My Faith, My Background, My Passion

In response to the article recently published in the New York Times that created a very bad image of Shen Yun Performing Arts and Falun Gong, I would like to share my personal experience. I enrolled in Fei Tian College in upstate New York in the summer of 2023 to complete a master’s degree in music and have been lucky enough to tour with Shen Yun Performing Arts during the 2023-24 season as part of my master’s program practicum. I received my bachelor’s degree from the Royal Academy of Music in London, and before that, I studied with different teachers who are part of top European orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Dresden Staatskapelle.

Regarding claims that Shen Yun pushes their dancers and musicians to work overtime, the following thoughts come to my mind. When I was young, I enjoyed playing the violin. My teacher at the time would ask me whether I would like to become a professional violinist one day, and my first reaction was “No,” because I knew very well that it took a lot of hard work to get there. When I was 15 years old, I happened to watch a Shen Yun performance in Germany that deeply touched my heart. Suddenly, I felt like it might actually be very worthwhile for me to put all that hard work and effort into perfecting my skills on the violin, if the result would be to one day touch the hearts of an audience as deeply as Shen Yun touched my heart that day. All the violin teachers I have learned with after that, as well as all the excellent musicians I have learned alongside with, were by nature very hardworking people. They taught and showed me that if someone was looking for a comfortable and wealthy life, then they would be better off doing something other than music. Accordingly, anyone who ends up choosing a performing arts career in today’s world is not motivated by the money and comfort they could potentially get out of it. They choose to be musicians or dancers because they cannot help but feel passion for the art form. I love making music, I am passionate about giving an audience an inspiring musical experience, and I get satisfaction out of perfecting my own craft. Most of the musicians and dancers at Shen Yun share this kind of motivation, and that is what drives them to work incredibly hard. At the same time, I have never received so much while still being a student. During my bachelor’s degree studies in London I had to take a student loan to cover the tuition fees and living costs. Now at Fei Tian College, I am so lucky to receive a full scholarship that covers accommodation, food, and tuition fees, and I get to travel all around the world during my practicum. Where else would I get that? Hard work is simply a necessary ingredient of the art of a high quality stage performance, not something that is being forced upon me by Shen Yun or my spiritual belief.

Another thing I would like to mention is a personal story about the topic of marriage. My dad was born in Brazil and moved to Germany to study. Here, he met my mum and they fell in love, but he was on a student visa. So, they decided to marry and have been as happy as can be in Germany for 30 years now. From the outside, it might be easy to accuse my parents of marrying for a visa because their passports are from two different countries. The reality is that my parents truly love each other and raised my brother and me with the best love and care; they married because they are meant to share a happy life with each other. Similar scenarios might have happened between different members of Shen Yun. That absolutely does not mean that anybody forced or pushed them to marry or that it was not 100% their own choice to get married. And whether or not their marriage turns out to be smooth is not something Shen Yun or Falun Gong can be held accountable for.

When it comes to the accusation that Falun Gong practitioners’ spiritual belief prohibits them from getting medical treatment, I can only join the many Shen Yun dancers and other Falun Gong practitioners who have already voiced that that is simply not true. Anybody who feels the need to see a doctor is free to do so. Nevertheless, Falun Gong happens to be a practice for the mind and body. We as Falun Gong practitioners believe that mind and body are very much connected. I personally have experienced a phase of severe tendonitis in my right arm from playing the violin with the wrong posture and too much force before I came to the United States. I went to physiotherapists and doctors for treatment, but unfortunately in my case, the issue could not be solved. So, I started thinking about the psychological side of this situation. What was it that was stressing me out so much to create the kind of bodily tension that led to my injury? What can I fundamentally change in my heart about how I see myself and my body and the pain I feel in my arm right now? After receiving little to no results from physiotherapy and other treatments, I turned to the teachings and exercises of Falun Gong for guidance to answer those questions. Within a week, the pain in my arm was gone and I could play the violin again. That was only the first time that the teachings of Falun Gong gave me good results after medical treatments failed.  Of course, this kind of approach might not work for everybody. But it happened to work for me, and not just once, but repeatedly over the years. This is just to explain that if a colleague of mine felt similar pain in their body from playing their instrument and would ask me for suggestions on how to go about it, it would only be natural for me to tell them about my personal experience. If in the end the person chooses to receive a different treatment, I would have no objections at all. My concern would be that that colleague recovers and feels better as soon as possible. After all, what kind of interest would Shen Yun have in an orchestra that is made up of injured musicians? That is not beneficial for anybody.

In conclusion, I would like to share: I grew up in Germany in a neighborhood that had been built and inhabited entirely by Jewish people. Because of the Holocaust, you cannot find a single Jewish person in that neighborhood anymore. Instead, each house carries a sign with the names of the Jewish people who used to live in that house and information about when they were taken away and killed. So, the cruelty of religious persecution was very present to me from an early age, every single day that I walked home. In Germany, we learn in depth about how such a horrible phenomenon can come about, and what kind of political ideology and methods of propaganda there need to be for something like that to happen. Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted, deported to labor camps, and tortured to death over the last 25 years in China, and Shen Yun is trying to let the world’s people know about this. Now, instead of reporting about the cruelty of human rights being broken every day in China and those innocent Falun Gong practitioners suffering persecution for over 25 years, a reputable American newspaper like The New York Times chooses to put all their effort into distorting the image of Shen Yun beyond recognition. However, I sincerely trust that Americans, who had stood up for religious freedom and human rights against tyrannical regimes, will look beyond such media reports to judge for themselves.