Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [74]
She thought of her first posting as a judicial clerk-secretary in that county-level court. And of the pressure on her to agree to all those executions. The examples her colleagues brought up to sway her were of Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Luoyang, all of which towns had executed forty or fifty people. Even a backwater like Jiaozuo had executed thirty people. When Little Xi visited Luoyang, Kaifeng, and Zhengzhou, the events of the 1983 crackdown never entered her head. But when she went to Jiaozuo the events of that year appeared right before her eyes.
Those events had changed her life forever and proved she was not cut out to be a judge in the People’s Republic of China.
Little Xi stayed in bed for two days in a small inn in Jiaozuo before coming to a decision. She resolved to rid herself of the ghosts of the 1983 crackdown. In the early morning of the third day, she took a small bus toward Wen County, Jiaozuo, and went to the Warm Springs township. She walked around aimlessly until she passed a big house where the front gate was open and a number of friendly-looking, elegant people were milling around in the yard.
There was a spring couplet pasted on the gate. The top line read: “Heaven bestows the Tree of Life / Faith, hope, and love abide eternally.” The bottom line read: “The Spring of Life gushes from the earth / Body, mind, and soul dedicated completely.”
Is this a home church? wondered Little Xi. Aren’t they supposed to be underground? How can they be so open?
At that point, the people in the yard disappeared into the building, leaving only one middle-aged man standing by the gate looking at Little Xi. He took a few steps toward her, and she saw that he was lame. “Please come in,” he said to her. Little Xi walked slowly into the yard with her eyes fixed on the banner on the house front: GRAIN FALLEN ON THE GROUND DOES NOT DIE.
She thought to herself, I’ve only ever heard that the spirit does not die, or that matter cannot be destroyed, but this says that a grain of wheat never dies—it certainly accords with philosophical materialism.
The man responsible for the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground was called Gao Shengchan. From his name, meaning “high level of production,” one could easily tell that his parents had been minor local officials who had given their children names like “Production” and “Planning” in accordance with government policies at the time of their births.
Two years earlier, Gao Shengchan, Li Tiejun, and three others had organized an underground Protestant church in Jiaozuo City. But they soon came into conflict with the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Church, were arrested by the Public Security police on orders from the local Bureau of Religion, and were sent to prison. There they dubbed themselves “grain fallen on the ground,” from Jesus’s parable that if only one grain of wheat fell on the ground and died, it would then give birth to a great deal more wheat. They had already resolved to die for their religion and they grew even stronger in prison; they would never abandon God’s work. After their release, they were all the more resolute. Li Tiejun, who had made some money in business, bought a piece of land in the Warm Springs township, built a big meeting house, and established a Christian fellowship. Four leaders set up fellowships in the villages around Jiaozuo and put into practice Mao Zedong’s policy of “the countryside surrounding the city.” Gao Shengchan traveled between these four fellowships preaching the gospel. Nowadays the Bureau of Religion and the Public Security police no longer bothered them as before. Even more unusual was that almost more people than the fellowships could handle were asking to join their church.
More than thirty people now participated in the Warm Springs fellowship’s daily witness meetings and Bible-study sessions, and there were upward of two hundred people