Return Justice to My Father

My father, Yi Sirong, is a Falun Gong practitioner. Mother and I missed father during his month-long detention. Many relatives and friends also cared about father's well-being. Mother rushed about exhausted between Chendu City and Wanzhou District to rescue father, and many fellow practitioners also made great efforts to help.

Father was previously an electrician at the Sichuan Metallurgy Plant. Since he began practising Falun Gong in 1996, father has tried to become a good and better person, by living according to the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.

Father was addicted to smoking before taking up the practice but then completely eliminated that bad habit. Family members were surprised at Falun Gong's miraculous power. Father also stopped drinking. Mother and I were happy for father from bottom of our hearts!

Father was a group supervisor. His colleagues sometimes sent him gifts to get preferential treatment. Prior to practising Falun Gong father would accept those gifts, but not since. If others asked him for help, as long as he could handle the request, he tried his best to help. He worked more diligently, and his colleagues and supervisors thought well of his work.

After the Chinese Communist regime started to suppress Falun Gong, father and mother went to Beijing to appeal. The police arrested and took them back to local police station where they were detained. Leaders from father and mother's company went to the police station and petitioned for the release of my parents, to let them return to work. But the police forced those leaders to dismiss my parents from their jobs. Later, father's brother, people from my parents' plant, and street community office staff colluded with each other to change father's name to my uncle's name on father's property ownership certificate, so we lost our home.

In late December 2000, the police arrested father again and subjected him to three years of forced labour. We barely recognised him when he returned. Our strong father had become a walking corpse. He looked so weak, as if a gust of wind would blow him over. His once luxuriant black hair had given way to an almost bare head. The guards had knocked out several of his teeth, and now he could barely eat any solid food.

After the regime started persecuting Falun Gong and my parents lost their jobs, we had to rely on scant savings and on the help from relatives and friends. Father rested for a while and then found a job as an electrician in an estate management company. Thus he was able to provide for my education and life's necessities. One day in August 2004, however, over ten police officers from Chengdu Security Department, the Fuqing Road Police Station and the Chenghua District 610 Office¹ arrived and tried to arrest father. Father escaped and fled our home, concerned for our family's safety.

On July 31st, 2009, Wanzhou District Baiyan Police Station agents arrested father and held him in the Wanzhou Detention Centre. Mother wasn't informed until a week later that my father was imprisoned, but we still didn't know why and how father was arrested. Mother decided to go to Wanzhou District with me, to look for father.

We arrived in Wanzhou on August 27th, a month after father's arrest. We went immediately to the Wanzhou Detention Centre, hoping to give my father some daily necessities that we had brought with us. The detention centre officials were unable to find father's name on their list and told us that there was no such person there. We had to return to the police station to inquire about the situation.

Mother asked officers at the Baiyan Police Station whether they arrested our father and where they detained him. First floor reception desk officers said they were unclear about that and needed to ask their supervisor upstairs. One of them went upstairs and the other told my mother and me to wait for a while. A long time elapsed, and the officer who had gone upstairs didn't return. A woman officer arrived and spoke with the officers who was with us. She told us to go upstairs, to talk in detail. As we anxiously wanted to know what happened to our father, we followed her to the certificate affairs office on the third floor. She told us that they arrested father as he violated a law. When we asked her what law father violated, she avoided answering our question and merely said that she didn't know the details. Her attitude was bad from the beginning. Our repeated inquiries into my father's circumstances did not persuade her to tell us the facts.

The policewoman stopped us from leaving, and five other police officers surrounded us. They rudely dragged and pulled us and took us upstairs to interrogate us. A police officer surnamed Yang showed up and said he was in charge of father's case. He told us that our father was being held at the Wanzhou Detention Centre and was on a protest hunger strike. He had been detained for more than a month after we finally knew where he was detained.

We once again went to the detention centre to inquire about my father's circumstances. This time the guard rescinded his previous statement and admitted that our father was detained there. He quickly found father's name on a list.

We decided to hire a lawyer to represent us, but needed a formal written notice of my father's detention, which we did not have. We went to the police station again on September 3rd, and asked them to give us our father's detention notice. We waited for two hours for the notice we should have received a month prior. It took the clerks two hours to get it ready for us because they needed to report, get approval and print it at the time we asked for it, as it had not been previously prepared. With the notice in hand in the afternoon, we also received the judgement for forced labour. They charged my father with "breaching execution of state laws by using a cult." The specific charges were as follows: "A laptop, MP3, MP4 containing Falun Gong materials were found at Falun Gong practitioner Li xx's home, whose address is xxxx. He was arrested by police at the site." The charges sounded like fabricated nonsense!

Within one day we got the detention notice in the morning, and in the afternoon father was transferred to the Wanzhou Forced Labour Camp. The officials tried their best to prevent us from meeting with him.

I call on the kind-hearted people around the world to help stop the Communist regime's persecution of good people like my father.

Note

1. "The 610 office" is an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and all other political and judiciary systems.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2009/9/8/207888.html