Several months ago, a friend of mine in L.A., who is a Falun Dafa practitioner, was invited by a local TV station to talk about Falun Gong related issues. The host asked him how many Falun Dafa practitioners are there in Southern California. She was quite surprised to hear my friend answered he doesn't know since Falun Gong has no registration or roster.

That's right. Falun Gong has no fee, no membership, and no registration. It started like that in China before the persecution, and it's the same way now in more than 60 countries in the world (including China). So whether one is a Falun Dafa practitioner or not, no one would give you that title and there is no any form of ceremony. As long as you think you are a practitioner, you can call yourself one.

I did not consider myself as a real Falun Dafa practitioner until fall of 2003.

Two years after my previous visit to Beijing when my friend introduced Falun Gong to me, I went there again in the summer of 1996. My sister, who by then had been practicing Falun Gong for two years, had a new book waiting for me. It was "Zhuan Falun", the main text of Falun Dafa. I remember I read it overnight and simply loved it. When I really like something, I have this habit of repeating the experience, such as reading a good book or watching a good movie. So I brought the book with me when I returned to the U.S., and I read it many more times during the next few years. It's just like my friend Wenny told me, you discover new meaning when you read the book again. "It's a book from Heaven," she told me. I did not really understand what she meant at that time. But I knew it is THE best book I have ever read.

Every time when I visited Beijing, Wenny was one of my must-see friends. The last time I saw her in person was 2000. During my two week vacation in Beijing in the summer of 2002, I could not get hold of her. Later on an old classmate of us told me she heard that Wenny had "disappeared" due to her Falun Gong practice. Up to that point, I was not fully aware of the severity of the persecution on Falun Gong in China. Needless to say, I started to pay attention to the issue after I returned to the U.S.. I started to read reports about the persecution on internet. (I will talk more about Wenny's story later.)

I also read the lecture notes from the Falun Dafa official site. It was not an one-day decision, and it took me a few more months to decide now it's the time for me. It did not happen very dramatically. Just one day in October 2003, I called a practice site which is located in my university and made an appointment on learning Falun Gong exercises. A Ph.D. student who was studying at the same university taught me all five sets of exercises at the following Saturday group practice. I consider that from that time, I "officially" became a Falun Dafa practitioner.

I was still the same person, yet I was changed - I know the true meaning of my life.