With her life back to the right track again, Sun Shihong reappeared in front of everyone again with a smile on her face. Under the care of government workers, now she lives a stable life as before, going to or off work on schedule again. Now in her fifties, she is all alone after the divorce, but she feels even sadder when talking about her daughter because her daughter, as her only child, doesn’t want to see her for no reason other than the fact that she once believed in the evil cult Falun Gong.
Sun Shihong lives in the Ning’an farm in Heilongjiang Province. She used to work in a brewery. In 1990, she married her boyfriend in love and started a small but happy family, but the peaceful and good life was broken in 1996 when she got roped in by the Falun Gong cult.
Actually, at first Sun Shihong only practiced Falun Gong for fun. At that time, other Falun Gong practitioners repeatedly came explain to her the benefits of practicing Falun Gong and gave her some gifts from time to time. That was how she was drawn in to the Falun Gong cult before she could think it straight. Then she unwittingly went with those Falun Gong cult believers to the cultivation venue and involuntarily practiced Falun Gong by clumsily following their postures and movements.
Gradually, Falun Gong practice and Dafa learning began to grow on her to the extent that she almost made cultivation the only thing she was doing in her daily life. As for the evil book Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel), she deemed it a treasure book, which, step by step, led her to the clutch of the evil cult. Her life was turned upside down by this evil cult book. She spent most of her time on practicing and learning Dafa and often participated the Falun Gong promotion activities, while she treated her job as something dispensable and couldn’t care less about her family’s well-being.
Being obsessed with “True Cultivation” made Sun Shihong indifferent to family ties day by day, pushing her friends away from her, driving the relationship between her husband and her toward the verge of breaking down. They quarreled a lot with each other in those years because her husband was strongly opposed to her cultivation. At last, except for her cultivation, she wanted nothing in her life, not even her own daughter. She said that, at that time, her daughter was quite young and often ill, but she was so busy with her Falun Gong practice and Falun Gong promotion activities that she didn’t even get around to see her daughter who had a fever at home back then, leaving everything to her husband to worry about.
In order to quickly “getting into high levels”, and more importantly, to be blessed by the “Master” , Sun Shihong hung a portrait of Li Hongzhi and a slogan of “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance” on the wall, toward which she sat in meditation and exercised. She deeply believed that such efforts could truly bring benefits for the whole family, and she was also firmly convinced that she was learning from her master about how to be a better person, because her “Master”, Li Hongzhi, said in the book Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel) that he was truly taking people to ascend to a higher level.
In July 1999, the evil cult Falun Gong was banned by the state in accordance with the national law. By then, Li Hongzhi who fled abroad successively released deceptive and evil oral instructions to his believers. In his instructions, he used the lie “the last chance to reach consummation” as a live bait, and he also terrified his believers with nonsense like “incurring total annihilation of both the form and spirit” if they would not comply, and he even instigated his believers to go into streets to do the so-called “safeguarding the Dafa” to rally against the government and to destabilize the whole society at all cost. However, in the face of all these facts, Sun Shihong still failed to see clearly what the Falun Gong really was, let along got rid of shackles of Falun Gong’s mind control. On the contrary, her chaotic mind became more confused than before.
Her husband, her old parents, and her young daughter all begged her to give up her belief in Falun Gong, hoping she could change her mind for the sake of family ties. But Sun Shihong ignored all of them. In her mind, she regarded her family and relatives as demons trying to stop her from further advancement, and she viewed all their persuasion as a test for her from her “Master” Li Hongzhi.
With her energetic self-motivation and self-improvement in the quest of how to better promote the Dafa, the religious mania for Falun Gong almost drove her crazy. All she could think of was nothing but the absurd book Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel). In order to ascend to heaven as soon as possible, she took out all their family savings over years without telling her husband, and turned it over to Falun Gong cult organizations for printing illegal propaganda materials. She ditched her job and abandoned her family, causing her family circumstances from bad to worse.
Not only did the Falun Gong cult made her run into financial crisis by depriving her of her family savings, but it also devastated her family by manipulating her mind with heretical ideas. Sun Shihong introduced that there are many weird taboos in Falun Gong cult. Beside the most notorious one that demands people cure their diseases by way of “Karma elimination” instead of going to hospital for medicines or injections, other taboos are also quite absurd, such as the one which is called “Desire Elimination” theory demanding husbands and wives give up their sexual lives, and another idiotic one that asks believers to remove onion, ginger and garlic out of their diet. All these unreasonable taboos suffocate souls of Falun Gong believers, making their families suffer dearly as well.
After their divorce, her daughter also left along with her husband.
The evil cult Falun Gong also gave Sun Shihong another “blessing”.
Both the Long-term disordered life and her obsession with eliminating karma to cure diseases resulted in the deterioration of her physical condition, but she was firmly convinced that her master would make her safe and sound, and those magic instruments with supernatural powers, such as Dharma body, Dharma wheel and energy field written in the cult book Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel), were all real and kept emitting beneficial energy to her.
One morning at the end of 2002, when Sun Shihong sat in meditation in front of the portrait of her “Master” Li Hongzhi as usual, she felt a burst of pain in her gut. Believing that Law Bodies (fa-shen) of her “Master” would help her relieve the pain, she continued her cultivation regardless of the ache. Finally, the pain became so increasingly fierce that she passed out in front of the portrait of Li Hongzhi.
Sun Shihong was cured by doctors in a hospital who performed a surgery to remove fibroid tumors in her uterus. After discharged from the hospital, she expected visits of other Falun Gong practitioners who practiced together with her, but in the end, no one showed up. She said it didn’t occur to her before that Falun Gong practice could make people ruthless like this because those practitioners were once either her good neighbors or good friends.
At last, she was all by herself due to her devotion to Falun Gong cultivation.
Her own daughter also makes her feel lonely now. After getting married and moving far away from the hometown, her daughter is unwilling to get back home to see her again. She once asked her elder sister to bring a handwritten letter of her to her daughter, hoping her daughter could come to visit her, but she has never heard from her daughter ever since.
She doesn’t blame her daughter because she was so obedient to his master’s words that she cultivated away feelings common to all “ordinary" people.
Looking back on how her family was in years gone by, she was full of bitter remorse to herself. Fortunately, her work fills her present days with hope for the future. And now, each day begins promisingly with bright sunshine whenever she opens her door in the early morning.
