Persecution Stories: Myself [part 2] by a Practitioner in Ireland

My own story is that I became a stateless person since February 2001 when my passport of the People’s Republic of China expired. The Chinese Embassy refused to renew it for me; therefore, I had no passport from then on. This has brought great inconvenience. For instance, my work permit renewal would be easily refused if the Irish government were not supportive to me. But fortunately, and thankfully, the Department of Employment issued the work permit for me for another year (until May 2002). I cannot travel outside Ireland, cannot go back to China (if I did, I would not be able to return to Ireland with no passport and visa). Also because I am actively revealing the persecution of the Chinese Government against Falun Gong practitioners, it’s surely that I have been put on their ‘black list’. The evidence of this is that when I went to appeal for Falun Gong in Beijing in January 2000, the Department of State Security officers (secret police) went to my hometown to investigate me, they talked to the local police and blamed them for issuing a passport to me (this is like a joke, I came to Ireland in 1996, and the government banned Falun Gong in 1999, how could the local police predict that they had issued a passport to a ‘dangerous’ person 3 years ago?). They also interrogated my cousin who worked in the local government, searched my brother’s home and asked questions about me.

In Dublin, the Chinese Embassy often calls me and asks me to go to their office where I am ‘educated’. They also consider me as an ‘organiser’ of Falun Gong because I started to introduce Falun Gong to Irish people in early 1998. I used to have severe migraine since I was in school; I suffered from it for over 20 years. I also had very bad back and waist problems, and my health was poor, and I became tired and stressed easily. All these problems were gone without a trace after I began to practise Falun Gong exercises, and following the principles of Truthfulness Compassion Tolerance. I became full of energy all the time, and more caring, kind and peaceful. What a helpful practice! I then decided to share this to as many people as possible in January 1998. In the beginning I held the classes in Dublin City University and students in the college were attending the Falun Gong sessions. Thousands of people have been to the classes; learned the exercises and read the books. Now there are more people spreading Falun Gong with me, who are both Irish and Chinese. All the Falun Gong classes are voluntary. This is because we all benefit from the system and hope that other people could have the same benefits just like we do. After the persecution started in July 1999, I have learned so many cruel and unbelievable stories over the Internet, I cannot bear the feeling of knowing those innocent people being so ill treated by the Chinese government and police, therefore I joined in to reveal the truth of the brutality against the Chinese authorities’ propaganda. Simply because of my above activities, the Chinese embassy took away my rights of having a passport, interferes with my normal life, forced me to quit voluntary Falun Gong teaching, and put me on the black list, etc., etc.

Due to the above reasons, I couldn’t go home to see my mother. And before she left this world, there were only 3 of her 6 children with her, whom she spent a whole life to bring up. Before the persecution, we had a very happy family. When I went home for holidays either from Beijing or Dublin, all my sisters and brother also went home for some days to stay with us and enjoyed the time being together. After my father passed away in September 1998, my poor mother became very lonely. The ordeals of my sisters and my brother speeded up my mother’s death, since she was very worried about them all the time. Her daughters were ‘missing’ to her, her son was constantly detained and tortured (my brother has also been detained many times as he also practises Falun Gong), another daughter (myself) is thousands of miles away and will now never see her again. My family is only an example among those millions of families persecuted in China. There are even families worse than our family. A family in Hubei Province, the son (Peng Min, died 6 April 2001) and the mother (Li Yingxiu, died in May 2001) both were tortured to death, all other family members are either detained in detention centres or in the labour camp (the father, another son and a daughter). Wang Lixuan and her 8-moth-old baby son both were tortured to death in labour camp. There are many other families in which the parents are detained and have been forced to leave young children alone at home with nobody looking after them.

By Dai Dongxue
Ireland
23 October 2001