Man so I'd heard SoCal people joke about Shen Yun being a cult - had even seen some articles in passing about the use of child labor and unfair treatment of the performers - but wasn't really sure where it sat on the continuum between Shitty But Legitimate Business and Actual Fucking Cult until this past weekend, when my family and I ended up in a rideshare driven by a Shen Yun zealot. We were going out for a Father's Day dinner to a place about a 5 minute drive away, and as we set off, I thought, "huh, the music the driver is playing sounds vaguely familiar - I wonder what it is?" And from where I was sitting, I could see the name of the track on the screen of his iPhone, so I discreetly googled it and, lo and behold, it was a Shen Yun song, which I'd probably heard in an ad at some point. And in the next breath, I realised that the blue lotus tchotchke hanging from the sun visor was also a Shen Yun thing.
I didn't verbalise this realisation at all, but about ten seconds later, the driver asks my husband and I, "Have you gentlemen heard of Shen Yun?" To which we say, yes, we've heard of it, in response to which the guy starts telling us about the music, the dance, how it's meant to encourage and reflect "traditional virtues" - a dogwhistle if ever I've heard one - and how wonderful it all is. And after about a minute of this, he finally draws breath, which allows us to say, "Oh, that's nice," in a polite, we-are-a-captive-audience-in-this-rideshare-and-you-seem-to-feel-strongly-about-this way - and if the guy had left it at that, we'd have had no problem.
He launches into a new spiel, completely unprompted, not talking to us, but talking at us, a literal uninterrupted stream of information about how the group practises ancient Chinese meditation that some publication or other has proved can cure stage four cancer, and how the Chinese communist party is an evil persecuting force against multiple religious groups and is committing genocide,* and he has some literature he can give us, and really the dance troupe is amazing because the modern world has forgotten its values and society needs to go back to traditional virtues and that's why everything sucks - just this constant, breathless delivery with zero pauses for interjection, like he's just desperate to tell us everything about this group in the space of a five minute drive, and let me tell you, he made four straight minutes feel like fucking eternity.
Finally, I can't take it any more. The entire experience is upsetting, not least because this dude keeps dogwhistling about "traditional virtues," and so I, in my firmest yet politest voice, say, "Excuse me, sorry, but would you mind not talking about this? You're stressing me out." And he just kind of. Blinks. Like it hadn't ever occurred to him that randomly launching into a non-stop tirade about cancer and genocide to strangers could possibly elicit a negative reaction, and says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stress you," followed swiftly by something like, "But I just wanted to say -"
And then he keeps going, or tries to; I cut him off again saying, "Please, you don't need to give us the hard sell." To which he replies, "Oh, it doesn't cost anything -", forcing me to say, a third fucking time, "Please, just. Stop."
Which, finally, he does, leaving the entire car in a tense, awkward silence for the final minute it takes to reach our destination. And still - still! - when we pull up, he feels compelled to add, "I'll just give you some information about it," and pushes some brochures about Shen Yun and Falun Gong over the fucking center console towards us. (We did not take them.)
On the positive side, this did lead to a fairly lively conversation over dinner, where my husband and I explained what a cult is to our twelve-year-old, who was suitably baffled by the entire experience. But I also felt compelled to look up Falun Gong, the organisation behind Shen Yun, and learned that they're vehemently opposed to both homosexuality and feminism, which certainly explained all the "traditional virtues" talk, but also made it retroactively hilarious that this guy had tried to pitch us at all, on account of how I am queer and transmasc - I would've assumed he'd misread me as female, if not for the fact that he'd addressed my husband and I as gentlemen, which. Like. My guy! You saw two men and a kid get into your car from a suburban house and were driving them to a restaurant on Father's Day weekend and the possibility that we were a gay family somehow didn't occur to you?
But on the other hand, maybe I should be grateful that he got it wrong. If he'd thought we were degenerates, perhaps he might've kept quiet, but perhaps not. Hence the anxiety and unpleasantness of the experience! Either way, though: man, Shen Yun is a fucking cult.
*Let the record state that, under normal circumstances, I actually enjoy talking politics with rideshare drivers! I'm extroverted, I like people, and as we don't have a car and live in a place with negligible public transport, I get a lot of Ubers. You meet a really fascinating cross-section of people this way, but even when I encounter someone with different views to me, I'm usually still able to have a decent conversation, because I take care to read the vibe. So the objection here was not to the choice topic: it was to the fact that this guy launched into it with zero warning, full tilt, without checking or caring how his captive audience was reacting or whether we were comfortable, and was not in any meaningful way interested in hearing a reply. Ordinarily, I give all rideshare drivers 5 stars and a tip: this was only the fourth time I've ever not done that. (The other three were, in order: a guy who took off while I was still getting in and half ran over my foot; a condescending asshole who kept trying to pitch me on bitcoin and called me sweetheart (derogatory); and a full MAGA Trumpist who feigned politeness for the first half of the drive, then abruptly switch-flipped on me and started shouting.)
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