God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [76]
On December 20, 1979, after Father came back from the field, an officer came into his dorm and handed him a sheet of paper, which said: “Criminal Yuan Xiangchen has been granted parole. During the parole period, which starts from the date of his release to 1989, he shall not leave his residence in Beijing. Yuan shall report regularly his activities and his thinking to the local public security bureau.” With the parole paper in hand, he packed immediately and walked three kilometers to the bus stop, caught a train at the next town, crossed three provinces, and arrived in Beijing. His telegram saying he was coming home had been a complete surprise.
My eldest brother had written to the local court, saying that my father had been wrongly accused by the fanatics in the Mao era and asking the judge to follow government policy and reverse my father’s verdict and clear his name. My brother was told that Father was the ringleader of a counterrevolutionary clique and the verdict would stand. He was given a form letter stating: “We have carefully reviewed your request. We believe that the original verdict reached by our court against your father still stands. The charges against him remain unchanged.” The letter, dated November 16, 1979, bore the court’s stamp.
Liao: And barely a month after that, your father is out on parole . . .
Yuan: The Communist Party can be capricious.
We were all at the station to meet him, but, eager to get home, he didn’t linger and took a late night bus at the Baitasi stop. He walked around the neighborhood, trying to find our house, and began shouting my mother’s name. My sister-in-law was home and heard my father call. It was the first time they met. By the time we got home, Father was soaking his feet in a basin of hot water.
Liao: How did your father adjust himself to life outside prison?
Yuan: It wasn’t easy. He was completely out of touch with the realities of modern life, but while he had to reconnect with the physical, he remained in tune with the spiritual. If anything, his faith had grown stronger. After 1979 many people who had been jailed for religious beliefs were released. If they openly expressed support for the government-sanctioned Three-Self churches, the Religious Affairs Bureau would assign them jobs, offer them compensation, and allocate housing. Wu Mujia joined a Three-Self church and got a teaching job at the Yanjing Theology Academy. He lived a very comfortable life. My father didn’t even bother to ask the court to clear his name and soon resumed his religious activities.
He turned our house into a church. Initially, he preached to ten people at our house. Within a few years, his congregation was three hundred and his house church was the biggest in Beijing. Our house was certainly too small to accommodate such a number—we would dismantle our beds to make more room—and soon the whole alley was packed with followers when he preached. We used to have a joke: “We are short of everything at home, except Bibles and benches, and we were given those.” My father still holds that the government and the church should be separate and that the church should also be self-sustaining. Several foreign Christian organizations such as Open Doors have offered help by donating Bibles. Father doesn’t believe his house church should be registered as a nonprofit organization as that would place him under government authority. Our house has been ransacked several times, and we are being constantly harassed, but my father’s position