Bucks County Courier Times [Pennsylvania]: The longest march

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The first time the police came for Li Sihui was at a hotel in Beijing.

She had gone to the Chinese capital to practice the ancient meditation and exercise discipline Falun Gong. But Li said she was instead packed into a stadium overnight with other Falun Gong members and then sent home.

Two more times over the next two years Li would be arrested for practicing Falun Gong. Never would she get off as easily as she did that night in Beijing.

Li arrived in Bucks County from New York City yesterday. She walked. One of a couple dozen Falun Gong members who are trekking to Washington, D.C., as part of a nationwide campaign to bring attention to the arrests, beatings and deaths of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

'The more people know, the less the Chinese government can hide behind its lies," said Meng Yang Jiam, a 16-year-old high school student who has been practicing Falun Gong for four years. Meng Yang began her protest walk from Boston, where she lives.

"It's tiring but when you think about what people are going through in China, you have to go on," said Meng Yang.

After a news conference at the New Jersey state capitol in Trenton yesterday afternoon, the group marched across the Calhoun Street Bridge to Morrisville and into the arms of supporters in Bucks County.

Marina Vassong, a Northampton resident and Falun Gong practitioner, joined the group there to march with them through Lower Makefield. 'These are really nice people," she said. "These are people who think about others first. That's what this is all about."

Other local Falun Gong practitioners - there are an estimated 200 in southeast Pennsylvania - opened their homes and larders to the marchers.

It was difficult to gauge the marchers' impact when the people they were trying to reach were driving by at 40 mph. First down Trenton Avenue and then in a single file line along Big Oak Road, the sign-holding, sash-wearing marchers occasionally elicited a honk or, even more rarely, a wave.

"People smile sometimes if they're pulling out and have to wait for us to walk by," said Erin Elliott of Bergen County, N.J., as she marched in the blazing hot sun along sidewalk-free Big Oak Road. "The only negative reaction we get is sometimes people don't want to take our fliers."

Elliott, 19, said that before discovering Falun Gong five months ago, she was severely depressed.

"It has uplifted my spirit and given me more energy," she said of the discipline, which is very similar to tai chi. "We walked all morning and when we got to Trenton, we did our exercises and I feel more refreshed than if we had rested."

While Elliott also walked from New York City, none of the marchers had journeyed farther than Li. Speaking through a translator, Li said after she was sent home from her Beijing hotel, the Canton police interrogated her for seven hours.

She said she went back to Beijing to, as she explained it, "tell the government they couldn't do this" to Falun Gong practitioners. "This," she said, meant arrest, beatings and labor or re-education camps.

Her efforts got her arrested a second time. This time, Li was kept in custody for three days before being sent back to Canton. Once home, she was picked up by the Canton police and jailed for 15 days, she said.

"They told me I was going to be sent to a re-education camp," said Li.

Her family intervened. The police told her parents that if they signed a form guaranteeing that Li would not go back to Beijing she would be free. If they didn't sign it, she would stay in jail. Her parents signed the form.

That kept her out of jail, Li said, but she was fired from her job as a government social worker for practicing Falun Gong. Months later, while practicing Falun Gong at the home of a friend, she was arrested a third time and held in jail for 15 days.

"When my family came asking for me, they denied they had me," Li said.

When she was finally released, Li said the police took her family's telephone and came to the house every other day to check on her.

Not wanting to be persecuted any longer, Li moved to Rochester, N.Y., a year ago this month. Today, she'll walk along Old Route 13 through Falls and Tullytown, then through Bristol Township and Bensalem on her way to Washington to protest.

"I have to make people aware," she said.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/couriertimes/news/news/0710falun.htm