Why Shen Yun Matters to Me—and Why It Matters Today
When people ask me why I have been involved with Shen Yun Performing Arts for so many years, my answer is simple, though not short: Shen Yun helped me rediscover my own culture—and, in doing so, helped me understand what has been lost, and what is still worth protecting. I was born and raised in China. Like most people of my generation, I grew up believing what I was taught in school, watching what was allowed on television, and repeating the narratives that were considered “normal.” I did not realize at the time how much history, culture, and truth had been removed from my education. Only after coming to the United States in the 1990s did I begin to understand the scale of that loss. It took years to process what I learned—about the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the persecution of faith, and the systematic destruction of traditional Chinese culture. Even longer to accept that what I had thought of as “Chinese culture” was, in many ways, a carefully constructed replacement....