Simon Zhang: Do Not Forget My Mother

My family is one of the earliest Falun Gong practitioners in China. My mom started practicing Falun Gong since 1996, and me in 1997. My father had never been a Falun Gong practitioner. So at the very beginning of the persecution, my family, especially my mom, who is a local coordinator of those spontaneous events of practicing, she naturally became a target of local police force. They put her into custody many times, but severely, the most important three times were in 2001, 2008, and lately early 2022. In 2001, she was put into labor camp far, far away from my family, and shocked by electric batons. Since the introduction, she was one of the victims of electric batons. She suffered there for constantly two hours, and she urinated involuntarily, and her health was destroyed terribly. Her heart disease developed after that until she passed away in the last custody. So she was severely tortured in the first labor camp and almost died there. Right before she almost died, my family were allowed to take her back home because the labor camp does not want to carry the responsibility of having someone die in their labor camp. So we brought her back home. She recovered, and seven years later, in 2008, she was put into labor camp again, three months before this 2008 Beijing Olympic, which was a super big event for the communist regime to put powder on their face. But my mom became one of their costs to look good. Again, in the local detention center, she was tortured, beaten, insulted. Then she was moved to another labor camp, even further from the first one, from my home. There, her health condition went down directly quickly. After a few months, she became severely ill, and we were notified that she was about to die there again. So we traveled like nine to 10 hours, went there and bring her back home. That was the second case. And there were many, many harassments, police confronting and surveillance, many, many such cases surrounding her. So since 2003, I left my home to be in a university in a place far, far away from family. So I was not impacted directly by those surveillance harassments, but my mom certainly was. And then the latest case, a few days before the winter Beijing Olympics, she was arrested again. And quickly, her health condition went down. So she was tortured there again, because she was protesting by going on a hunger strike. So they beat her. They poured freezing water on her, and they left her in a seizure on the concrete floor. So 11 days after she was put into the local detention center, she was sent to the hospital because she lost her consciousness. And the male treatment did not stop. She had iron feathers on her ankles, and there was a rubber tube in her nose. And she was handcuffed onto the iron bed in the hospital. The first few days she was in hospital, she came around a few times a day, but soon we did not know what happened later, because on March 20th, the police notified my father that my mom was about to die. Then my father went to the hospital trying to bring her home, and the police said, no, you can't, because our leader has not approved this yet. Then the next day, they told my father that she passed away. And they sent about 50 policemen guarding her body and monitoring her apartment, because they do not want this message to be sent out, though quickly we know what was happening. So then they used my cousin, who is a close nephew of my father, used her job in the government to threaten my father to give permission to cremate my mom's body. So that happened, and my mom was cremated seven days after that. So my mom is a very typical victim in the persecution. In her last 23 years since the was in custody many times. She was harassed so many times, facing surveillance, confronted by police, and she was constantly, in the last 23 years, she had to be extremely careful about what she says on the phone, where she goes, and she cannot carry a cell phone, because that would bring her in trouble, since the police was monitoring her cell phone. So in the last 23 years, she was in super high pressure, and that impacted my father and that relationship, because my father's attitude was, why are you so stubborn about truthfulness, compassion, forbearance? And my mom's response was basically, you said it, truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, that's something we should be stubborn to. And yeah, that's basically the story. And her case was so recent, it happened just in March. That's a very good example that such a horrible crime, the persecution is still going on vividly in China. Even being covered up by, or surrounded by so many other news in China, that's something that is truly happening, and they don't want anyone else in the world to know about that. Yeah, that's basically the story. Thanks. Thank you, Simon, and thank you for sharing that. I know that's not an easy thing to do.