A Daughter’s Dilemma (Part I)
From the Cultural Revolution to the one-child policy and religious persecution, how the Chinese Communist Party’s repression haunts a family
Editor’s note: I first met Lydia two years ago and have worked closely with her as she has sought help from the U.S. government to gain freedom for her mother, imprisoned in China for sharing information about Falun Gong. Each time we meet, new elements of her vivid and heart-wrenching story emerge, but also Lydia’s own deep yet understated strength in overcoming so many challenges. The Chinese Communist Party's suppression has touched her family in many ways, even before the regime started persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, so we chose hers for our first story to share on Unsilenced China Voices.
During the summer of 2022, I saw a message from my sister: my mom was missing. She reported it to the police, only to discover that they were the ones who had come and arrested her. When my sister went to check her apartment, the place was a mess; the police had ransacked everything. I put down the phone, shaken. I had known this could happen, but it was still a shock, and I was worried about what might happen to her next.
This was the 11th time my mom had been detained by Chinese police since 1999. We lost my father in 2009 because of torture in custody. My mother has never met her grandchildren. And all because our family practices Falun Gong, a spiritual and meditation practice that has brought our lives health, meaning, and inspiration, but which the CCP is determined to stamp out.
Living now in New York as a naturalized U.S. citizen, I’m grateful for the freedom I have to share my story on a platform like Substack. I hope it gives readers a clearer sense of the depths of the CCP’s depravity and the impact of its actions on generations of Chinese people.
Early challenges under CCP rule
Our history begins like many Chinese families. My parents, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Hunan, grew up during a tumultuous period and witnessed the Cultural Revolution as young adults. My father’s family was already on the regime’s blacklists because his grandfather had fled to Taiwan at the end of China’s civil war.
At the age of 29, my father was finally able to take the college entrance exam and attend university, thanks to the influence of another relative. He met my mother, and they both became teachers, settling down for a busy life as part of China’s emerging middle class.
My two older sisters were born, but then my parents ran up against the regime’s one-child policy. When I was born, my mother lost her teaching job. My younger brother Steven was born in the late 80s; then it was my father’s turn. He was dismissed from his job and, as a CCP member, also fined by the Party for having too many children.
My parents started their own business but despite years of hard work, it failed to turn a profit. We were facing serious financial troubles. The stress took a toll on my father’s health. He suffered from depression and other ailments, the cost of his medicines adding to the economic burden he felt.
A sliver of hope
It was around that time, in 1996, that one of my father’s friends and business associates introduced him to Falun Gong. The practice had started spreading in China in the early 1990s and by then had gained millions of believers. After only a few months of practicing Falun Gong’s meditation and qigong exercises, studying its spiritual teachings, and aspiring to follow its core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, my dad emerged from his depression and looked healthier than he had in years. We all saw the change in him.
My mom and we four children took up the practice, joining him each morning at a meditation practice site in a local park near our home in Hunan to do Falun Gong’s slow-moving exercises. My father was one of the coordinators for the site, which drew 20 to 30 people most days.
The Falun Gong community in the city was broader, though. I recall going to a courthouse to watch videos of Mr. Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong’s founder, lecturing on the practice’s spiritual teachings, with hundreds of people in the audience. In a city whose population at the time was 350,000, that was a notable turnout. I was fifteen years old and oblivious to the preciousness of that brief period when Falun Gong practitioners in China could practice freely.
Dark clouds return
"Where is your mom? Is she okay?" he asked. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had also been detained.
Everything changed the summer of 1999. On July 20, rumors circulated that the regime had banned Falun Gong and that coordinators from meditation sites were being arrested. Two days later, the evening state-run news broadcast announced that Falun Gong was now banned and anyone who continued to practice could face arrest. Television programs, newspapers, and radio broadcasts spouted around-the-clock lies, making it sound like Falun Gong practitioners were crazy, violent, dangerous, and hurt their families.
It was so far away from what we had experienced, but those who didn’t know Falun Gong believed it.
Given the small size of our city, it took time for this latest CCP political campaign to reach us. But in late 1999, police came to our door.
They said they had been monitoring my family for a long time, all the more so because my parents traveled to Taiwan frequently to visit relatives, an indication of potential treachery in the minds of Chinese security services. The police beat my father in front of us until he was nearly unconscious and dragged him away to a detention center. He was interrogated, tortured, and forced to watch CCP propaganda demonizing and distorting Falun Gong.
My father was released, but that was only the beginning.
Within a few months he was arrested again, and so was my mom. My big sister took my siblings and me to see my dad where he was detained. Initially, the police denied us access, but after a relative paid 500 yuan, we were allowed to visit with him for a few minutes. The only way to communicate was by writing on chalkboards and holding them up to the window. “Where is your mom? Is she okay?” he wrote.
We didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had also been detained. We just cried and tried to encourage him.
Those first arrests were a preview of what was to come: an endless cycle of detentions, abuse, release, police harassment, and family separation. Through it all, even when we have been unable to be together, we’ve felt a deep connection—that in following our conscience, persisting in our faith, and speaking out against the persecution, we are contributing to something larger than ourselves and, through our sacrifice, building a brighter future for China and our children, all while advancing on our own spiritual paths.
My father was arrested four times after the persecution began, and each time, he was severely tortured in detention.
On September 20, 2002, he was detained again because he was a well-known local practitioner. After several months at a detention center, his health deteriorated. A doctor told the detention center staff that if he was not released that day, he would die in custody. The detention center initially refused to release him and transferred him to a drug rehabilitation center instead. There, his health did not improve. Finally, to avoid responsibility should he die, the center released him. He was unable to walk, and his kidneys were failing.
My older sister quit her job to take care of him and had to break the news—my mother had been arrested and sent to a labor camp. He was heartbroken when he found out.
My brother leaves home
In 2008, my younger brother Steven received a life-changing opportunity—to move to the United States and become a dancer with Shen Yun Performing Arts. Steven had started dancing when he was eight years old and dreamed of becoming a professional dancer. He was attending a boarding school for aspiring dancers in Chongqing, sparing him from the hardships and persecution my parents were facing during the early 2000s.
At the time, Shen Yun was just starting out. This was a chance for him to contribute to a grander mission of reviving the beauty of China’s traditional culture—a beauty the CCP has sought to destroy and distort to maintain its grip on power—and to give voice to stories of present-day persecution like my family’s own.
So in the spring of 2008, my parents hugged him goodbye. Little did we realize that he would never see our father again.
Despite receiving treatment at a local hospital, my father’s health continued to deteriorate. In September 2009, he died from kidney failure, having never recovered from the damage done to his body during his multiple detentions. He was only 62 years old, and narrowly missed being able to walk me down the aisle at my wedding.
Police probing
“It would be a shame for your baby to grow up without a mother," the agents warned.
It was during this time that the police learned of Steven’s departure for the United States and his start with Shen Yun. Our family became an even higher-priority target, with Chinese security forces claiming Steven’s artistic career was a “threat to national security.”
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when police called me on my wedding day. When I didn’t pick up, they called my husband, asking questions about my brother’s life in the United States and his involvement with Shen Yun.
After my wedding, my husband and I moved to Guangdong Province, which meant I couldn’t see my mother as often. But in 2011, I visited her while on maternity leave after my first daughter’s birth. One morning, my mother had gone out to the supermarket, and my husband, sister, and I were eating breakfast when police came to the door. They asked for all our phone numbers and kept questioning us about my brother. We simply replied that he had gone to study abroad.
A few months later, after I had resumed my job teaching at a college, agents from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) visited me at work. They took me to a room in the school and questioned me for hours about my brother. I suspect they didn’t realize I was also a Falun Gong practitioner, or they would have been harsher. Again, I repeated that my brother had gone to the United States to study, and that my mother had told me Falun Gong was good.
They eventually left, but not before threatening me with arrest and torture. I froze, my blood running cold at their words. “It would be a shame for your baby to grow up without a mother."
They also called my husband with further threats and intimidation.
By the summer of 2012, our family’s situation had worsened. My sisters and I continued to face harassment, and my mom was repeatedly detained. To make matters worse, I discovered that I was pregnant with a second child. Under the one-child policy still in effect at that time, I would either need to have an abortion or face a hefty fine—or even arrest.
After learning about my pregnancy, I decided to visit my brother in the United States.
My family advised me not to return.
To be continued…
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The evil conducts of the CCP regime must be stopped!