Just as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun. The most pervasive forms of local advertising often feel like thisโlike nursery rhymes or urban legends, or something implanted in your most tender consciousness by a social version of natural law.
Shen Yun has lived in the pink fluffy insulation of my mind for a while now. Shen Yun greeted me silently at the bus stop and loomed over highway exits, following me around on the physical plane of existence the way anything you shop for on the Internet starts to follow you around online.
Then, over the holidays, I went home to Houston, where my parents live. On Christmas Day, my dad told me that he had something special planned for the family. Really fabulous, traditional dancing. Why look up a figment of your own imagination? On the day of Shen Yun, I developed chills and a fever, which I immediately decided to ignore in the interest of seeing Shen Yun.
My family drove to the fancy concert hall downtown, where the lobby was full of people in suits and cocktail dresses. Behind the stage was an enormous screen upon which digital backdropsโancient temples, royal gardens, the cosmosโappeared, along with digital dancers who would walk to the bottom of the screen and then pop out, via the appearance of a living dancer, on the stage.
The colors were near-neon and unnatural; they reminded me of the glowing hues of Photo Hunt , the tabletop bar game. The hosts started talking about a spiritual discipline called Falun Dafa, and then introduced a dance in which a beautiful young follower of Falun Dafa was kidnapped and imprisoned by Communists, who harvested her organs. He intoned a phrase and asked the audience to repeat it. I felt my forehead.
