God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [46]
Liao: So Sapushan was where Christianity in the Miao ethnic region started and developed. How big was the parish?
Wang: It encompassed all the Miao churches in five counties: Wuding, Luquan, Fumin, Lufeng, and Yuanmou. It was the largest Miao parish in Yunnan. Since donkeys were the main means of transportation, preaching the gospel meant days on the road, climbing up and down the mountains. It was very tough. But under the leadership of my father, the parish developed fast. According to documents that I have obtained, before the Communist takeover in 1949, about 5,500 Miao, Yi, and Lisu people were converted and joined the church group in Sapushan. In 1945 my father went to live in the provincial capital of Kunming for three months. He compiled a collection of psalms in the Miao language. That was probably the first Miao hymnal in China.
When the Communists came, all religious activities were banned. In 1951, when I was eleven, my father traveled to Kunming and was ordained as a minister by Chu Huai-an, who had come from Shanghai. At that time, all foreign missionaries had been kicked out of China. The Communist government condemned foreign religions as spiritual opium, tools of invasion to oppress the Chinese people.
Liao: The Land Reform Movement started in 1951. Was your family affected?
Wang: Ours was a poor village. There were no landlords or rich peasants to persecute. Three relatively well-off households were put in the middle-class category, but the rest belonged to the class of poor peasants, allies of the revolution. But while my family was categorized poor peasant, we were Christians and received different treatment. We couldn’t share any of the “fruits of the revolution”—we were not given land, housing, or money.
Liao: Without an evil landlord as its target, how did your village conduct its “class struggle sessions”?
Wang: We would import landlords from other villages to use as targets. People would raise their hands to condemn the landlords, tell their bitter stories about how they had been exploited, and then parade the landlords around in the field. You know, there were a lot of beatings and tortures. The village here didn’t miss a single activity the campaign required. My father took pity on those fallen landlords. He would often sigh in private and say, “I don’t know what’s happening! Those kindhearted people leased their lands to us. They didn’t even charge us that much money. It was very generous of them to do that. But now they are getting all this brutal treatment.”
The government sealed and confiscated the church property in Sapushan and ordered my father to return home and farm under the supervision of the revolutionary peasants. Since he was one of the few literate people in the region, they made him the village accountant. He obeyed because the Bible says you should submit your body to the rulers, but he never stopped his daily prayers.
Sometimes, Christians in other villages would gather at our house late at night. The tense political environment made everyone nervous. All prayer activities went underground. Then the local government assigned members of the local militia to monitor us and interrogate us. They forced my father to confess his close ties with ministers in foreign countries. My father’s situation made it very hard for him to connect with other