PureInsight | December 8, 2003
Greetings to Honorable Master!
Greetings to all practitioners!
[PureInsight.org] I am a Falun Dafa practitioner from Tennessee. I have practiced Falun Dafa for about five years, during which time I passed and failed many xinxing tests. With the careful protection of our compassionate Master, I overcame these difficulties. In our area, the practitioners have been actively involved in calling China, mailing fact-clarification materials, Fa promotion activities and the like. Today, I will talk about my experiences of clarifying the truth to the overseas Chinese and cultivating while working with the local Chinese community.
In the past our practitioners' families were very close but we didn't have much contact with ordinary people, so our social contact was limited to a very narrow circle. Two years ago, the southeast region of The Epoch Times newspaper was published. In order to promote our newspaper, we were forced to get involved in the local Chinese community. Here are some of our experiences:
Setting Up a Distribution Center and Establishing Contacts with Chinese Grocery Stores and Restaurants
At first, our idea was to simply put the newspaper in the local Chinese grocery stores and we expected the Chinese people would take our newspaper when they were shopping there. There was a Chinese weekly newspaper called Mid-America Times in the local market. It was sold at 45 cents each and I estimated about 70 copies were sold every week. We put 100 copies of our newspaper in three Chinese grocery stores, but only half of the newspapers were taken. Maybe the readers didn't know the newspaper was free, or they didn't see our newspaper because we didn't have our own shelf. Our newspaper was mixed with other materials about Buddhism. We thought we needed to collect some local advertisements so more people would be interested in our newspaper, and that way more people would get the truth so they could be saved. In our area, we have only a few practitioners, so we could not organize many activities. The newspaper became our major channel to clarify the truth to Chinese people. We contacted the store owners, made friends with them and collected some advertisements. For a few months, the 100 copies of our newspaper would all be picked up by Chinese people. Before we could feel even a little relaxed, we heard the readers say that The Epoch Times was a Falun Gong newspaper and the articles were biased.
Such comments really hurt us. The practitioners in China were suffering from such evil and brutal torture, and the overseas Chinese were not sympathetic. They were indifferent or even discriminated against Falun Dafa practitioners. We felt the evil propaganda and lies had deceived so many Chinese people. We were very anxious and worried. How can we help them accept the Truth? How will they accept our newspaper? As many practitioners had said, if you truly want to save sentient beings, Master will create the opportunity for you. Master did arrange the opportunity for us.
Reporting Local Chinese Activities and Getting Involved in the Chinese Community.
In June 2001, with Master's compassionate arrangement, my daughter got a visa to America. We got her into school and we also looked for a Chinese school because we wanted her to continue her Chinese education in America. We found a local Chinese school and registered her into Chinese classes. The Chinese school is a good place to meet other parents and chat. We approached the principal of the Chinese school and offered to write some articles about the school. Later, in order to provide digital images, I bought a digital camera, so our articles could have pictures. Since The Epoch Times had local news, it had more readers, so we increased the quantity of the newspaper to 200 copies. Many times, we heard other parents talk about our news reports such as "Did you see the picture of that child in the newspaper?" Since they read the newspaper, more or less, they had read the facts clarifying materials in the newspaper.
Once, The Epoch Times had an article about the children's performance at the end of the semester. It had a picture with many students, principal and vice principal in it. A few weeks later, the vice principal surprisingly received a phone call from a university classmate who had lost contact for many years. It was because the friend saw his picture in The Epoch Times newspaper and recognized him. Well, this became our story to promote the Epoch Times newspaper. The vice principal was also very happy and publicized the newspaper for us.
After three years, we now have our own newspaper shelves. We distribute 400 copies every week that are mostly being taken by Chinese readers. Our newspaper is available in all four Chinese grocery stores, and more than ten Chinese restaurants. Our newspaper was put on reading shelves in ten public libraries. However, the Mid-America Times Chinese newspaper disappeared from the local market.
Serving the Local Chinese Community and Influencing the Media
In Chinese schools, we always meet a mostly fixed group of people. In order to increase our influence, we started to get in touch with other Chinese groups. Last year, our Chinese community organized a large scale Chinese New Year's party. We took the initiative to offer help and volunteered to write reports, take photo, design flyers and even perform for the New Year's party. Although every practitioner had already taken on a lot of Fa-related work, we managed to squeeze out some time to serve the community. We usually wrote the report ourselves, so we could control the article. We would use the The Epoch Times to praise the good, compassionate and beautiful things. As for those bad things, struggles and tricks of interest among ordinary people, they would be avoided.
In Dafa, the practitioner can have many kinds of talents. One female practitioner in our group does a lot of Dafa work. She is a computer programmer and can also write very good Chinese articles. She can play a musical instrument, play GO (Wei qi), write calligraphy, and paint traditional Chinese paintings. Besides, she can sing, dance, and recite. When we worked for the community, we were very serious. Though many times we didn't have much experience, we still did it well and the Chinese people liked it very much.
Through displaying our hard work and talents, the leaders of the Chinese community recognized that Dafa practitioners were not freaky as propagandized by the Chinese government. We are talented, have high moral standards, and have a warm heart to serve others. One of the practitioners was accepted into the council of the newly established Chinese Association to be in charge of the communications committee. We clarified the facts to overseas Chinese and helped them to bring the truth to their relatives and friends in China. Our experience is that we need to spend time with the Chinese community and serve the community.
Besides writing news articles, we also exchange experiences with other reporters and editors. We gradually understood that our articles shouldn't be limited to the news itself. Many things are not related to Dafa, but we can still clarify the facts through our reports, and clear the lies and expose the evil.
For example, this summer, SARS reached its peak. One of the local Chinese grocery stores was hit by a rumor saying that store had an employee infected with SARS. So the rumor urged the customers not to shop there. In a few weeks, the store lost a lot of business. At the same time, many Chinese became worried if the mainstream society will discriminate against Chinese, suspecting they carried a virus. In order to help the store to clear the rumor and at the same time expose the Chinese Communist Party's lies covering up the truth about SARS, we contacted the local public health department to get first-hand information, and we also contacted a few local Chinese leaders to shop in the store. Then we used the The Epoch Times to publish articles to clear the rumor and widely publish the articles about how the Chinese Government covered up the truth about this epidemic disease and did not care about the health of its people. Even after the world media exposed their lies, they still tried to block the information and cover the real situation. In our articles, we emphasized that all overseas Chinese became the victim of Chinese Government's policies. The origin of the rumor was actually from the Chinese Communist Party's policy to cover up the truth of not caring about people's health. Through this event, we clarified the facts to the Chinese community and also made friends with the store.
Clarify the Facts in Our Local Community and Changing Their Biased Ideas About Dafa.
In order to clear the wrong ideas in people's minds, we chatted with many people in the Chinese school and tried to clarify the facts. At the beginning, I had the mentality of fear. I was afraid that other people would oppose me so I was afraid to talk about the truth of Falun Dafa. Sometimes, we talked from one topic to another for a long time and I didn't talk anything about the persecution and the truth about Falun Gong. After going back, I would feel regret about missing such a good chance and began to think about all kinds of words, hoping next time I could do better. After many times, I gradually found ways to talk. For example, I will start by telling a story. One year, a village in north China had a drought. The local communist cadre spent a lot of manpower and resources to dig four wells. But none of them had any water because the cadre didn't know that he needed to explore the land and find a source of water first. But he reported to high level leaders that he did such and such. Next year, the leaders wanted to increase agricultural output. So he ordered the four dry wells be filled and reported that he had led the village and worked hard to recover so much land by filling four wells. He always picked the good part to report so he got promoted to higher positions but, as for the villagers, nothing was left for them and they even got poorer. Through the story, the people started to talk about the Communist Party's lies and ridiculous propaganda campaigns. Later I mention the persecution of former Chinese Chairman Liu Shaoqi who was framed as a traitor and spy with fabricated evidence. If the people followed the topic, I would talk about a recent case, the "Tiananmen Square Staged Immolation Case." This exposes how the Jiang Zemin regime framed Falun Gong to create an excuse for their persecution.
Another story is about an old and a new practitioner. One practitioner's parents came to America to visit them. After seeing the practitioners' life with their own eyes, and after watching the video programs, they changed their ideas about Dafa. Later, they also started to practice Dafa and had their illnesses cured. Their moral level rose higher. Once, the family went to a friend's family party, and the new practitioner's couple met another old couple from Hubei province. When the other old man heard Falun Gong, he became very angry. His face turned red and he began to repeat a lot of lies created by Jiang's regime. The new practitioner's couple didn't have the experience to handle such a situation and didn't know how to start. After some time, they began to talk about the practice Taiqi Quan. The other old man had also practiced Taiqi Quan for about 30 years. So they found a topic that they both were interested in. The practitioner said his Taiqi teacher was over 70 years old and because of age, he could not practice Taiqi Quan anymore. The other old man is also over 70 and encountered the same problem. He didn't have the strength to practice the whole set of Taiqi Quan. So the practitioner couple began to introduce the difference between sports and qigong exercises as related in Lecture Nine of Zhuan Falun. They said the Taiqi Quan could only build muscle, and when you get old, you couldn't practice it anymore. Only qigong exercises change the internal health of the body. They also discussed many common diseases among old people. In the end, they introduced the theory of Falun Gong and how to open the hundreds of energy channels at the same time. They talked about the good effect of practicing Falun Gong and urged the old man to put away all the biased ideas about Falun Gong and read the book Falun Gong by himself. The old man didn't say anything.
It seemed this talk had no positive effect at the beginning. But a few weeks later, another practitioner told them that the old man borrowed a Falun Gong from her and later asked for a facts clarifying VCDs. A few more weeks later, they met the old man at another party. This time, the old man said he read the Dafa book and it was good. He also asked the practitioner, "I have the Falun Gong exercise CD, do you want to learn it?" Their attitude toward Falun Dafa totally changed.
This is positive feedback, but we still see many Chinese around us who don't have a correct attitude toward Dafa. Some of them still have biased ideas about Dafa. These lives are waiting for us to save them. We must hurry up and clarify the facts.
Thank you Master!
Thank you all!
