God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [73]
To support the family, my mother went out and got a temporary job at a construction site. It was a hard-labor job that nobody else wanted. My mother was grateful for any job, even though it hardly paid anything.
Liao: Between 1955 and 1958, Christian ministers were arrested and churches nationwide were closed down. In Beijing, more than sixty churches were combined into four, and those four were shut down in the Cultural Revolution. In a way, the government got what it wanted, the elimination of all religious activities in China.
Yuan: But they could not control what is in people’s hearts. In those difficult years, we would join our mother in prayer every day. One day, my mother couldn’t find anything to feed her six children. She knelt and prayed, “God, we don’t have rice. We don’t have flour. We don’t have anything to eat. It’s going to be like this tomorrow. If you think we should suffer like this, we will accept it. I will feed them with hot water . . .”
The next day, a woman came to our door. “Is this Brother Yuan’s home?” she asked. My mother nodded. The woman took an envelope from her pocket and handed it to my mother. Inside the envelope was fifty yuan. Mother looked up to thank the woman, but she had gone. Fifty yuan was enough to feed the family for two months. Mother knelt and offered her thanks to God. Over the next two decades, we regularly received anonymous cash in the mail.
Liao: When did you learn your father’s fate?
Yuan: We had no news of his whereabouts until November 1958, when a clerk from the local court came to our house and handed my mother a copy of the court’s verdict. We learned that he had gotten life imprisonment. When facing persecution from secular authorities, Christians never appeal. So my mother followed this tradition. It would have been futile anyway.
In December my father sent a postcard to us from a prison in Beijing, indicating the date of our first allowed family visit. So my mother brought me, my youngest sister, and my grandmother to Zixing Road.
The waiting room was packed with visitors. Small groups were allowed in for thirty minutes at a time. Father’s head had been shaved and he looked feeble. We were so excited to see each other. We simply held hands and didn’t know what to say. My mother meant to tell him that more Christian brothers and sisters had been arrested, but a guard stood by our side throughout the visit.
Liao: Did your father meet any fellow Christians in prison?
Yuan: Yes. One night in 1959, the prisoners were watching a propaganda film outside, when he noticed that sitting in front of him was his mentor, Reverend Wang Mingdao. They looked at each other for a few seconds. Neither said anything, but they both looked up at the sky—referring to their Lord in heaven.
Sometimes, my father might run into a Christian he knew, but he became very cautious. While he was at a detention center, a former Catholic reported to the authorities that my father continued to preach during incarceration. He was punished.
At the end of summer in 1960, there was famine in many parts of China and crime rates went up dramatically. Prisons in Beijing were overcrowded. So the government decided to send prisoners with long sentences to the labor camps in Xingkaihu, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, along the border with the then Soviet Union. My father was one of them.
When they first arrived, they slept in tents fenced in with barbed wire and made bricks to build their own prison, after which they slept side by side in dormitories on a single fifty-meter-long bed.
In the winter, the temperature in Heilongjiang dropped to minus thirty degrees centigrade. While working in the field one day, a fellow prisoner noticed that my father’s nose