24

We arrived in America with nothing but a diaper bag and a long list of people to thank. First, we landed in Dulles International Airport, where a World Vision official helped process our refugee paperwork at customs. We also met two friends, Dr. Carol Hamrin, who had worked at the State Department as a senior China analyst for decades, and Mr. Greg Chen, assistant to the mayor of Washington, DC, who’d worked tirelessly behind the scenes on our behalf. Then I went to Raleigh, North Carolina, where I thanked Pastor Ronny and promptly transferred the church’s ten thousand dollars back into its account.

I also thanked King’s Park International Church for being my sponsor, and one of its congregants for letting us stay in his family’s home for the first couple of weeks of our residency. I went to Washington, DC, where I thanked Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck, who’d also worked so diligently for our freedom.

And we still weren’t done thanking people by the time we arrived in Philadelphia, where I would attend Westminster Theological Seminary. There, the first thing I did was find Charlie, the businessman who gave us food money every month while we waited for freedom. He and his wife were so kind, and it was wonderful to finally meet them.

“Where are you staying?” Charlie’s wife asked, after I explained how much their money had helped us. “Do you already have food?”

“With a friend and—honestly—where do you buy food around here?”

“Let’s go.” She laughed. “The first week’s supermarket bill is on us.”

“What’s a supermarket?” Heidi asked as we pulled into the parking lot. The store had gleaming white aisles and was stuffed with beautiful, fresh tropical produce, even though we were in the middle of a northeastern city.

“How do you decide?” I asked, gawking at the green grapes, red grapes, purple grapes, and seedless grapes. This was the first time I realized a free society had its own kind of torture: the agony of unending choices. We filled our cart with foods we’d never seen before, without paying attention to the price. When we got to the cash register, I was embarrassed we’d racked up a two-hundred-dollar food bill.

However, they paid for our groceries happily and, over the course of the next few weeks, showed their generosity in ever-increasing ways.

“This is yours,” Charlie said, tossing me the keys to a brown Ford station wagon.

“I’ve never even driven before!” I protested.

“Why do you think it’s fully insured?”

Tim Conkling, the American missionary responsible for introducing me to Charlie while we were in Hong Kong, was in Philadelphia that summer. I made sure to thank him for the introduction.

“It’s made a huge difference in our lives,” I said. “He even gave us this car!” I pointed to the station wagon.

“Do you know how to drive it?”

“I don’t even know how to pump gas,” I admitted. Tim kindly took me to a station and conducted a short tutorial on how to get fuel from the pump to the tank.

A few months later, Charlie bought us a two-bedroom house in north Philadelphia that was near the grocery store, near Westminster’s campus, and within walking distance of an elementary school.

“As long as you are staying at Westminster and doing China ministry, this is yours. No insurances, no taxes,” he said.

We were overjoyed.

However, there was one more person integral to our escape whom we couldn’t find to thank. She’d come to our illegal printing press on the referral of our mutual friend Craig. After placing an order, she never came to collect the books. Since she hadn’t even left her name, we couldn’t track her down. When it came down to the wire, we had ended up using her deposit money to flee China.

“Please give us her address so we can write a letter to thank her,” I said to Craig, after he came in from Australia to visit with us. We had been so eager to tell him that story, and he listened with rapt attention.

“My mind’s been racing,” he said, “but I never told a woman about you.”

A hushed silence fell over us. To this day, we’ve never heard from this woman or discovered her identity. Billy Graham referred to angels as “God’s secret agents.” Had God employed one of his divine secret agents to help us escape communist China?

All of these blessings intimidated us.

“You know the Scripture that says, ‘To whom much is given, much is required’?” Heidi asked. “Do you think this is all some sort of test?”

Very recently, I had eaten wormy cornbread and slept on a concrete slab. Now I attended seminary and had a beautiful son, a house in Philadelphia, and a vehicle with a tank full of gas. We couldn’t help but wonder what God was about to ask us to do and, more importantly, if we could meet the challenge.

Life was hard without even considering ministry. Westminster was a new world of opportunities and challenges. Hebrew, a more oriental language, seemed beautiful and rhythmic, but Greek perplexed me. Plus, I struggled with English. Though Heidi and I both had learned the language in China—and even taught it—the classroom was much different than north Philly.

In the meantime, Heidi was thrown fully into the world of domesticity. Daniel, who wasn’t an easy baby, grew into an energetic toddler. When Heidi got pregnant again, we discovered her mom and dad were coming to live with us because her mother needed open-heart surgery. This was good, since we missed our friends and family in China. In fact, I’d had no direct contact with my family for so long. About one month after we arrived in Philadelphia, I was finally able to make calls without being monitored. In fact, I didn’t understand AT&T’s various calling plans, so my international calls drove my first phone bill up to six hundred dollars! In spite of the cost, however, I was thankful to be able to connect with some of my friends from school.

“Please tell my father we arrived safely in the United States,” I said to one friend from my family’s village.

“Xiqiu,” my friend whispered. “I’m glad you finally called. The PSB officers have been here. They treated your father very harshly.”

I hung up the phone with a heavy heart, wondering how my disabled father fared under their abuse. Another family member told me the details. Two Public Security Bureau officers interrogated my father after we left Beijing in September, demanding he tell them how I fled China and who helped me escape. In August, a few weeks after we had left Hong Kong, they came back for more interrogation.

My ministry friends had more dire news. “Sister Wang got arrested and was tortured,” one friend told me. “Brother Li was sent to labor camp,” another one said. With every conversation, I learned more about my old friends who were tortured or suffering for the sake of the gospel. As I sat in my comfortable house, memorizing Greek and Hebrew vocabularies, China was on the other side of the world. But I carried it—and its people—in my heart.

Heidi went into labor with our second child, and we were so thankful to be living in America. This time, I could accompany her into the labor and delivery room. But we had one complication. Heidi’s parents had just arrived from China and offered to babysit, but they weren’t familiar with our toddler. Since we didn’t feel comfortable leaving him, I ended up toting Daniel to the hospital and taking care of him in the delivery room while Heidi labored. Even though it was a less than ideal situation, Heidi gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whom we named Yaning, or “elegant peace.” Her English name was Tracy. Of course, she made our lives much more interesting. But even as Heidi recovered from her pregnancy and struggled to adapt to the rigors of having a second child, I began receiving speaking requests from church groups and organizations.

“Should you really go speak again this weekend?” Heidi asked, holding a baby in one arm and a toddler in the other. While my life had gotten so much larger, hers centered on diapers, acid reflux, laundry, and potty training.

“We’re in America,” I said, motioning around the house. “The least we should do is speak out on behalf of our brothers and sisters.” Heidi nodded, but her bloodshot eyes indicated she wasn’t ready to accept the heavy burden that came with freedom. I wasn’t either. At night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, and my mind raced with terrible scenarios. If I brought too much attention to China’s treatment of Christians, the PSB would retaliate. “Do I stand up for truth to protect the millions of people in the Chinese church?” I asked God as I wrestled with my dilemma. “Or do I remain silent to protect my dad and siblings?”

Of course, I really had no choice. So when God gave me speaking opportunities, I took them. I made a speech at the National Presbyterian Church, where I met with John Shattuck. Afterward, he asked me for a list of people I knew being persecuted for their beliefs, which he promised to pass along to President Clinton before his visit to China. Also, I testified before Congress in several hearings, including one hosted by Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Bill Goodling. I also testified in Los Angeles in front of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and spoke in Atlanta for the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted.

Though I was sleep-deprived, stressed out about seminary, and distressing Heidi by my frequent trips, I told anyone who’d listen about the situation in China. Very few people understood that the underground Catholic and Protestant churches vastly outnumbered the government-sanctioned churches, and that millions of Christians would rather gather illegally than submit to the theological manipulation and retaliation of the Three Self Patriotic churches. Some didn’t even know persecution was still going on in these modern days. And so I told them story after story of how the communists used Maoist-style propaganda, Cultural Revolution–levels of surveillance, and torture techniques that led to death. Even though I’d seen it with my own eyes, it was hard for me to prove these things happened. If I spoke out too aggressively, I might further endanger the victims of brutality. Plus, without documentation, how could I really prove that China—which had long boasted of religious freedom—was crushing the church?

The ache in my heart for my family back in China grew unbearable. In 2001, when I found out my sister Qinghua had installed a phone in her home, I could no longer resist the temptation to call.

“Qinghua?” I said. I strained to hear the familiar sounds of my old peasant village, but a fire truck barreled down the street outside my window. “This is Xiqiu! How are you?”

“We are fine,” she said, in a very serious tone. I waited for more details, or for her voice to soften toward me. But, after a silence, she said, “There are many new bridge construction projects around here, and the economy is doing very well.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Her stilted conversation was at odds with the loving sister I remembered. “Okay,” I said. “May I speak to Father?” My heart was so full of expectation and longing for home that I could barely get the words out. When I heard his voice, it took me a second to collect myself.

“Hello, Dad!” I said. “How are you?”

“I am fine,” he said.

I decided not to mention any of my public activity in America, but I did tell him about my studies at Westminster and my ever-growing family. When I hung up the phone, I felt worse than before. Something seemed wrong. Later, I learned the PSB was monitoring their calls and had forced them to brag about the government construction programs. They wanted me, and the whole world, to believe China was a land of freedom and prosperity. And without any real documentation, who was I to say otherwise?

That year, however, China overplayed their hand. Underground Christianity was becoming increasingly popular. For example, the South China Church, a loose network of illegal house churches, had over fifty thousand members. To clamp down on its growth, the Communist Party labeled it an “evil cult” and arrested hundreds of church leaders, confiscated more than five hundred homes and properties, and fined, beat, and harassed thousands of the members. In a secret trial, five pastors—founding and senior Pastor Gong Shengliang, Xu Fuming, Hu Yong, Gong Bangkun, and Li Ying—were sentenced to death for “using an evil cult to undermine the enforcement of the law.” Gong Shengliang was also convicted of rape and twelve others were also convicted of “using an evil cult to undermine enforcement of the law.”

On New Year’s Day 2002, Xiong Yan and I held a retreat. Xiong had been labeled one of the “twenty-one most wanted national student leaders” during the 1989 student movement. He went into hiding, but he was caught and served several years in prison. After his release, a house church Christian gave him a book called Streams in the Desert, and he became a believer before escaping to the United States. He and his wife both joined the United States Army and served two tours in Iraq. He even became a high-ranking Army chaplain. In 2000, after being transferred to Westminster, he asked me to be the executive director of the God Bless China Foundation, which was co-founded by Jonathan Chao. I immediately said yes, and through this organization hosted a retreat at the US Congressional retreat center in Maryland. It was called, a “Symposium on Christian Culture and the Future of China.” Many Chinese pro-democracy leaders attended, including Dr. Wang Bingzhang and Peng Ming, as well as many American leaders from academia, churches, and the media, like Os Guinness, who let us use the retreat center at a discounted rate. Former Congressman Beau Boulter, whom I knew through his son Matt, a classmate at Westminster, spoke at our retreat.

During our time at the center, however, we received the very disturbing information about the five South China Church leaders’ death sentences, which had been pronounced just a few days prior on Christmas Day. We also received multiple pages of smuggled-out testimonies of torture from those arrested in the South China Church.

“Let’s just pause,” I said, “and ask God what we should do in response to this information.”

Our hearts were heavy for our brothers and sisters being persecuted for their faith, and we cried out to God on their behalf.

“Actually,” Beau said after we had prayed, “I’m going to lead a delegation with two current congressmen to visit China in a week or so. We’ll be the first United States congressional delegation to visit there since the attacks on 9/11.” In January 2002, he was assigned to talk about religious freedom issues with the Chinese president, and we were thankful to have that direct line of communication with such a world leader.

At the retreat, we discussed various ways to help the South China Church, and decided to help to provide a good legal defense. We hired a Christian attorney in Beijing to help coordinate a legal team of fifty-three lawyers, and decided to ask believers in all of our various networks to help cover the costs.

“I know we can get Christians to donate money,” I said. This draconian use of force to obliterate the church and the trumped-up charges disturbed people throughout the world. “But who’ll collect it?”

“We could have an organization sponsor it,” someone offered. “They could accept the donations and then designate the money for legal assistance.”

However, one Christian organization after another turned us down. No one was willing to accept the funds because they feared retaliation by the Chinese government. Without a nonprofit organization to sponsor us, the donations would not be tax deductible. Though I didn’t feel like I had the energy or the inclination to start my own nonprofit organization, I decided I had no choice. I had to help the South China Church.

When I got back home to Philadelphia, I sat in my attic where I set up an “office,” meaning a chair and a tiny desk next to boxes of Christmas ornaments and summer clothes.

“Justice for China,” I wrote, as I brainstormed names for my new organization. I crossed it out because it seemed too clinical.

“Just China,” I wrote down, but that sounded too selfish.

“ChinaAid,” I wrote. I wasn’t sure if it was catchy, but it did give me some room as I figured out the mission of the organization. “Aid” could encompass a great deal of activities, after all, from flood relief to legal help.

In 2002, one man’s guilty conscience sent political shockwaves all over the world. An official in China’s Ministry of State Security felt terrible about how he’d been treating the various religious groups. He’d been told evangelical Christians, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, and Roman Catholic bishops were all “cult members,” and was given very harsh protocols to deal with them. The official decided he could no longer execute the protocols, so he left his position, turned over top secret government documents to a man in New York named Shixiong Li, and went into hiding. Other officials in China’s PSB provided documents as well, which were smuggled out of the country by a network of Christians.

When Shixiong Li, president of the Committee for the Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, or CIPRC, contacted me and spread the documents out on a table, I knew we had a treasure trove.

“Only twenty-eight copies of these were made,” Shixiong told me. He’d grown up in a Chinese gulag, after the PSB had put his parents in prison. “And here’s one of them.”

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“You mean what are we going to do with it?” Shixiong said, smiling. “Will you be the executive director of CIPRC?” he asked. Though I was already stretched so thin in my life, I wanted to be a good steward of the material so many people had risked their lives to smuggle out of China.

When I went home and told Heidi of the new developments, her face fell. She’d spent the whole day running tedious errands in one of the largest cities in America, though she had just received her driver’s license and had trouble communicating in English.

“What should I do?” I asked her late that night after everyone else had gone to sleep. Heidi’s eyes were bloodshot, her hair was mussed, and her shirt was covered in baby spit.

“How much does the position pay?” Heidi asked, trying to find at least some silver lining.

“Zero dollars.” At the time, I made videos of Chinese Christian testimonies for Voice of the Martyrs, which paid five hundred dollars per month. We were able to live on that, since we didn’t have to pay for our car or lodging. I knew I had a responsibility to Daniel and Tracy, but as we looked at them, tucked so sweetly into bed, our consciences were quickened.

“There are so many ‘Daniels’ and ‘Tracys’ in China who are orphans because of those protocols,” Heidi said, fighting back tears. “We must speak out, even if it’s . . . hard.” Her voice broke on the last word.

And so, I assisted Shixiong in translating these top secret documents, which we compiled into a 141-page booklet called Religion and National Security in China in cooperation with human rights partners at Freedom House, Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, Compass Direct, and the UK’s Jubilee Campaign. We were all on edge.

These documents demonstrated for the first time in history how China’s central party leaders knew of and encouraged the torture of people who belonged to “cults.” Their fourteen “cults” were described as a “crawling danger to domestic security and defense,” but their definition of “cult” was so ambiguous and arbitrary it could be applied to almost anyone in an unregistered group. Also, the documents showed how extensively the Communists spy on members of these groups—both in China and abroad.

This rang true to me. Since we’d moved to Philadelphia, I noticed Chinese people sitting in cars outside my house for hours. Sometimes Heidi was afraid of running errands with the children. Were we imagining things? Or was it possible that China had sent agents to Philadelphia in an effort to kidnap me . . . or even worse?

One rather chilling sentence encouraged local police to “purify the area” after religion had been introduced. Also, the documents detailed the use of secret government agents to infiltrate Protestant house churches, as well as ordering “forceful measures” against the Falun Gong, a relatively new spiritual discipline first introduced in China in 1992 that focuses on morality, meditation, and slow-moving qi gong exercises. In addition to the documents, we identified more than twenty-three thousand people arrested since 1983, and collected statements from five thousand torture and persecution victims in twenty-two provinces and two hundred cities.

Jonathan Chao helped write all the detailed footnotes for the documents, so I tried to credit his effort by making an editorial note at the end of the booklet. “Footnotes by Chinese church historian, Dr. J. C.”

“Why did you use my initials in here?” he said, when he first read the hard copy of our report. “The PSB will figure out that’s me in no time!”

To calm Jonathan’s nerves, I reprinted all of our materials without attributing him in any way. We were all afraid. Friends and even people associated with the United States government had warned us about what we were about to do. “China has assassinated people for much less,” one said.

In spite of our apprehension, we pressed ahead. On the morning of Monday, February 11, we held a press conference at West 51st Street in New York City, which not coincidentally was ten days before President Bush was to meet with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. We chose to hold the press conference in New York City instead of Washington, DC, because it was just months after the September 11 attacks. New Yorkers hadn’t wanted to know so much about terrorism, but now they had stared it in the face and were resolved to fight it.

Shixiong approached the podium and cleared his throat. The reporters packed several rows of seats, and cameras flashed when he began speaking. “Today, we disclose confidential Chinese documents that were brought to us by brave people at the risk of their lives. We’d like to let these bloody documents speak for themselves, so that you can see what today’s religious freedom really means to the Chinese Communist Party!”

The reporters typed furiously on their laptops as he stepped away from the podium and I approached. I wished I’d brought some water. My mouth had gone dry, and I feared I might open my mouth and no sound would come out. I’d never held a press conference before. Who will deliver the news if not me? I thought, so I took a deep breath and began.

“We want to further push for religious freedom for the Chinese people,” I said before explaining the Chinese government was engaging in “double talk” by saying they had religious freedom while issuing secret orders to crush religious groups. I encouraged President Bush to shine a bright light on the human rights abuse when he visited China, to send a message to President Jiang: America values freedom.

It all felt a little crazy, to be sure. Here I was, a guy with poor English trying to direct the conversation of the leaders of the most powerful countries on the planet. Though we’d hoped our efforts would get attention and we made sure President Bush received a copy of our report, we weren’t prepared for what happened next.

Our document release made the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the London Times, Agence France Presse, and South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

“Listen to this,” I said to Heidi in the aftermath of the release, when I’d retrieved a copy of the Washington Post. “A China specialist in London examined our documents and said this ‘could be among the most significant internal documents on religious persecution in China seen in the West.’”

“I’m proud of you,” Heidi said, as she paused at the door. “I really am.” She was leaving to go fill some prescriptions with her mother, father, and babies in tow.

When I finished reading, I looked up to see that Heidi was already out the door, and I was alone in the house for a few moments. There, in the rare silence of our home, I was overwhelmed with gratitude over what we’d been able to accomplish. I knew my father didn’t know about any of this, but I just wanted to hear his voice. I picked up the phone, dialed the number, and waited for his familiar voice. He’d never felt so far away. Qinghua answered the phone.

“Hello, sister!” I greeted. “I just wanted to check on you.”

“Everything is fine,” she said, raising her voice. “We are all very fine at home.” She paused, and I could hear the phone being muffled. She was weeping.

“Is Father okay?” I asked, to which she repeated, almost robotically, “We are all very fine at home.”

I knew. They’d gotten to them. After phone calls to family friends, I found out the PSB had gone back to my hometown after the document dump. No one was willing to explain the details, but I knew that my aged, disabled father was in trouble, and I needed to get him out of China. But how? I was barely able to escape as a relatively young man. How could he escape with agents monitoring his every move?

As I agonized over my father’s predicament, I flipped on the television to see a joint press conference between President Bush and President Jiang in Beijing. Human rights advocates were wondering if Bush would risk ruining the goodwill of the visit by bringing up religious freedom. Though I had to run to campus for my Greek class, I sat down on the sofa and turned up the volume on CSPAN. Bush and Jiang were standing behind flower-decorated podiums on a stage with both American and Chinese flags. Jiang spoke first in Chinese, explaining several issues on which the two countries agreed. Then Bush gave his own review of their visit. “Our talks were candid, and that’s very positive. The United States shares interests with China, but we also have some disagreements. We believe we can discuss our differences with mutual understanding and respect.”

Disagreements? The word caught my attention.

“China’s future is for the Chinese people to decide,” he said. “Yet no nation is exempt from the demands of human dignity.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Right there, in front of President Jiang, President Bush was bringing up the plight of the persecuted. I held my breath as he continued. “All the world’s people, including the people of China, should be free to choose how they live, how they worship, and how they work. Dramatic changes have occurred in China in the last thirty years, and I believe equally dramatic changes lie ahead. The United States will be a steady partner in China’s historic transition toward greater prosperity and greater freedom.”

ABC journalist Terry Moran asked a follow-up question. “President Jiang, if I may, with respect, could you explain to Americans who may not understand your reasoning why your government restricts the practice of religious faith; in particular, why your government has imprisoned more than fifty bishops of the Roman Catholic Church?”

President Jiang didn’t respond to the reporter, and instead stood aloof behind his podium. There was a slight pause, when everyone—including President Bush—looked at him to respond. He didn’t. To eliminate the awkward silence, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official jumped in and let a Chinese reporter ask a different question. A little later, another American reporter, Bob Deans of Cox Newspapers, asked the same question about religion. Once again, President Jiang ignored the question and the official pivoted to a Chinese reporter.

However, just as the news conference was wrapping up, President Jiang indicated he wanted to answer the questions of the American journalists. He presented it as if it were an oversight, laughing as he said, in English, that he was not as familiar with press conferences as President Bush.

He reiterated the old Chinese claim that the nation does, in fact, have religious freedom, but added, “Whatever religion people believe in, they have to abide by the law. So some of the lawbreakers have been detained because of their violation of the law, not because of their religious belief.”

My phone began ringing off the hook. Though President Bush didn’t directly challenge President Jiang over his false claims—at least not publicly—we’d forced human rights onto the summit agenda, an issue that China desperately wanted to avoid. And the questions from the two American reporters had obviously rattled President Jiang.

I was pleased to see President Bush had the moral courage to stand up to President Jiang on a global stage. And I was a little amused that the son of a disabled man and a former beggar had affected the international dialogue at this high level.

All of these great accomplishments aside, however, something significant still haunted me. Deep down, I worried they’d retaliate by killing my father.