, yet we barely scraped by. We were so poor that we didn’t have enough to eat and didn’t have enough clothes to keep warm in the winter.
My husband once became so ill that we went to a doctor in town. As we walked, he struggled to breathe and fell face down. An old man who was passing by told me about a folk remedy that he said would help my husband. I was to raise a chicken, then sacrifice it on Chinese New Year Eve and cook it for my husband. No one else except my husband was allowed to eat the chicken. I did exactly what the old man told me to, and, sure enough, my husband’s health improved after he ate it.
I had my first period when I was 21. When I became pregnant with my oldest child, I had no idea what was happening to my body. As the baby grew inside me, I grew a few inches taller.
When I was 26, I got pregnant with my younger son. Right before my due date, my stepmother lied to me and made me travel to the northeast, where my baby was born. During the month after I gave birth, I ran out of food and almost died of starvation. However, it was not my time to leave this world, and I somehow survived. I felt something good must be in store for me. My husband and I decided to stay in the northeast, and we started a new life in a small remote village. We later had our third child, a baby girl.
Falun Dafa was introduced in my town in 1997, and many people started to practice it. While traveling the mountain roads to the market one day, I fell and broke my arm. It took a long time to heal, and I couldn’t do anything in the meantime. There were Christians in my village and also a group of people who practiced Falun Dafa. A Christian came to visit one day and invited me to his church. I went to the church every day for the next week, and everyone there prayed for me. I was touched.
The Falun Dafa practice site coordinator also came to visit me and brought a Dafa book. I told her, “I’m a Christian now. I can’t practice Falun Dafa.” She said, “Christianity has a history of over 2,000 years and their founder is long gone. Falun Dafa is the true Buddha Fa and Master, the founder of the practice, is still alive.” She turned to the page with Master’s picture and showed it to me. I was shocked—I felt as if I’d seen Master somewhere before. Master looked at me with such compassion that I knew right away that I wanted to read this book. I gave up Christianity and began practicing Falun Dafa.
My two sons and my daughter began practicing with me. I couldn’t read the teachings since I had never gone to school and was illiterate. At Fa study, I listened when other practitioners read Zhuan Falun. When I heard the passage,
“Humanity has experienced such periodic changes 81 times, and yet I have not traced them to the end.” (Lecture One, Zhuan Falun)
I was blown away—this Fa was so profound. I was eager to study the Fa and I asked my daughter to help. She read to me one sentence at a time, and I repeated it after her.
In the summer of 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) banned Falun Dafa and launched a nationwide campaign of persecution. The atmosphere was oppressive, so, for safety reasons, our Fa study group stopped meeting. I couldn’t listen to practitioners read the Fa—what was I going to do? I held the book in both hands and cried out, “Master. I want to study the Fa, but I don’t know how to read. What should I do?”
I moved the book closer, pointed to each character, and tried to pronounce it. Amazingly, I recognized every one. I read them out loud to my daughter and asked her if I was correct. She couldn’t believe it. “Yes, Mom! How did you know all these characters?” I was beyond happy, and I knew Master had helped me.
I read all of Zhuan Falun in two weeks and only made a few dozen mistakes. It was incredible. I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be able to read a book as thick as Zhuan Falun. I knew it was because of Dafa’s mighty power.
Pressured by their higher-ups, the village CCP officials regularly harassed me. One came to my home and grabbed my copy of Zhuan Falun. It is the most precious thing to me, and I wasn’t going to let him take it. I ran after him barefoot, but he hopped into his car and drove away.
When I was arrested and taken to the police station, an officer said, “I thought Falun Gong practitioners didn’t fight back when they were punched or insulted. Why did some of you hit our officers?” He reiterated the lies slandering Dafa that the CCP was promoting in its propaganda.
I was full of righteous thoughts and told him, “There is only one Master of Falun Dafa in this world, and he teaches a righteous Fa. But some people truly practice it, and some are just pretending. Just like there is one head of the state, yet there are corrupt officials, murderers, and people who commit crimes. We can’t expect everyone who says they practice Falun Dafa to act the same way at all times. But I can tell you this: Most practitioners conduct themselves according to the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. Everything the CCP says about Falun Dafa in the media are lies.”
The officers in the room listened and agreed with me. They released me that day and even gave me a ride home.
The township Party officials and village Party officials came to see me. One of them said, “Do you still practice Falun Gong? If you still do, we’ll have to shoot you.”
I replied, “I’m not afraid of dying. We all have one life to live, and we inevitably die, don’t we? I am determined to practice Falun Dafa and nothing can change my mind.”
The officials toned down their rhetoric, begging me, “Please don’t go to Beijing again. If you do, we won’t be able to allot any land to your family, neither the woods nor farm fields.”
I said, “I’ll go to Beijing no matter what. I don’t want any land and I don’t even care about where my family’s ashes are buried.” None of them said another word. I could tell they admired my righteousness.
I had a vivid dream that night. Master came and brought a big bag full of Dafa books. Then a group of police officers took Master away. I woke up and knew I needed to validate the Fa and petition the central government in Beijing. I needed to help restore Master’s reputation and let people know that Dafa was being wrongly persecuted. But for the time being, I decided to print flyers to inform the people in town that the CCP’s state-run mouthpieces were telling lies to slander and discredit Dafa.
The next day, I withdrew all our savings (4,000 yuan) and took my children with me to look for a print shop. We met a practitioner who helped us get some flyers printed. That night, we distributed them in town, delivering the truth about Dafa to every household. This was before practitioners nationwide started organizing efforts to distribute truth-clarification materials. What we did touched a nerve with the local authorities. The town’s CCP officials and police came to our door and asked who’d passed out those flyers. I didn’t answer their questions directly, and, since they couldn’t prove anything, they left.
After we covered most of the surrounding towns and villages, I had the idea to distribute truth-clarification flyers in my hometown in Shandong Province. I printed more flyers and took my daughter with me to my hometown. When we ran out of flyers, I purchased plain paper and asked my daughter to write messages such as “To cherish Dafa is to cherish your own life” on each page. We stayed up all night, night after night, making these hand-written flyers that we distributed the next day.
My daughter and I were out distributing flyers one night when we came to a small bridge, and I all of a sudden felt so tired and sleepy that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. We lay down to rest under the bridge. In less than 10 minutes, the village night patrol started combing through the area for who had left those flyers. They walked right past us while we slept under the bridge. I knew that Master was watching over and protecting us at all times.
The flyers caused a big stir in the village. A wanted poster appeared offering a 10,000-yuan reward for anyone who turned in Falun Dafa practitioners. My sister, whom we were staying with, was scared to death when we didn’t come home that night. She shouted at me when we finally returned the next day, “I was worried to death! Even if you don’t care to live anymore, my poor niece still has a long life ahead of her!”
The police went to my sister’s home twice in the following days trying to find out if I was a Dafa practitioner. My sister fobbed them off, and we returned to the northeast safely.
In 2001, I noticed that a banner that read “Falun Dafa Is Good” had fallen from a tree in the foothills where we lived. I asked my daughter to fetch it so we could use it when we went to Beijing. But what was I going to do to raise money for the trip? I decided to sell our cow, for which I got 1,500 yuan. My husband tried to talk us out of going, fearing that we would not return. I comforted him and told him not to worry.
My daughter and I set out for Beijing in late 2001. We unfurled and held up the banner in Tiananmen Square and declared to the world, “Falun Dafa is good.” Within minutes, police officers who were patrolling the square seized us and took us to a police station. They patted us down and even went as far as to strip search my 20-year-old daughter. Because she resisted, an officer punched her and broke her nose. The excruciating pain made her cry out.
I told her, “Don’t cry! We’re here to validate the Fa!” Then I shouted, “Restore Master Li’s reputation! Restore Dafa’s reputation! Falun Dafa is good!” The officers grabbed me and started to strip off my clothes. They took away the banner and pushed me to the ground. They poured ammonia water into my nose and stuffed my mouth with a towel so that I couldn’t breathe. After a brief pause, they poured more ammonia water into my eyes and burned my fingers with a lighter. They fed me something (I had no idea what) and then injected me with an unknown substance. I was locked in a cage until they were ready to repeat the whole routine again.
We were eventually released and returned home. The local police and the town’s CCP officials attempted to arrest me for going to Beijing. To avoid further persecution, I left home and became displaced for eight years, during which time my husband was harassed repeatedly. He was fined 7,500 yuan for refusing to turn me in. He didn’t have the money, so he sold our home, some of our land, and our bull, but this was barely enough to pay the fine.
The village Party officials were implicated by my case. The town authorities fined the head of our village 1,000 yuan, fined the village Party secretary1,000 yuan, and fine our village treasury 500 yuan. They harassed my husband and demanded that he compensate them. They threatened to take back the plots of land allocated to me and my daughter. With no other choice, my husband sold part of the harvest that was our food supply for the year and paid the village officials.
After I moved back home, the village officials and police harassed us during the CCP’s Zero-out Campaign and tried to get me to renounce Falun Dafa. There was no way I’d do such a thing. I was not afraid and told them in no uncertain terms, “I will practice Falun Dafa and I will never change my mind.” They didn’t say anything and left.
I now know that all the hardships I suffered in my youth paid off a lot of my karmic debt so that I was able to obtain the Fa. My circumstances have improved so much—I have enough to eat and clothes to keep me warm. I no longer resent my stepmother, because I know everything happened for a reason and we had a predestined relationship.
I am 74 years old now, and I’m in excellent health. I’m able to work in the fields like a young person. I raise corn and make more than I need from my harvest. I’m not after money and don’t care about getting rich. I’ve already obtained the Fa—what more could I ask for? I feel like I’m the wealthiest person in the world. I’m the luckiest person because I have Master who watches over me and Dafa that guides me.
I study the Fa and do the exercises every day. I used to be illiterate, but now I can read and even recite all of Zhuan Falun. Because I’m resolute in my faith, Master continues to give me more wisdom. I can’t even begin to imagine how much Master has endured for me throughout my years of cultivation. I still have many human notions and attachments that I need to work on and eliminate. I will cultivate diligently, and maintain righteous thoughts and follow Master.
The first half of my life was more bitter than the bitterest Chinese herb, but now that I have Dafa in my heart, my life is sweeter than honey.
Thank you, compassionate Master!