It is the annual Employee Appreciation Week at the company that I work for. Because of the COVID-19, also known as the CCP virus, this event is taking place online this year. Each employee is asked to write a question related to him/herself for the team to answer, and then present to the team the story behind it with a photo.
Question:
Who has been on stage and spoke during a press conference in the press conference room on Parliament Hill?
Picture:
Story:
This is a photo of me inside the Canada Parliament Hills Press Conference room in December 2015. In the background of this photo, you can see the former Minister of Justice Mr. Irving Cotler, and a friend of mine from University of Toronto named Hope. I chose this picture because it is a reflection of my life outside work for the past 6 years — to rescue my 63 years old father from prison in China, and to raise awareness about an on-going tragic human rights issue in China for 2 decades. I believe my story is also relevant to all of us today, since the influence of China is impacting people’s lives globally, we should be concerned and informed about what else is happening in China.
PART 1: The Persecution
I was a graduate from University of Waterloo in 2007, with an bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and had a decent Java developer job in downtown Toronto. In 2009, I relocated back to my hometown in China, because my father was in prison for the 5th year. He was sentenced to 8 years of prison because of writing articles that expose the suppression of Falun Gong which started in 1999.
The Chinese government, under the ruling of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is a single-party authoritative regime following the ideas of Communism. Under this system, any ideology or belief that doesn’t conform to Communism (atheist, Marxism, materialism etc.) or the party itself, is not allowed.
Similar to Yoga or Tachi, Falun Gong is a spiritual practice, from the Buddha school. It has a set of gentle exercises and also offers moral teachings with the principle of “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance”. A genuine practitioner not only keeps up the exercises but more importantly cultivates or improves his or her character based on these values. As a result, this practice provides tremendous positive impact on the practitioner’s physical and mental health.
In 1999, the number of people practicing Falun Gong reached 70 million nation wide, the Chinese government saw it as a threat to its totalitarianism control over the population and a national wide persecution was launched on July 1999. People were arrested, jailed, physically tortured, even organ harvested. Many ordinary people were deceived by the state media and hate propaganda and viewed the Falun Gong adherents as psychopaths and murders even until today. This is very similar to other concentration camps today on Uyghurs, Tibetans, suppressions of Hong Kong citizens and and the demonization and marginalization of the other minorities in China.
My father was one of many practitioners who has been peacefully and silently protesting against this human rights crime in China for the past 20 years. Inside the prison, my father went through beatings, humiliations, forced labours. He was locked in solitary confinement for 3 months with extreme physical penalties and almost no food to eat. I visited my father multiple times in those years, but each time I was only able to speak with him for 20 minutes.
In 2012, my father was released from prison, because of the tortures and harsh condition in the prison, his left eye was blind. In the next 2 years we lived in peace, the suppression was still going on, but my father continued doing the same thing he was doing before - to clarify the truth of Falun Gong and expose the crime. We printed articles that we find online on A4 paper, folded them into envelops, and went to rural areas and hand them out to the people live there. This is one of the few grassroots method to spread awareness in China despite the suppression.
We did this for few months and one day on April 2014, as we were giving out the pamphlets in a small town, 3 police cars showed up. The police yelled at us, pushed my father onto the ground, and grabbed our arms and forced us into the police cars, as if we were criminals or murders. One the same night we were thrown into local detention center. Our home was ransacked by the police, our laptops, printers were all confiscated.
I repeatedly requested to contact the Canadian Embassy in Chongqing, but I was told “You do not have such right here, because you are in China”. Four days later, local authorities and the police, escorted me from prison to the airport, and forced me to return to Canada. My father remained in the detention center. In 2015 after a show-trial, the court rejected the attendance to the Canadian Ambassador and sentenced my father to another 8 years of prison. Simply for his belief in Truth, Compassion, and Tolerance, and for trying to tell people the truth.
Between 2014 to 2015, I contacted local medias as well as various Members of Parliament, City Councillors, including staff from Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, and Amnesty International etc. to rescue my father. Most of the politicians and media are quite aware of the Falun Gong issue in China. But few had the courage to truly speak up. We held press conferences inside Parliament Hill, multiple times, to urge Canadian government to take actions. But it did not result in my father’s release. The CCP has more influence and control on the democratic nations than we can imagine.
Since the day I landed on Canada again, I’ve devoted all my spare time to my spiritual cultivation as well as bringing awareness here in Canada, until the day the persecution ends.
PART 2: Raising Awareness
I’m in a marching band since 2015, formed by fellow practitioners. Some of the members are over 70s, some are still in school and universities. I played Euphonium, Tuba and Sousaphone for a period of time. The band is invited to 15–20 parades across the year, including the Stampede parade in Calgary. It often awes the Chinese people in the crowd when they see us, because we are so different from what the Chinese state media and hate propaganda say about us. Even here in Canada, many Chinese people are misled by the Chinese media that we are getting paid by anti-China forces or by the US for everything we do.
In Fall 2019 a small group of young practitioners organized the Art of Zhen-Shan-Ren international exhibition inside City Hall of Toronto and University of Toronto. We’ve had guest speakers and received greetings from city councillors and artists. The exhibition featured realistic oil paintings on canvas done by fellow practitioners, using traditional techniques inspired by the Renaissance. The paintings delivered intriguing messages of joy and peace felt in spiritual cultivation as well as the cruelty of the persecution, which was another way of raising awareness.
In the summer times, I often volunteered for Falun Gong booths at outdoor festivals, to demo & teach the gentle exercise of Falun Gong to the people interested. Other times, I’d bring a pad, a pen, and a pile of unsigned petitions and collect signatures from pedestrians and tell them my story and the persecution.
On February 2019, the coldest days with freezing rain, I decided to try my best to spend an hour every morning before I head to work and stand by the street to collect signatures. If lucky I can get 3 or 4 signatures, sometimes 1 or no signature. Eventually I was able to tell some faces and names and the time they are about to show up. Some of them smiled and encouraged me to keep going. I was there until we all started working from home due to the pandemic. It didn’t matter how small the thing I was doing, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
Now things have changed a lot since the CCP virus, and people have been wondering how it became a pandemic. Mounted evidences are showing that the virus was spotted from China since late Nov. 2019. For 4–6 weeks, the Chinese government covered up information on the spread of the virus and persuaded the W.H.O to stand with them. It eventually led to the outbreak of the pandemic, infecting nearly 8 million lives up until today.
Now, Hong Kong is also facing the same degree of suppression from the CCP because of its status of independence and pro-democracy.
I wish one day justice and freedom will be seen in China again, my father will be safe again. I wish my story could shine some lights on what is truly going on in China under the Communist regime. In fact, the communism has long infiltrated into the ‘free’ nations for decades. We should not to be blinded by the economic growth that the regime wanted to us to see, for “…the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” — George Washington
References:
4. Information on organ harvesting
6. facebook.com/falundafatoronto
7. Documentary film on Tianguo Marching Band (English Narration & Caption) (My story told from: 23:44–29:30)
https://youtu.be/1r8sR-tKmC4
