[Celebrating World Falun Dafa Day] “Mom, We Are Truly Buddies Now!”

(Minghui.org) I started practicing Falun Dafa in 1998. During the past 25 years, because I was persecuted for not renouncing Dafa, my son experienced many ups and downs. He was discriminated against by his classmates and teachers, so he dropped out of school and began working at a young age. Luckily for him, he did not get lost and recently resumed practicing Falun Dafa.

My Son’s Path

When I was arrested in 2002, my son was still in elementary school. When the police ransacked my house searching for Falun Dafa materials, my son was so terrified that he hid in his bed and shivered. I can still remember his frightened eyes.

I was forced to live away from home to avoid the persecution. When the police couldn’t find me, they threatened my son, trying to find out where I was. Our neighbor’s children also beat him, scolded him, and instigated others to bully him. They even buried him in a pile of sand, and when some adults heard about it and rushed over, they could only see my son’s little head sticking out. My son grew up in this hostile environment.

After he began attending junior high school, the environment in his class was very poor, and he couldn’t continue. After I returned home, I tried to teach him, but he refused to listen. He often skipped classes with a few other children and went to Internet cafes, played games, bullied timid classmates outside of school and collected protection money.

I didn’t know how to deal with my son’s problems or communicate with him. I turned to corporal punishment. It backfired, and he became even more angry and rebellious.

Worried that my son was drifting away from Dafa, I contacted my older sister (who is a practitioner) and asked her to help take care of him for a while.

He went to live with my sister in another city for a year and attended school there. My sister had a clearer understanding of the Fa principles, and instead of nagging or criticizing, she used the wisdom she gained from Dafa to educate him, giving him clear guidance and a lot of encouragement. My son began to see his problems and appreciate the efforts others made to help him.

He gradually learned to think more for others when encountering problems, and how to conduct himself and do things by following the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. His kind nature gradually awakened.

I noticed a big change when he returned home. He was polite to his teachers and had a harmonious relationship with his classmates. He also studied hard. However, due to his poor academic foundation, the head teacher still said that he could not pass the high school entrance exam even though his ranking improved a lot.

I didn’t give up, and with more Fa study, my anxiety was replaced by kindness. I thought: “Dafa disciples’ children are protected by Master. I should do my best without being attached to the outcome. I need to be kind to my son, reason with him on the basis of the Fa teachings instead of yelling at him.” My son didn’t give up, either.

A miracle happened: During the high school entrance examination, my son’s school expanded enrollment and lowered the admission score, so he was admitted. All his teachers were surprised and said he was really lucky!

Another miracle happened when it came to the college entrance examination: My son was admitted to a second-tier major in a university in another province, when his teacher thought that he might be lucky to go to a third-tier university at best.

At the family celebration banquet, his grandpa (my father-in-law) exclaimed, “This is the blessing from his mom’s practicing Falun Dafa. Falun Dafa is good!” Since then, whenever he talks about the achievements of his grandson, he would say, “It’s all because of his mom. She practices Dafa! I can’t imagine what would have happened to my grandson otherwise!”

My Son’s Career Path

Although my son did not study the Fa with me for a long time, he still remembered the teachings he listened to when he was a child. I also focused on guiding him with the Fa principles, and he began to show his fine character. When he suffered losses, when his efforts were greater than rewards, or when he was treated like a fool, he was able to treat it all with the mindset of a Dafa practitioner.

I was harassed by police from time to time for practicing Falun Dafa, so I did not have a stable job. My husband was in poor health, so our financial situation was rather destitute. After my son went to university, he tried to reduce the burden on the family by self-training in vocational skills in addition to his course studies in international economics and trade.

He helped a senior student manage a store for six months, but instead of getting cash reward as he had been promised, he was compensated with a pile of goods that he didn’t want. He felt a bit unhappy. I said to him on the phone, “People tend to take advantage of others nowadays. Maybe we owed them something in the past, so it is a good thing to pay it back now.” He felt much happier after talking with me.

I always treated my son with sincerity and respect when we talked on the phone. Gradually, he and I became close friends and he shared everything with me. He also started to think about things in a new perspective: Problems cannot be resolved by everyday people’s means, and it could only make things more complicated and difficult, whereas disciplining oneself according to the Fa would make one feel happy and one will be given more opportunities.

His teachers sent students to a five-star luxury hotel in a coastal city for internship. Most students tried to grab cool jobs, such as picking up celebrities at the airport, or greeting high-level guests from various countries because such jobs could earn them handsome tips. However, my son focused on learning more skills from the training program instead.

He was assigned to do various jobs, such as greeting guests, serving dishes, and training junior students, etc. Female students didn’t like to be on night duty, so they always asked my son to take the night shifts. He was like a good-natured handyman who would go wherever he was needed, and he worked very hard. The hotel manager took notice of all this and liked him very much.

While working at the hotel, my son also became acquainted with a young man of his own age, who was a long term resident in the hotel and had influential members in his family. When he saw that my son was down-to-earth, honest, unselfish, and was quite capable in handling things, he asked if he wanted to work for his family business.

“You must not work for them,” I told my son, “We don’t know where their money came from. There aren’t many clean businesses in China nowadays. If they have connections with the government, there must be corruption involved.”

My son listened to me and declined the job offer from the young man. The young man’s father and grandfather were indeed put in jail later on for corruption.

My Son’s First Job Offer

After graduation, my son applied to a position in a major European company. The recruiter was quite impressed by his work experience. During the interview, my son also gave satisfactory answers to all 20 questions about the customs of various countries, as well as the birthplace and habits of some famous people. He was able to do so because his father told him these things when he was a child.

Candidates from prestigious colleges all proposed a specific figure for a salary. When the recruiter asked my son if he had any salary expectation, he said, “I have no specific requirements. You can decide according to the revenue I create for the company. No matter how much you pay me, you will be satisfied with my performance.” My son was offered the job, with a salary much higher than he anticipated.

Thanks to his previous learning and training, he quickly learned the skills required for the job. He was diligent and hardworking, and was able to work independently.

One day, when he was working in a mall, a Western lady who could speak mandarin wandered around and asked all kinds of questions, and yet she didn’t seem keen to buy any product. My son treated her with respect and carefully explained to her about their products. From time to time, the lady also asked tricky and weird questions, and my son did his best to answer them. If he indeed didn’t know the answer, he would tell the lady that he didn’t know while trying to explain to her kindly. In the end, the lady purchased a product.

The lady patted my son’s shoulder and said, “Young man, I was sent by the headquarters and have made unannounced visits to several countries over the years. No one has been able to persuade me to buy a single product. You are the first one.”

She then continued, “What happened just now was only a test. I am very happy with your performance. You have excellent qualities, adaptability, and intelligence. I decided to take you to the head office for further training and promotion.”

After more than a year of rigorous training, my son took on new roles. One day, he told me, “Mom, many people I trained with went to other companies for better pay. I want to leave too.”

“This is not good, son,” I said to him, “The company spent so much money to train you, how can you just leave? You are from a Dafa practitioner’s family and we cannot go with the flow in society. We must rectify things that aren’t righteous.” He agreed.

He was assigned to a key position in the company and worked diligently. He always held himself to the standards of a good person. When their performances won awards, he shared his bonus with his teammates.

Thanks to his outstanding work performance, the company headquarters sent a reporter to write a special feature about him, detailing how he started from scratch and became an excellent employee. The report was published. It took my son only three years to become a department manager in the foreign company, managing two floors of a large mall.

In his third year on the job, the company encountered a bottleneck in marketing and found it difficult to develop further. Someone recommended him to another big foreign company. He got the job because a person in the design department resigned, creating an open position.

My son was hoping that he would be able to develop his design skills at his new job. However, it was not something one could learn in a few days, especially when he was brand new in product design, and English language was also a big hurdle to start with. To make things easier for him, his manager decided to conduct meetings in Chinese. My son felt really embarrassed and worked very hard to improve his English skills.

He had English books with him all the time, and tried to memorize words and phrases whenever he could. One night, he had a dream, in which a teacher taught him English. He vaguely felt the teacher was Master Li, the founder of Falun Dafa. He remembered the dream vividly when he woke up.

At the meeting that morning, his manager encouraged him to talk in English. My son stood up and said in fluent English what he wanted to say. The people sitting around the table all looked at him in surprise and said, “How could he learn English so soon?!” When my son called me in the evening, he said excitedly, “Mom, it was Master who helped me!”

My son left the company after working there for over three years, and joined an Asian company to pursue a career in design technology. The products of my son’s team were crucial to the entire product chain. The company sent someone to teach him step by step, and he worked very hard. He got off work late every day and sometimes didn’t go back home until midnight.

When the company needed a new product, each member of the team had to come up with a design plan. My son worked hard and he often recited “Falun Dafa is good. Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good.” He knew that he needed to ask Master for help at critical moments.

He came up with two sets of design ideas, one of which was unanimously approved. They asked him how he came up with such brilliant ideas and where he got his inspiration. “It came from the universe!” my son told them with a smile.

After the product was launched, it received high user reviews and sold very well. The company also rewarded my son a high commission.

Study Abroad

The city where my son was working at was devastated by the strict three-year lockdown during the COVID pandemic, and foreign companies started to withdraw from China one after another.

My son also wished to leave China because of the rampant corruption and persecution of Dafa. He became even more determined after witnessing how the police searched students on the subways when the anti-lockdown protests were spreading fast in the colleges.

But it wasn’t easy to study abroad. He took the IELTS test several times and failed every time by a few points. When the managers of the two companies he worked previously heard that he wanted to study abroad, they both wrote recommendation letters for him. In the end, my son was admitted to a university in a Europe without IELTS test result.

Even though it was rather difficult to obtain a visa nowadays, my son didn’t have any problem. On the day of his interview, when the visa officer looked through his papers, he chatted happily with my son and granted him an entry visa straight away. Our family was very happy for him.

“Mom, We Are Truly Study Buddies Now!”

When I obtained the Fa in 1998, my son was only a few years old. He often listened to Master’s lectures with me. After the persecution started in 1999, I took him with me when I went out to distribute truth-clarification materials or hang up banners. When he got tired or sleepy, I would leave him by an utility pole for a rest, and carried him home when I finished. He never complained. It was as if he understood that what I did was most sacred. When my husband and his family couldn’t understand why I practiced Falun Dafa, my son always stood by my side and supported me.

When he grew up, he also knew that he was blessed by Dafa, otherwise his career path would not have been so smooth. He understood that he must work on his heart when encountering issues, and he always referred to Dafa practitioners as “our family.” However, I always felt bad for him as he could not be considered a Dafa disciple in a true sense.

Not long after he went abroad, he called me and said to me quietly, “Mom, we are truly study buddies (fellow practitioners) now!” He sounded so happy and I had never seen him laughing with such joy before.

As it turned out, Shen Yun Performing Arts performed in his city for the first time. When my son heard the news, he felt that something would change his life soon. The day of the show, he noticed that the audience members all looked very refined and elegant. The men were wearing suits and the women wore beautiful dresses. He was surprised to find the entire theatre was filled with an atmosphere of peace and sacredness, and he was equally surprised to see just how many people were looking forward to watching Shen Yun.

My son didn’t want to leave the theater after the first show. He bought another ticket to see the next show, thinking: This one is for my mom. She cannot be here herself. I will watch the show on behalf of her.

By talking to practitioners working during the show, he was connected to the local group and began cultivating soon after.

As I write this sharing article, tears stream down my face. Thank you, Master, for never giving up on us!

(Selected submission in celebration of World Falun Dafa Day on Minghui.org)