Ms. Zhenni Zhang
Ms. Zhenni Zhang addressing a rally in San Francisco, commemorating 22 years of persecution in China.
For practicing Falun Gong, Ms. Zhenni Zhang’s entire family was persecuted. For 11 years, the Zhang family lived in displacement, where “every moment was spent in great pressure and fear,” as almost all Falun Dafa practitioners they knew had been harassed, kidnapped, and detained.
Ms. Zhenni Zhang began practicing Falun Dafa in China in 1994. After her sister and parents practiced for a few months, their chronic diseases disappeared.
Falun Dafa also improved their spiritual lives, offering Zhenni a moral compass:
“I was immersed in the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance at a young age, and I was never lost,” she said.
Ms. Zhang’s mother was a university professor. She was abducted three times for practicing Falun Dafa, tortured, and then forced to retire without her pension. Her father was a researcher in an institute. He was also kidnapped, and his bank account was frozen. Her sister was dismissed by her workplace.
Seeing how the Chinese Communist Party slandered Falun Dafa and used the media to continually propagate rumors and propaganda, Ms. Zhang decided to go to Beijing to appeal. She sent a letter to Party leaders to let them know how her family had benefited from practicing Dafa.
“As a result, I was handcuffed and locked in a detention center. I went on a hunger strike for six days. After I was released, I was expelled from school and I could not complete my college education,” she said.
At the time, almost every Falun Dafa practitioner she knew was harassed, kidnapped, and detained. She had learned that two university professors she knew had been tortured to death. One of them was a professor of mathematics, and her husband had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. Their four-year-old daughter became an orphan.
“That was definitely the darkest period in my life,” Zhang said. She said that CCP police continued to harass her family and threatened to kidnap them and take them to a brainwashing center.
“We were forced to leave home,” she said. “During those 11 years of displacement, every moment was spent in great pressure and fear. We didn’t know what the police would do to us if they found us. We were worried that one day we would be seized again and would ‘disappear.’”
Despite the immense ordeals her family faced, Ms. Zhang says what she experienced was by no means exceptional. She noted that many other practitioners in California (her resident state) had relatives who were tortured to death in China. Some were tortured, and some almost had their organs taken. She calls upon more people to work together to stop the CCP’s persecution.
Excerpted from Minghui.org:
