Mr. Liu and Ms. Deng:
I am Chen Zixiu's daughter. I am sure you both remember Chen Zixiu, the nearly sixty-year old lady that was brutally beaten to death by your clubs just after the Chinese New Year this past February. I have considered meeting and speaking with both of you in person, but I was concerned that you might misunderstand my motives. Instead, I have decided to write to both of you. With the pen in my hand, all I have in my mind is my mother. I dont know where to begin.
My mother just celebrated her 58th birthday on January 3, 2000. She was your elder. She was a very healthy person and probably would have lived for at least another twenty years. Just like my brother and I, both of you are also children and parents to your families. You must know how much we suffered when we lost a member of our family, and how much anger we had towards the murderers.
I was detained by the Public Security Bureau on April 17, while you were still free to walk around free of punishment by the law. You were even commended by the Chinese government. In those days shortly after I lost my mother, I kept thinking that I would take my revenge using the same brutal means that you used upon her. I didn't think that I needed the law to solve the problem because both you and the people you work for seemed to have entirely lost your human nature. But now I hope that we can resolve the issue in a legal manner.
Animals wound and hurt others in order to survive. That is the nature of beasts and the order of the jungle. The difference between human beings and wild animals is that human beings have social morality. In a country with a legal system, human beings also follow and obey the law. With morality and ethics, human society will keep developing towards a better future. Families will have love, people will help each other out, youth will respect and take care of their elders, goodhearted people will be respected, and evil criminals will be punished.
But you and those you work for punished the kindhearted and encouraged the evil! You paid no attention to morality and disregarded all laws. In which direction are you trying to direct society?
Ms. Deng, do you still remember my mother's compassionate smile? Do you still remember her cries of pain when you savagely beat her? I wonder what kind of mental and physical pains she suffered during the last three days of her life, up until the last moment. And yet she did not complain. Ms. Deng, I want to tell you: she was a mother, a senior citizen, and a kindhearted and optimistic person who had been through a great deal of misery in her lifetime. She was a person deserving of respect from all of us. Yet she died in a nation that has a legal system, she died at the beginning of the 21st century, and she died under China's corrupt bureaucratic system. She died as a result of treatment that was so shocking that no one would have ever believed it could still exist in this modern civilized world.
Mom was a beautiful woman. We used to see her pictures in the photo studio's display windows when she was young. We were proud of having such a beautiful mother. Mom was warm and kind. Although we were poor, she always offered help to people she did not even know. At dinnertime, if somebody knocked at our door and asked about renting an apartment, she would leave her meal on the table and take the person all over the village to help them look for one. Mom was healthy and strong. She paid with her own life the price in search of the truth. Although I know that my asking for the details of her death is fruitless, I am still doing it because my mother's behavior has inspired me to not shy away in the face of anger and hatred.
Mom had been through many hardships in her life. Her marriage only lasted for fourteen years because my father had liver cancer when she was thirty-seven years old. She knew that my father's illness would be incurable once it developed to its later stages. Without telling my grandmother, my older brother, and me, she took my father to lots of different places, searching for treatments even though she had never been far away from home before. She took care of my father day and night until he passed away. She lost her own mother a hundred days after our fathers death. That year, mom was thirty-eight years old, my older brother was thirteen, and I was only eleven. She had to take care of two young children with no money and no help.
As a middle aged woman, she deeply understood the difficulty of being a widow. My brother argued and yelled at her because he was too young to understand our family's hardship. He even left home and did not see mom for two years. Every time there was a festival or a holiday, mom suffered deeply in her heart. How many people ever experience this kind of suffering?
The bricks used to build our home were picked out from other people's garbage by my mom and me under the moonlight. In an old fashioned village, without help from either machinery or a husband, the pain she suffered once drove her to sit on the bundles of straw and weep when a sudden rainstorm hit. We still remember all the hardships that mom experienced in her life. There is no way that we can repay her, and now we cannot even see her anymore.
We are now trying to prove the truth, awaken people of goodwill, and call for justice. I don't know if you still have any human nature left. I don't know if you regret what you did, and if you want to confess. But I believe that one day, evil will be punished. I believe that history will give us a fair answer. I also believe that the truth will one day reveal itself to the people. In fact, I once sided with and was misled by the government's propaganda, and I had misconceptions about Falun Gong. I criticized my mom and tried to correct her. It was mom's death that awakened me.
Who is right and who is wrong? Who is kind and who is wicked? I have many regrets. If my mind had been clear and rational, would the result have been so tragic? Shouldn't we think about and question many things based on moms and other practitioners' experiences? Where in the world can you find such a kind of "evil cult" practitioner who never fights back when beaten and never swears when abused even when they are able to? Are there any such kindhearted "cult" practitioners in the world? Not even non-practitioners could bear such brutal persecutions without complaint. Was anything they did actually wrong? What "evil" can you say about them? Just that they found Falun Gong, which benefited both their minds and bodies, to be the true meaning of their lives?
You are actually just the sticks and clubs held in the hands of others, and serve only as a tool of evil. Servility is one of the main reasons for the miseries in our country, and it continually worsens the existing problems. Servility makes corrupted officers feel secure and makes them forget their responsibilities to the people. Those people with no moral restraint in their hearts are always complaining about what they dont have and they encourage the corruption. Every one of them is full of desires for material wealth. And they all have plenty of "good" reasons for their selfishness. They can even give noble reasons for their evil actions. They consider good and kindhearted people to be idiots, and they make their lives miserable.
My mom's death deeply moved my heart. Her faith made her a dignified person. It was this kind of strength that has now made me become a Falun Gong practitioner. Besides, what else can I believe in? Because I am a Falun Gong practitioner, I know that my mother would not hate you. Neither will I. But I want to say this to all those people who are aiding in the evil:
Stop your wrong behaviors! Put down the clubs in your hands! For your own sake, for the sake of humanity, and for the sake of the human society, stop your wicked crimes!
Sincerely,
Zhang Xueling
