(Clearwisdom.net) I believe that the Chinese ruling Party is good at making things up, especially fabricating the most indecent and shameless tales, hypocritically playing upon the last vestiges of human decency and morality and then forcing people to listen to lies and lose their faculties of critical thinking in order to instigate hatred. How does the Party manage to accomplish that? It was only a few days ago that I began to understand the process a little bit.
Both my parents lost their fathers to the Communist Party. One was executed with a bullet and the other persecuted to death. My parents were considered by the Party as "children who can be re-educated despite questionable lineage" and allowed to go to school and receive a good education. Both of them graduated from college in the 1950s. But both of them did suffer a lot because of their "questionable lineage." My father was singled out for "special treatment" and was almost driven to commit suicide when he was a youngster. People who grew up the way my parents did invariably are afraid of getting involved in "politics." They just want to be left alone. When my sister and I were young, we were taught to be good people, be diligent in our studies and keep to ourselves. We were very good students. We witnessed what a difficult time my parents had while we were young. After we grew up, we tried very hard to be good to them and frequently bought them expensive gifts. My parents were very proud of us, and their reputation as good parents spread far and wide. People asked for parenting advice from them constantly. Even after I came to the US, my Mom often told me to write letters to children of so-and-so and offer them advice on how to be good students and how to be good to their parents. That went on for more than 10 years.
In 2000, my parents came to the United States to visit my sister and me. I had not seen them for many years. At that time, even though I had just been practicing Falun Gong for a short period of time, I had already recovered from my prolonged stomach ailment. I became very cheerful and full of happiness and wished to share the beauty of Falun Gong with everyone. How was I to know that a violent upheaval in the family was about to take place? I was totally unprepared for it. For many years, I was the pride and joy of my parents and they depended on me heavily. Before that, I had made a number of choices that my parents didn't agree with. For example, when I lived in China, I once had a stable job at a state-owned enterprise in China, a job that was practically guaranteed for life. I got bored with that job and decided to resign and start a business on my own. My parents couldn't understand why I would give up a secure and stable life but they trusted my judgment and supported my decision. Therefore, I was shocked and dismayed to see that when the topic of "Falun Gong" came up my father climbed immediately to the pinnacle of hysteria. I did not expect that the filthy lies spread about Falun Gong, that most poisonous deceit, would have seized my father, hook, line and sinker! I never expected that no matter how I tried to explain things to him, he would not accept a single word of what I said.
The thing that shocked me the most was my father's deep hatred of Falun Gong. I thought he knew the true nature of the ruling Party because of his own experience. When I first left for college, my father had told me about his own family's history. After the Party executed his own father, he and his mother were left in despair. When he was eighteen years old, he was left with no choice but to leave home and try to start a new life for himself. His mother also decided to leave home and try her luck in the great wilderness of northern China. She wasn't quite 40 years old yet and her hair had turned gray. On that day that he left home, she hurriedly caught up with him and handed him a cylindrical roll of freshly wound silk. That was the only possession of hers that was worth even a penny. When he told me the most sorrowful stories, he seemed sad but not hateful. Even when he spoke about how he nearly committed suicide, he just laughed it off. He said that he often lay in the open and desolate wilderness at night and cried his heart out. He often thought about committing suicide then but always dropped that idea when the stars appeared in the sky.
Because of his hatred toward Falun Gong, my father became a different and strange person to me. Even though we had not seen each other for such a long time, we still corresponded through letters and by telephone. My highest monthly expense was my telephone bill. When I tried to clarify the facts about Falun Gong, I begged him to listen to me because of his love for me, but I did not succeed. He was burning with rage. His abusive language left me groping for a reason. I was at a total loss when he repeated the slanderous lies that the ruling Party had spread about Teacher. I just couldn't listen to him anymore. I lost my temper and yelled, "You'd better not bring the filth of the ruling Party to the United States; you should at least talk with some basic reasoning. If you keep repeating groundless personal attacks against my Teacher, our relationship will end here."
Later, I lent him a copy of Zhuan Falun (1) to read. I valued the book deeply because it had been published in China and there aren't too many copies of that printing of the book left. I had hoped that after reading the book he would realize he was wrong about Falun Gong and Teacher. When my parents left the United States after their visit and went back home, I opened the book [that I had lent him] and was utterly shattered... Even today, as I write about this experience, I can't stop my hands from trembling.
My father had used a ballpoint pen to write the most spiteful words in all the empty spaces in the pages. I felt extremely heartsick. How could my own father have been so heartless? I was hopelessly heartbroken. I called him and said: "Why did you trample upon the most cherished beliefs in your daughter's heart? You can at least show some respect to me and others." I asked my mother whether she knew what he had done. My mother replied that on the issue of Falun Gong, she had quarreled with him on several occasions. Even my mother felt that he had gone too far.
As time passed, I still continued to ask my parents about how they were, but we could no longer behave with the same affection as we had in the past towards each other. My father never regretted what he did. They returned to the US to visit my sister and me two more times. During both visits, the issue of "Falun Gong" remained like a time bomb about to explode at any time. My father frequently used innuendoes to attack Falun Gong and I was always trying to clarify the facts. It was as if we were fighting a protracted war. My mother was always trying to patch things up and reconcile the two parties. She only hoped that her daughter would no longer be hurt (but having been influenced by the rumors and fabricated propaganda, she definitely doesn't see eye to eye with Falun Gong on a personal level either). There were several occasions when she was about to kneel down before my father to calm down his anger; and those moments shocked me greatly. For as long as I remembered, it was always what my mother said in the family that counted. She had been the head of the family.
I didn't know how to control the situation. I lost my right to speak and explain [the truth] in the house. To this day, the longest I have been able speak and explain the situation about Falun Gong is not more than half a minute. My father is fine as long as we talk about anything else. The type of hostility that my father held against Falun Gong is incomprehensible.
As a scholar, my father has two addictions. First, he enjoys helping the people that he has interviewed (mainly people who were considered right-wingers and were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976) to get justice. Secondly, he worships and has blind faith in modern science. I told him jokingly that his worship of modern science is a result of having read too many science articles by those who don't understand science themselves, and many concepts he has about science are wrong. He wasn't offended at all and said that he wished he had my two Master's degrees in Science. I then said, "You know that my knowledge doesn't end with just science. Have you forgotten that I used to study the Analects of Confucius and had memorized it so well that when you wrote your essays and needed to quote Confucius, you used to consult me? My knowledge of classical Chinese is such that I was so absorbed in reading Bainian Gudu (Century of Isolation) as to forget about eating or sleeping and you could not even understand the classical Chinese language used in the book?" He agreed with that assessment as well. Then I tried to say, "Since I do know a thing or two, you should at least listen to what I have to say on the subject of Falun Gong." But before I could even finish my sentence, his countenance suddenly changed and his enmity instantly appeared. I asked in despair, "Why would you rather believe in the Communists, who murdered your father, than in your own daughter?" He made a rather outrageous statement, "I have never believed in the Communists, but this is a different matter!" Why is it not the same? Can a wolf that feeds on sheep change to feed on grass?
Five years have passed by in a flash. It wasn't until practitioners filed a lawsuit in the US against Zhao Zizhen for "inciting hatred" that I began to study "The Tales of Li Hongzhi," a program that Zhao and others produced. I cried after I watched it. The loathsome slanders against my Teacher are too shameless, brazen, outrageous and farfetched. The program was filled with blatant personal attacks and attempts at character assassination! Many such programs and articles have been broadcast to all levels of society in the name of the nation. It actually duped my father, who is generally recognized as a good person, a man with more than thirty years of involvement in the news media, and a man who has the title of professor. Why? It is because the filthy and despicable concocted lies took advantage of the last vestiges of conscience and the small bit of righteousness left in people, in order to instigate the hatred. Because of such lies, people can no longer calmly and rationally think things through for themselves.
When Judas betrayed Jesus, he was permanently branded with shame and disgrace. In his program, Zhao found several "Judases," former students of Teacher who were expelled from the practice due to severe defects in moral character, to vilify Mr Li. Why do people believe in the things that those "Judases" said? Why don't people think about the motives of such people?
When Jesus was spreading the gospel, were the religious elders not enraged with jealousy towards Jesus? Did they not mock Jesus as being only a carpenter, thus slandering and vilifying the truth?
For the last several years, my Teacher has silently borne all injustice and has never uttered a word in self-defense. I have attended virtually all the large-scale Fa Conferences since 1999 and have seen Teacher on many occasions. On each occasion, whenever he lectured to his students, Teacher has time and again taught us to be good people, and to be even better people. He has continually reminded us to be kind and benevolent towards those who have been deceived by the poisonous propaganda about "Falun Gong." We have been taught never to quarrel with others, and never to harbor any hatred against anyone, but to treasure the better part of those people by clarifying the truth to them in the hope that they will eventually change their hearts.
As I read those fabricated lies and poisonous attacks about my Teacher, I suddenly realized why my father was so impervious to reason when discussing the issue of "Falun Gong." It was because Jiang and his clique misused the state apparatus in the most rotten, sinister and venomous way to plant hatred into the minds and bodies of people who did not know the facts about Falun Gong. The hatred is like a toxin that has gradually pervaded the blood, the marrow, the brain, and eventually completely gained control and manipulated the people to lose their individual reason.
It appears that if I do not clarify the facts about Falun Gong, I will lose my father forever. I must expose the lies of Jiang and his clique, as there are still many people in China like my father who are being hoodwinked into hatred. They assist Jiang and his hoodlums in their evil deeds, murdering innocent people, and will eventually be destroyed by their own hatred. Can someone say that I am getting involved in politics? I am about to lose my father. How can I just remain silent?
Note: This article was first translated from Chinese and published in English on the Pureinsight website.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2004/7/21/28316.html
English version: http://www.pureinsight.org/pi/articles/2004/9/6/2515.html