(Minghui.org) I’m a young Falun Dafa practitioner who emigrated from China to the US in January 2020. Despite the onset of the coronavirus, also known as the CCP virus, I was able to come to the US before entrance was banned. It was because Master has compassionately safeguarded and empowered me. As a result, my wisdom opened up. Despite my very limited English, after studying for the International Language Testing System (IELTS) for only a month, I miraculously passed the exam and got admitted to graduate school.
In this final moment, I hope we can firm up our righteous thoughts, live up to our mission, and cooperate to fulfill our ancient vows.
Pre-cultivation: An Ill Child
Beginning at the age of four, I was very ill. I needed injections every month, and I was filled with tons of antibiotics. Frequent needle pricks made the veins in my hand thick and stiff. Thus, it always took quite a while for nurses to administer the injections. Besides, my constant cough and fever confused the medical specialists, as they couldn’t find the cause or cure.
I still remember the pain I had to go through when I had to cough. Because of that, I avoided eating during the daytime, otherwise, when I started coughing, I ended up vomiting everything that I ate. After I was in bed my situation worsened. As with every cough, I felt my lungs were about to leave my chest. I couldn’t cry either. Sobbing just made the coughing worse.
In order to alleviate my situation, when my mother cooked, she only used very little salt or other seasonings. After a while, the hair on my body turned white because of a shortage of salt. However, it did very little to change the situation. No matter the season, as long as I encountered a wind, I’d start coughing.
Life as a Dafa Practitioner
My grandmother is a practitioner who began with Dafa cultivation back in 1996. Since July 1999, when the persecution was launched under Jiang’s regime, she has traveled to Beijing several times. A few times, she was illegally detained at the police station.
After my parents divorced, my mother took me to her home in July 2004. In August, she was released home from having been held at Wangcun Forced Labor Camp in Zibo City, Shandong Province for two years. When we saw her, although she was a bit emaciated, she was in a good shape.
After having witnessed the preciousness of Dafa, my mother began to follow my grandmother and cultivated in Dafa. In terms of the exercise music, I had never heard something so wonderful. Therefore, I always asked them to wait for me until I got home from school before doing the exercises. I also enjoyed listening to Master’s lectures and his voice was comforting.
About half a month later, I began to cultivate in Dafa with them. Then I did the exercises every day. After I came home from school, I studied the Fa for an hour before working on my assignments and became one of the top students in my class.
A couple of weeks later, one morning, I suddenly felt like vomiting. When my grandmother brought over a basin, right away, yellow thick pus gushed out of my mouth. After I stopped, I touched my chest and said, “So comfortable!” I knew it was Master purifying my body. Before that, because I had taken so much medicine, time after time, it had deferred my sickness karma from showing up on the surface.
I truly appreciate Master for my recovery from my serious disease. After that, I no longer coughed, and I threw out all my medications. Since I began practicing in Dafa, I've no longer taken any medications or injections.
When I was a child, my grandmother was very strict with me. When I read the Fa, she scolded me for every single mistake I made. She said that this is the most precious Dafa, so no one was supposed to make any mistakes. With more Fa study, I gradually came to understand her. Since this is the most precious Dafa, we should use our purest hearts to treat it. When I made a mistake in reading the Fa, it was because I was absent-minded.
I was also with other practitioners and spent the whole day reading Zhuan Falun – the main teachings of Falun Dafa. When I was nine years old, I went with my mother to Tiananmen Square to appeal to the government. I shouted as loudly as I could, “Falun Dafa is wonderful!”
Every year, I joined the young practitioner Fa-study group during my summer vacation. During holidays, I went with my mother and grandmother to hospitals, shopping malls, and residential buildings to hand out truth-clarification brochures. Because of my age, people usually didn’t pay much attention to me. So that I could act as a liaison person to help other practitioners pass on informational materials, I used my vacation time to make phone calls to inform people of the persecution and help them quit the CCP.
Dafa cultivation has completely changed my life. I not only became healthy again, but my academic grades also improved significantly. For example, I was exempt from taking the high school admittance exam.
Miracles in the College and Postgraduate Entrance Exam
As an art student, before I took the college entrance exam, I was required to pass the arts test. At that time, I really wanted to go to a certain university. Unfortunately, I didn’t do well enough on the exam. In June, however, this school announced that the score needed for admission was miraculously lowered by close to 10 points for no reason. In addition, the quota for admissions to this school from another province also got transferred to my province, jumping from six to 13 students. I was admitted.
After I started at the university, I realized the path of arts that I had pursued was full of bribery and pleasing others. Male teachers turned a classroom into a place where female students learned how to smoke and drink. They even went as far as to say that females who didn’t drink didn’t know about life and had no hope of becoming an artist. I truly saw the decline in morality in today’s society. When a teacher guides their students to do bad things, that’s the greatest sorrow in the world today.
When I worked for a children's arts training institute affiliated with a TV station, everybody’s goal was to pursue self-interest on the basis of sabotaging other people’s benefits and tarnishing morality. Because of that, a few times, I engaged our management staff in conversations about morality. I even went up to the podium to speak to the public, so I could point right out that the current operation mode wasn’t reasonable since, without morality, it’s impossible for an enterprise to achieve long-term growth. They all thought I was making a big fuss over nothing.
Seeing that the owner was called the “head of the underground society,” I handed in my resignation. In turn, they deducted over 10,000 yuan from my pay. But what caught people off guard was that a month later, the institute, a big corporation with branches that used to penetrate the entire city, closed down. When the staff members appealed for their rights, they ended up being taken to the police station by officers assigned to the TV station.
Right then, I’d returned to my hometown. I was preparing for my postgraduate exam and planned to go overseas. Yet I faced a great difficulty, which was: “Since grade 12, I’d put all my focus in the arts admission test. In the university, there were no English courses offered in my program. All in all, I hadn’t touched English for six years. But still, I had to take the IELTS just the same.
But after I set my mind right, empowered by Master, my English level amazingly improved. I went from having difficulty saying one complete sentence, to speaking fluently. In the listening test, I could only catch one phone number at the beginning, but then I was able to understand the main idea. The whole process only took one month after I started learning IELTS.
During that time, I did the Dafa exercises in the mornings and went to the training institute to study in the afternoons. Then at night, I studied the Fa with my grandmother and mother. Although I was worried about the test result, I never thought about giving up. I firmed up my belief that Master has given me a new life and I will for sure follow the path arranged by Master going forward. Then I successfully passed the IELTS exam the very first time. During my visa interview, the interviewer only looked at my admission letter and application forms, then issued me the visa.
Both the college entrance exam and postgraduate admission test can be the key turning points in one’s life. I managed to pass them with success under Master’s protection.
Master told us,
“Cultivation depends on one’s own efforts, while the transformation of gong is done by one’s master. It is good enough if you have this wish.” (Lecture one, Zhuan Falun)
Only by setting our standpoint right, firmly believing in Master and Dafa, can we truly feel Master’s saving grace.
Letting Go of Sentimentality towards My Mother
I’d been very attached to my mother since she raised me. Soon after I came to the US, the stay-at-home order was enacted and I was the only one left in the residence on campus. Facing empty streets and quiet all around me, I had a hard time getting used to it.
The sudden loneliness made my attachment for my mother even stronger. When I studied the Fa and did the exercises, I couldn’t calm my mind. Even though I was clear in my mind that this was a great interference, I could hardly get away from sentimentality. It became even stronger when I learned that my family was harassed again.
In that state, I could only study more Fa to help myself. During that period of time, I studied the Fa for three hours every day. And I could truly feel Master’s compassion and felt ashamed for my unstable cultivation state. With that, I gradually let go of my sentimentality.
Right then, Master helped me again. Fellow practitioners from a few project teams got in touch with me. And then I was introduced to a young practitioner club. When our young practitioners shared, I felt very light-hearted. Seeing practitioners painstakingly working on the projects without any complaints, when they cared about and comforted me, I could clearly see my gap.
After I cut off my sentimentality toward my mother, I began to write letters to her to share with her my insights from studying the Fa. Before I was born, my grandmother dreamed about cyclamen growing in my home. Whenever thinking about that, I firmed up my righteous thoughts that the predestined relationship between us was Dafa.
Master said,
“Those who are attached to affection for family will definitely be burned, entangled, and tormented by it. Pulled by the threads of affection and plagued by them throughout their lives, they will find it too late to regret at the end of their lives.” (“Cultivators’ Avoidances,” Essentials for Further Advancement)
Every time I came across this passage, I felt it was a stick warning for me. So many practitioners have sacrificed their lives for upholding their belief, yet I got stuck in sentimentality in this free society.
This opportunity will not last long. In order to obtain the Fa, we have suffered numerous tribulations. In the final leg of the Fa-rectification, let’s strive forward vigorously and fulfill our prehistoric vows.
