UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun | San Francisco Screening Panel Discussion

Thank you everybody for coming out. I hope everybody enjoyed the film. We're very grateful for everybody's time and coming out to watch it. Before we get started, we are going to have a panel discussion with Q&A that will open up to the audience. Before that, however, we do have some past and present Shen Yun performers here in the audience with us right here in the front. If you wouldn't mind just standing up. Let's give them a big round of applause. Thank you guys. Okay, why don't we start our discussion? Okay, so to start it off, before you answer this question, if everybody could just maybe introduce themselves and then so the audience can kind of get to know what role you play or played in Alison's case in Shen Yun. Let's start off. Was there anything in particular that stood out in the film that you'd like to share? Hi everyone. My name is Alison. I'm a Bay Area native. I grew up in San Jose, California right here. I used to dance with Shen Yun and now I'm a dance teacher. I think after watching this film again, the thing that always really sticks out to me is actually when when Lisha and Levi start crying about their kids. And I think for me why that really sticks out actually is because usually we're very, very friendly and really casual when we're with each other. But I don't realize how many pressures they face, you know, on the front lines, you know, advocating for Shen Yun and still dancing with Shen Yun or performing right with Shen Yun. And but now as I'm also a parent myself now, so I think that's really relatable to me. And, you know, it's a lot of people don't realize, you know, how many challenges all of us are facing, you know, as we are still trying to support Shen Yun. I'm Sarah. I'm from England, and I play the violin in Shen Yun. I think for me, the moment that really stands out for me in this movie is the very end where our audience members are giving us so much support, and they're telling us not to back down. Because I think in the face of such pressure that we're getting from the world's largest totalitarian regime, I think it's really hard to go through it alone. And it reminds me that we need the support. We need the support from each other, but we also need the support from you guys, the audience, and our friends and families outside of Shen Yun. I think that's really important, but I think it's also really heartwarming to see that. So my name is Cindy Kai, and I was actually born in Sacramento, two hours from here. And fun fact is San Francisco is actually the first place I ever stepped foot into a dance classroom. So my journey of dance with Shen Yun actually started here. And I'm a dancer with Shen Yun. I've been touring with Shen Yun for over 10 years. And a moment that really stuck out to me was actually not a single moment, but all the little behind-the-scene moments that show our daily life. Because we spend half a year touring the world, and the show we bring to the stage is what we spent six months perfecting. But when the curtain comes down, we're all very, very human. We have our friends, we have our family, we have our little jokes and things we like to do, things we don't like to do. And I think what the smear campaign right now is trying to do is to really demonize us and show that, show a very twisted angle of the story. But the film really brings to light all the little things that really go on once the curtain comes down. My name is Li Shai. I lived in San Rafael, Roman Park, and the area there a little bit up north from here. I want to first address the elephant in the room. And this is something I haven't brought up before with Steve on previous panels, but I almost boycott this movie. I've been a Giants fan since 1987. There was way too much Dodgers in that. It's not okay. I think the moment that stood out to me the most was Stephen Wong's story. I toured with Stephen for a while. Think about somebody who lost his father to torture in a labor camp, and then the courage to leave China, come to the States on his own, join a performing arts company where he's on stage portraying his father's story. He's one of 90-something people like that in the company. It's people that we know. We know a lot of their stories. Ms. Ying Chen talking about her brother, she barely got into his torture story. He was stuffed under a bed and chocked with multiple electric batons for hours. He almost died. There's so many stories like that. For us, those stories, when people ask us what drives us to do what we do, why do we do this, it's for these stories, to get them out, and to try to help somebody who's languishing in some labor camp in China to know that they're not forgotten, that their story's on stage. Very powerful. Why don't we go down the line again, or feel free to jump in anybody, and tell us something about Shen Yun that maybe most people don't know about, and what it's like day-to-day, your life on the road or training. I think it's kind of funny. Shen Yun literally means the beauty of divine beings dancing, but we are actually not divine. We are still very, very human. A lot of people think, oh, maybe people at the Shen Yun headquarters, it's super peaceful. It's like Utopia. Everyone's friends with each other, and we're like, la, la, la, la, la, every day. It's perfect every day. I think they don't realize that we still feel a lot of human emotions. Even though we're very supportive of each other, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of instances where sometimes we will feel self-conscious. We might feel nervous. We might feel selfish, or even jealous of each other. These feelings pop up as we are building the different performances, and repertoire, and everything. I think at the core of it is that regardless of whatever things come up, everyone is still constantly trying to work on themselves. I think that's really what pulls everyone together at Shen Yun this whole time. The company has been up for 20 years, and the whole reason why it's still going is because we still ground ourselves in this main value. I think that's really special. Yeah, and I think every day on tour is different. We have such a diverse kind of experience. Say if we're in Italy one day, we might pop into a museum and go see these amazing artworks by Michelangelo, or something like that before a show. But if we're in Taiwan after the show, we'll go to the night markets and we'll taste the local delicacies. It's really different. It's really diverse. I feel like with Shen Yun, we've had such an opportunity to taste the world's cultures, go to places I never dreamed of going before. As a young artist, who else has this kind of opportunity nowadays? It's really special. I think one thing that a lot of people actually get wrong is they think we come from China, but Shen Yun is actually based in New York. A lot of times because we travel in such a big pack, we arrive at an airport or somewhere and we're all dressed in suits. People come up to me and ask, do you speak English? Or I go to the airplane and I take out my passport and I hear whispering, they're like, oh, it's blue. So then I'm like, yes, I'm born American and I'm very proud of that. Because I feel like to me, Shen Yun really embodies the soul of the American dream. A group of artists that really started from zero and grew 20 years to where we are today, from one troop to eight troops. I'm very proud of that and I hope that in the future, Shen Yun can continue to grow. One thing I think people don't know is right before the curtain comes up, right before all the music starts, the gong is hit and people are dancing and jumping and all that stuff. If you look behind the curtain on stage, just the moments before, everybody's sitting with their eyes closed, meditating. It's so peaceful. You could hear a pin drop and that is a mental state that the performers take. It's really fun to watch them from the side and they're sitting there with their feet in double lotus and their costume and everything, just getting ready to perform. I think it just speaks to how the dancers and musicians, especially the heart that they put into what they do and trying to really remove their own ego, check their ego out the door and really do a performance for the audience and really give what's best and purest. I think that's when people see the show, they see the joy with which people perform. That's not an act. It's something real. It comes through in their eyes and their smiles. I think that's something that, which is also why the coverage that the movie talks about has been so offensive and so hurtful to people because they're so sincere about what they do. You see it in day-to-day interactions and how they prepare and how they work on their craft. Sari, you said that you're from England. How does a British musician make their way to New York and wind up in Shenzhen? It's a good question. To that, we'd have to go back to when I was two years old. I made my musical debut at a funeral. Just kidding. No, I was a musical child. There was a choir there and I got up and started singing too. Clearly, I fell in love with music at a very young age. I started learning the violin when I was eight. I'd grown up hearing about the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. My father was very active in spreading awareness of this. I remember I would go to Chinatown or I would go to cities and I would hand out leaflets with him, raising this awareness of the persecution. There was one time I did go with him and this Chinese gentleman was also with us. He was very quiet. Afterwards, I remember asking my dad, who is he? He said he very recently escaped from a labor camp in China. He was tortured for many years. As a young child, that hit me so hard. I didn't believe that in the world there could be such evil. It became almost an obsession of mine. I wanted to somehow stop this persecution. I wanted to raise awareness of it. When I was younger, I used to think I could fly to China and single-handedly stop the regime and save all these practitioners in the torture camps. It's a young child's word. As I got older, I realized that wasn't very possible. I probably wouldn't even be allowed in China. One time, I remember Shen Yun was coming to London and I watched it for the first time. Not only did I think it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, I also realized that this show is raising awareness of the human rights abuses that are going on in China today. Not only are they raising awareness, but there's also a live orchestra. I love music. I'm a musician. I remember telling my dad, I have to be a part of this someday in the future. That was really a dream of mine. Fast forward many years, I auditioned to the Feitian Academy of the Arts. I got accepted. Later on, I joined Shen Yun as part of the practicum program that they offer. You could say dream come true, but I think a better way of putting it is the other day I was talking to my dad and he said, you know, Sarah, I think the eight-year-old Sarah would be really proud of you. I think that's true. I am really proud of myself. It's an amazing story. Has anybody here ever experienced any type of harassment or hostility along the way? How might that translate into your real-world experiences? For me, I don't dance with Shen Yun anymore now, so I kind of find it funny how I would actually face some discrimination. It actually happened a few times because now I teach at a college and then I do a lot of collaborations with dancers and artists in locally upstate New York. There were a few instances where I tried to reach out and connect with some different artists, but they actually shied away from me and they outwardly told me that, oh, we don't want to keep working with you because you used to dance with Shen Yun and we know you practice Falun Dafa. They felt like what their work was doing did not align with my spiritual beliefs, but I thought that was kind of funny because it's not like I'm trying to impose my spiritual beliefs into everything that I do. I'm an independent artist now. All of my work, actually, all of the dances that I've been choreographing or the projects that I do with my students, none of them actually reflect Falun Dafa or what Shen Yun is doing, but they still didn't want to work with me. That was the first time I was kind of like, oh, it's kind of a slap in the face. What? I can't even collaborate with you just because of my beliefs, which I'm not even trying to impose on you. It's actually very real. Some people do judge me based on my beliefs. You guys remember that guy in Chinatown who used to stand on a box on a street corner cursing at Falun Gong practitioners? Anybody remember that old guy? In San Francisco here, I remember we had a hearing about this in Congress in 2002 that I happened to be in. We've had people beaten up by Chinese thugs with ties to the Chinese consulate, with ties to the triads, to the United Front, to Rose Pack. People just beaten up meditating, and that went from 2000 all the way until 2023 with the AIPAC, with the Xi Jinping visit, and dozens of people, not just Falun Gong practitioners, were beaten up. We've seen that stuff. People just being chased down the street and beaten up and abused, and I've seen people getting kicked out of restaurants in Flushing, New York with a sign literally like something you would see out of 1930s Germany, no Falun Gong practitioners allowed. That's definitely something that we've seen, but as a non-Chinese myself, I just feel like for two-plus decades, we've had to deal with all the propaganda coming from Beijing targeting people like myself and these people who practice Falun Gong. It took a while to do an information awareness-raising campaign and let people know this is what we actually believe. This is a Buddhist-based practice. We're being persecuted in China. A lot of the stuff that you're seeing is just fake news. This was before fake news was a term. Finally, you turn a tide on that, and now here, the New York Times and the media that are parroting the stuff that they do are coming after us again. I feel like we're having those same conversations over and over again. For example, very much like with Levi's story, my parents have been reading the New York Times for forever, and for years, I was telling them, all this is in China, and the New York Times is completely ignoring this genocide, these atrocities. They covered up the story of organ harvesting. They told the reporter, Didi Tatlau, not to cover the story when she wanted to, and then all of a sudden, they're coming after Shen Yun. After 20 years of complaining to my parents about the New York Times and telling them to stop forwarding me articles, finally, when this happened, they canceled their subscription. It took several rounds of this to see that, but it's mind-boggling how the tentacles of the decisions being made, the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Information in Beijing are reaching the homes of my parents in New Jersey and our friends and colleagues all over the country. That to me is scary in a different way compared to the beatings in Chinatown, say. As we saw in the film, it takes a lot for you guys to get ready, for any professional athlete for that matter. Mental toughness, you hear about that. Physically, you have to watch your diet. Train, we saw how you do that. So when you compound these types of daily bomb threats, death threats, the New York Times still carries a lot of influence in our country coming down on you guys. Where do you find that inner strength to keep going? For me, I feel like spirituality definitely plays a huge part in it. You have to find something greater than yourself. I remember there was this one instance before the show, like Lisha said, we like to take time to really calm down. Dance is such an athletic thing. You're always moving, always thinking, you're always worrying about the next technique. But before the show, I really like to maybe find a quiet place and just really calm down with my thoughts. I remember once I was in the audience before the show, and I had my eyes closed, and I was just like calming myself. And then I felt someone next to me, and I opened my eyes, and then there was an audience member. I don't know how she got in so early. And then she was just praying like so intently next to me. And then I was kind of surprised to see her, and I was like, oh, hello. And then she's like, oh no, you just keep doing you. I just saw you praying, and I had to join because I've never watched Shen Yun, but I know it's going to be great. And then I was just, at that moment, I felt like spirituality is not something that should separate people, but it should be something that brings people together. Because we're very transparent. We all practice Falun Dafa, but that doesn't mean we don't believe in truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance in the forms of other spiritual practices as well. Like I have many friends who are Christians and Catholics. So people are like, if you just take Falun Gong, then the Chinese communists won't be so against you guys, and they won't be at your back. But we say, no, we won't do that because this is who we are, and we're not going to let the Chinese Communist Party take that away from us. So I think we can maybe open it up to the audience for some questions for the performers. Yeah, right over here, please. What was the political hardcore threat of Shen Yun to the regime? That's a great question. It's perfectly timed for what I just spoke of. So when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the first thing it set out to do was to destroy the culture that had been there for thousands of years. 5,000 years of civilization, very spiritual civilization. Unlike what Beijing would like to tell you now that it wasn't spiritual at all, you have Buddhism, you have Taoism, you have Confucianism as a school of thought that teaches upright human behavior. And you can't take a nation like this that believes in the afterlife, believes in being accountable to your ancestors, believes in various concepts of heaven and hell, or reincarnation, or what have you, and get them to follow a Stalinist, Marxist, militant atheist, and later Maoist ideology. And so when it came to power, the first thing the Communist Party did was to wipe out the culture that had been there before. And if you talk to the Chinese people here and ask them about what maybe they or their parents had experienced, it's this kind of thing of, especially during the Cultural Revolution, of raising temples to the ground, burning artwork, forbidding people from having any contact with the classics of either the East or the West, marrying monks and nuns, and killing 80 million people or so along the way. And so you have multiple generations that are completely cut off from their heritage. And here comes Shen Yun and says, we're going to show you China before communism. That's on our billboards that Abraham and the local presenters put up all over the place. We're going to revive Chinese civilization. We're going to show you what China was really like, and not just the stories in the outer form, we're going to show you the essence of the civilization, the values and the spirituality of it. You know, Shen Yun's tagline is, China before communism. So when you think about what it was like before communism, that also tells you what it could be like without communism. And I think that might be one of their greatest fears. Thank you. Yep, right here in the front. In your opinion, why does the New York Times cave to the wishes of the CCP? I mean, we all have our frustrations with the New York Times, but you're better informed. So I'd love to hear what you think. Well, I think it comes down to sort of the issue of, you know, Wall Street. Why has Wall Street been headfirst in China? You know, you see, they see dollar signs with 1.2 billion people or whatever the population might be right now. And the New York Times is a very strong Chinese edition. They have a Beijing bureau. There's also, I don't know if it's still going on. There's something called an advertorial. It's a very deceiving advertisement that is placed in many of our publications. I know at one point, many were going into the New York Times, that looks like an editorial. And then there's just small fine print, and they get 10s of 1000s of dollars from those advertorials from the China daily. Yeah, so that would be one assessment. Yeah, right over here in the left. So I wanted to know how that's basically at the upper level in the medias and things that you know, that you're being threatened by the godless collectivist regime. But how do you, how do you know who identified him at a local level? Because I ran for city Congress and Congressional District 14, that's Eric's Wallace District. And as a Taiwanese American, I got a lot of suppression, I have a lot of backlashes. So I, I commend your courage and continue to do what is good. But in terms of how locally, how do you identify and how do you guard the sea? Because we're not against the Chinese people. And there are the nicest people in my community as well. We have a lot of them. But how do you identify some of them actually spies? And how do you kind of guard against these people? And how do you make sure that what you're doing is not being not not threatened? Because I've been threatened. And I saw that's the reason why I come in to support this film. It's very, yeah, it's the same playbook, censorship, suppression. I think one good question to ask them is say, Hey, what do you what do you think about Falun Gong and see what they tell you? See if they come to Shen Yun and give us a proclamation or not. That would be one good way to do it. John Chen, the spy that was caught by the FBI, he was connected to multiple other spies. And that's my guess as to why he got a light sentence as he ratted out a lot of people. Was Aileen Wong, is that the one from Acadia? Yeah, yeah. So that that's how they got her through him. And another guy from San Bernardino, I believe. And who knows who else is coming. So this it's a it's a deep network. As we know, we've had officials here in California who've had spies in their offices for many years. And guess what? They tended to support Beijing on many of these human rights issues in, say, Taiwan independence or Falun Gong. So I think it's it's it's it's a joke, but it's actually if you ask them where they stand on these issues, you often see, especially the the key issues, like the five poisons, June 4th, these kinds of issues, see where they where they stand on that. And if they change color when you ask them about it, you may have an issue. I do want to say we're happy to continue the conversation. It's not just Alison, Sarah, Cindy and myself. We also have Diana and Chelsea and Andrew, who are happy to chat. If you want to chat some more, we wanted to do real quick is we want to acknowledge and really thank the local presenters. So the way this works, we're based in New York. We do have hundreds of performers, but it's still that's not enough to go all over the world and just do this on our own. We could not do what we do, performing in front of a million people every year in five continents without local organizations that arrange for everything in our performance. They're the ones who book the theaters. They're the ones who sell the tickets. They're the ones who arrange our hotels and get us, you know, red bean buns for breakfast and the whole thing. Watch our buses, because we have people slashing tires. By the way, anecdote about the slashing tires, because this came up after in a review that I read. The reason we know it was a suspicious cut was from the police report and from the mechanic. This was not something that we invented. They told us this is not a normal cut. And then we saw the same cut multiple other places, just a small hack. So anyway, but back to local presenters, Abraham and his wife here, Anna, and just really representative of many other people, I'm sure, who are out there and they're the ones putting the Shen Yun advertiser on people's doorknobs and sometimes getting yelled at, but mostly trying to sell the tickets. And they're volunteers. And they do this because, as Abraham said, they believe in the mission. They believe in what we're doing. Some of them experience persecution. Others just feel that they want to spread the goodness of the company. And they're just so wonderful to see when we travel around the world. And as a thank you, we wanted to give you, if you don't mind coming up here, Abe, a poster, the unbroken poster that we signed. We'd like to present that to you. And really on behalf of the Shen Yun performers, to thank you and everybody who works so quietly behind the scenes, because these guys are not going to be on the red carpet with the performers. They're the ones who quietly and thanklessly do all the hard work to allow this to happen. So thank you so much. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Welcome to join us in the lobby. We greatly appreciate everybody coming out. Thank you so much.