God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [72]
At the end of 1957, the government reached out to my family one last time to “save” my father. A director at the local Public Security Bureau called my mother, asking her and my grandmother to show up at the local religious-affairs office. When they arrived, the deputy director greeted them with some harsh advice: “I’ve invited you over with the hope that you could talk with Yuan Xiangchen and change his mind. Like the Chinese saying goes, ‘Rein in the horse at the edge of a cliff.’ We can’t put up with his difficult attitude any longer. He is still young, only forty-four years old. You should assist the government in rescuing him. Don’t mistake our benevolence for weakness. If we want to lock him up, we can, in an instant. When that happens, your whole family will suffer.”
Liao: “Rein in the horse . . .” was used during the Cultural Revolution as an ultimatum.
Yuan: My father knew immediately what those words meant.
Liao: Couldn’t your father make some concessions for the sake of his family? There was no justification for your father to put his family through such suffering.
Yuan: He had thought carefully about such questions. He had also taken counsel from many friends. But the biggest misfortune for a Christian does not lie in the calamity that befalls him in this world. It is the betrayal of God for the sake of secular things on earth. Even if you are able to protect your relatives or your material possessions, your soul will forever be locked in darkness, without any prospect of salvation. My father believed that was the most terrible calamity.
Liao: I was in jail for a long time, but I still can’t see myself as determined as your father. If the authorities had used my relatives and friends as hostages to threaten me, forcing me to give up my faith, I would have written confessions, lied, done whatever was needed.
Yuan: But you wouldn’t chop off your right hand and swear never to write again, would you?
Liao: Of course not.
Yuan: It’s the same principle. My father would not betray his faith, because it was his life. When a person loses his life, then what does he have left for his family?
In those long sleepless nights, my father would kneel and pray for courage. He faced two paths: he could express his willingness to change and join the government’s Three-Self church, or he could accept imprisonment and separation from his family.
My father prayed for ten days, during which time no one came to bother him. He started to think that the government might change its mind about arresting him. At about eleven o’clock on the night of April 19, 1958, police came for my father. They knocked politely on the door first. Two policemen from the local ward stood outside. They “invited” my father for a quick meeting at the local Public Security Bureau office. There, several policemen were waiting for him. They read his arrest warrant and handcuffed him. He was charged with being “an active counterrevolutionary.” At the same time, a group of soldiers ransacked our house, sweeping copies of the Bible, hymnals, and other Christian reading material onto the floor and trampling them. They opened and emptied trunks, went through every cupboard. With iron bars, they searched for hiding places under the wooden floor and in the walls, tearing out sections whenever they heard a hollow sound. They even scoured the pond used for baptism rituals. They found nothing out of the ordinary for a preacher; no gold nuggets, no anti-Communist materials. At four-thirty in the morning, the soldiers left with a truckload of books and everything of any value. We children stood and watched. I shall never forget that night.
My father did not come home again for twenty-one years and eight months. Mother, now the wife of an active counterrevolutionary, was stripped of her job as street committee director. My seventeen-year-old brother, who had been