NEW YORK-Recent events in Flushing, New York have shocked and frightened both Western and Chinese onlookers alike. Burning with anger at the scene, one Chinese lady sought out an Epoch Times reporter to tell him her thoughts and experience of the mobbing of Falun Gong practitioners there.
When Chen saw her friend in the mob of people shouting abuse at Falun Gong practitioners, she went over to persuade her to stop. But the crowd turned on her.
"I'm so angry right now because you can't just attack me like that for simply defending Falun Gong. You can't just be like a 'crazy mouth, biting everyone'," she said. "This is America and you have the freedom of belief."
Chen has lived in Manhattan for eight years. Although she says she was not afraid at the time, she nonetheless didn't want to give her real name, afraid for the safety of her relatives in China.
The crowd refused to listen to her at all. "They just keep surrounding you and shouting at you. Like a pack of mad dogs. They have no reason."
Chen said that the Chinese communist regime "have used the young overseas Chinese students' love for their country and turned it against Falun Gong, telling them that Falun Gong is against China."
She said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has manipulated people's confusion about the spiritual practice and manipulated the fact that people do not distinguish between the CCP and the nation of China.
"A lot of these Chinese people that live in Flushing, they have no access to any other media except the propaganda that the CCP feeds them. They don't have an opportunity to get the truth from XinTangRen."
XinTangRen, also known as New Tang Dynasty TV, is an independent Chinese-language television station based in New York City. Unlike most Chinese media, the station reports frequently on human rights abuses in China and the corruption of the Chinese communist regime.
"America is a free country, so Chinese people can come and live here. But you have all these China TV stations that are just extensions of the CCP overseas in the US," explained Chen.
Chen regards the incident in Flushing as a continuation of the repressive history and nature of the CCP.
"They've killed many people, [in campaigns] like the Cultural Revolution... So a lot of people hate the CCP, but they can't do anything, they don't have the ability to, and they will be in danger if they said anything against the CCP," she said.
"Even with the people here in Flushing, never mind if you practice Falun Gong, but if you even dare to say that Falun Gong has done nothing wrong or that you support Falun Gong in public, they will besiege you and attack you."
"I'm extremely angry you know. I've never practiced Falun Gong, but I'm not against Falun Gong," said Chen.
"The CCP is very afraid of Falun Gong. So they will try to do everything to suppress them in America. But I feel that America should take action and kick out all these troublemakers, they should send these people back to China."
Chen believes that the persecution of Falun Gong is worse than the persecution of anti-communists during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s.
"Last year, when I went home, everything on the surface looks fine, but underneath there's a lot of awful things going on," she recalled.
"My neighbour's kid was going into the police academy. And then the government tried to investigate if there were any relatives of the child that practiced Falun Gong, if there were, he wouldn't be admitted. None of this is on the surface-but the persecution is very severe."