(Minghui.org) It was a normal summer day when my mother was taken away by a group of people dressed in police uniforms.
From that day on, my happy and peaceful life was no more.
It all stemmed from the persecution launched by Jiang Zemin, the former dictator of China.
In 1998 when I was ten years old, my mother started practicing Falun Dafa [also known as Falun Gong].
Before 1998, my memory of my home life was filled with my parents’ incessant fights and quarrels and my mother's face growing old and haggard.
After the commonplace stormy exchanges of my parents, my mother would always go to a nearby restaurant where she would sit on a chair with a bottle of wine and a lit cigarette, and I would always run to my mother in my slippers to comfort her, but my mother would always say to me, “Be a good kid. You hurry back home and go to sleep.”
Although I didn’t understand much at that time, I felt my world was collapsing. I often hid under my blanket and cried in secret.
Later, my mother began searching for spiritual help and dragged me to temples and to learn qigong. In the end, she found nothing worked and nothing had changed, that is, until 1998 when my mother began to practice Falun Dafa. Then, everything not only changed but also changed for the better, and better.
Ever since my mother learned Falun Dafa, she told me she knew that this was what she had been searching for all her life.
Mother would take me with her to do the exercises in the park. Every morning, we would get up early to do the first four exercises. Every evening, we would study the Fa teachings. Then, we would do the sitting meditation.
Every day, mother would ride her big bicycle and I would ride my little bicycle, and we would ride to the practice site and Fa study site. Some days, we would join other activities to promote Falun Dafa.
These are my happiest childhood memories. During that year, Falun Dafa took root in my heart and soul.
I began to understand the principles of Dafa and put them into practice. For example, I began to consider everything from others’ points of view.
My family was also quietly changing.
At the beginning, father refused to accept Falun Dafa, then he turned a blind eye to everything mother and I did, but eventually he also started to practice.
Everything was following the path of Dafa. Everything was rectified within Dafa. Everything was moving toward the right direction.
From when I was little, father always impressed me as someone very smart, who always found a way to solve problems, who was particularly kind to people, and someone I admired and idolized.
But he also had a hot temper, and he loved to drink. This all changed when he started practicing Falun Dafa.
He began studying the Fa and doing the exercises with us, and earnestly promoted Dafa.
He quit drinking. He stopped fighting with mother. He would exalt the wonder and goodness of Falun Dafa to one and all, and reiterate personal accounts of how Dafa had changed him into a different and better person.
On the evening of July 20, 1999, broadcast news slandering Falun Dafa began to spread, overwhelming the entire country.
How is this possible? A big question mark showed up in my innocent mind.
I was convinced that anybody who had contact with Dafa or with Dafa practitioners would not believe what television and other media said.
Mother and other practitioners decided to go to Beijing to petition, to clarify the truth about Falun Dafa. I wanted to go too, but mother wouldn’t let me. She left for Beijing with several fellow practitioners.
Before long, mother was arrested in Beijing and sent back home where she was imprisoned in the local police department.
The police coerced family members to persuade mother to give up Falun Dafa, saying that if she would sign a statement renouncing Falun Dafa, she could go home.
Many relatives were concerned about mother, so they advised her not to practice and to sign the statement so she could be released.
I never once asked mother to give up her practice because I know Dafa is the righteous way. I truly felt the changes in my family because of Dafa, so there was no way we would succumb and turn our back on Dafa because of outside pressure.
Mother hung on to her righteous thoughts and remained firm.
Later, mother was sent to a forced labor camp, and my world went gray.
With mother gone, father had to take up the roles of both father and mother to take care of me. Then, in consideration of my education and future, father decided to send me to school in the city and to stay with relatives there.
I knew I had to grow up and could no longer be a child whose main concern was playing all day. I began to turn to studying and learning seriously.
While my relatives were very good to me, and my aunt with whom I lived was kind and generous, but I felt insecure and lonely without my parents. I became very cautious with my words and actions lest I would upset anyone and leave a bad impression.
Those were truly dark days for me. I felt very tired. I couldn’t shake the bad feeling of living off others.
That was when I became keenly aware that having a mother by one’s side is the greatest blessing, and that there’s nothing that can replace the joy and peace that having a mother brings.
I felt my days were hard, but I could imagine mother’s days being illegally locked up in a forced labor camp had to be even much worse. I could imagine her spending every day as if it were a year.
I knew mother was tortured. They used physical violence and mental torment to force her to renounce Falun Dafa. I knew mother was a steadfast Dafa practitioner and would never waver.
Good people are thrown in jail and forced to undergo so-called “transformation” to give up their belief and their conscience.
Perhaps such absurdity can take place only in Communist China, which has become a land without faith, a land of moral decay.
A family, originally basking in quiet happiness, is forcibly turned upside down and fragmented.
This is the direct intended result of the evil act instigated by Jiang Zemin on July 20, 1999 to persecute good people who practice Falun Dafa.
It’s truly unconscionable to mistreat people who strive to be better people and who offer society not one iota of harm, but an abundance of good.
Mother was released after a year, but was rearrested while she was distributing informational materials about Falun Dafa.
When she was thrown back into the detention center, mother went on a hunger strike to protest her illegal arrest and detention.
On the tenth day of her hunger strike, mother was taken to the hospital under police escort. That night, when the guard monitoring her fell asleep, mother escaped the hospital.
Mother then went to the city to help out in an informational materials production site. However, she was eventually arrested again and later subjected to three years of forced labor.
Despite the fact that mother has been detained for a total of more than four years, she remained steadfast in her belief.
On my part, although I no longer had a Fa study and the group exercise environment, my faith in Dafa was deeply rooted and remained imprinted in my heart. Consequently I was able to walk a righteous path even during the extended and lonely time living without my parents.
Now, my mother has been home for ten years, my father has returned to Dafa, and I have learned to work on and produce informational materials.
During the years mother was incarcerated in forced labor camps, for lack of a cultivation environment, father started to become lax in his Dafa practice and slowly went back to his old ways of drinking, and ended up ruining his health.
He came down with cirrhosis of the liver. His eyes turned yellow, and his legs became swollen.
When mother was released and came home, father began to slowly resume Dafa cultivation. He stopped drinking and is once again disease-free. Now, he’s beaming with health and happiness.
I want to publicly denounce the principal culprit, Jiang Zemin.
Jiang Zemin is the one responsible for the illegal persecution he launched against Falun Dafa, bringing so many innocent families to ruination, and causing such devastating social and moral turpitude.
Jiang Zemin must bear full legal responsibility for all of these heinous crimes.
