A Young Chinese Practitioner's Essay: Mother's Love

An elementary school in Hebei Province recently conducted a "gratitude education" session. The third grade teacher in charge requested the students to write an essay about "being grateful to parents." A Falun Gong practitioner's ten-year-old daughter wrote a paper entitled, "Mother's Love." The full text is as follows:

Mother's Love

My mother loves me very much. She nearly lost her life for me to be able to grow up joyfully and healthily.

My mother is a Falun Gong practitioner. She started practising Falun Gong even before I was born. Mother said that at that time there were many Falun Gong practitioners, and "Zhuan Falun" [This book comprises the principal teachings of Falun Dafa.] was voted by many newspapers to be one of the bestsellers. To this day, mother still keeps the clippings of the announcements in the Beijing Youth Paper and the Beijing Evening News about "Zhuan Falun" being designated as a bestseller.

Afterwards someone in the central government did not allow the practice of Falun Gong. When I was one-and-a-half years old, mother was forcefully taken to a detention centre or prison time and time again, and I had to live with my father and paternal grandmother. I was used to breast feeding, so I refused to bottle feed. I was hungry and cried a lot, and my father and paternal grandmother were under a lot of stress. During that time, my father frequently held me in his arms and silently shed tears.

Mother was detained at the detention centre for a year and a half then imprisoned at the labour camp for two years. When she returned, I was attending kindergarten, and my mother took me and picked me up from the kindergarten every day. On the road, I would sing for my mother, "one fish, swims in the water, lonesome and worrying." Because of my young age, my pronunciation was not clear, and I always pronounced "lonesome (gu-gu-dan-dan)" as "Gu Gu Da Da." My mother finally, with great difficulty, made sense of the lyrics, and she could not help but laugh. I laughed with her. The time I had with my mother was really great.

The good times did not last long, and my mother was detained at a labour camp once again. This time, for my sake, mother did not passively endure. Mother said to the labour camp guards: "My daughter was forcibly separated from her mother since she was a year-and-a-half old. Because she did not have a mother by her side, she became timid and lost her bright spirit. For my child to be able to grow up joyfully and healthily, I have to go home. You are also mothers, I hope you can understand me."

Mother conducted a hunger strike, refusing food and water for ten days. The labour camp guards inserted a tube through mother's nostrils to force feed her; the guards intentionally filled highly-concentrated salt water into my mother's stomach, and the salt water burst from mother's nasal cavity and oral cavity. Mother's stomach was so swollen that she tossed on the bed due to the pain, without closing her eyes all night long. In order to torture mother, the labour camp guards did not permit mother to pull out the tube. Mother could only breathe through her mouth, and her throat and mouth had bloody cracks due to dehydration.

Finally, my mother's blood pressure, pulse, and body temperature all receded. Fearing responsibility for my mother's death, the labour camp agreed to release her.

When, my father and I went to pick up mother, she was very skinny. When my near-death mother saw me, she opened her cracked mouth and smiled.

I finally had my mother again, and I finally can live together with my mother. The feeling of having a mother is really good.

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The child's teacher read the paper aloud to her class, and evaluated the paper as "real and touching."

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2007/5/14/154779.html