NEW YORK—Han Guangzi pried open her eyes when her phone lit up unusually early with a beep.
The next moment, she was wide awake, trying to take in the news she most dreaded.
On her phone was one line from her mother: “Your dad was arrested again.”
“It’s the nightmare all over again,” she told The Epoch Times.
Ms. Han, a U.S. citizen, had lived in the nightmares for the first 13 years of her life in China: a country where her faith, Falun Gong, is a forbidden word.
Like countless families at the time, the Hans lived in suspension in 1999 when a sweeping persecution began in communist China, targeting the meditation discipline’s over 70 million adherents who lived by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
The state-run highway system in China’s northernmost province Heilongjiang fired her father Han Wei, who worked as an office director there, in 1999 after he refused to renounce his belief, cutting off the family’s main income source. His first arrest happened when Ms. Han was not yet a month old.
Ever since Ms. Han was little, she remembered police cars and their black uniforms crowding their home. Eleven years after Ms. Han escaped to the United States, what happened to her father was a reminder that she can’t shake these memories.
The March 29 arrest marked her father’s fifth over his faith. Mr. Han, who has U.S. refugee status, had by then lived for years in seclusion to avoid police harassment. The authorities nonetheless tracked him down, after he sent some text messages to others to bring awareness to the suppression campaign.
Through big data, the police first located Mr. Han’s brother, who doesn’t practice Falun Gong, and raided their home. The man’s girlfriend was so panicked that she had a heart attack right then and had to be hospitalized, Lu Shiyu, Mr. Han Wei’s wife, told The Epoch Times from New York.
After detaining Mr. Han’s brother, the police then tracked down Mr. Han through facial recognition tools and Mr. Han’s phone location data, descending on him just as he shopped for groceries.
Ms. Han is a student of the New York academy Fei Tian College and has been touring with Shen Yun Performing Arts, a company aimed at presenting China’s millennia-old civilization through classical Chinese dance and music free of communist influence.
She only found out what happened about a week later—a lag the family blamed on the opacity in the Chinese legal system that places little value on the targeted group’s basic rights.
The police didn’t notify the family, nor did they present any documents during or after the arrest.
“There was no proceeding, no warrant, nothing,” Mrs. Lu said.
From the bits and pieces her in-laws in China gathered, Mrs. Lu learned that the police had interrogated Mr. Han, but couldn’t pin down the details.
The lack of information has been heightening the family’s anxiety, given the regime’s record of brutality toward the group.
“In a Chinese jail anything can happen,” said Ms. Han.
Ms. Han hasn’t heard her father’s voice since she left China in 2013.
In 2015, the United States granted Mr. Han refugee status. He booked a New York-bound flight for Nov. 14 to reunite with his family.
At customs, however, an officer told him that his passport was invalid—revoked by local authorities “because the individual practices Falun Gong,” according to Mrs. Lu.
Mr. Han suffered harshly during the previous arrests. In 2001, police shackled him to a chair to beat him, covering his head with a plastic bag until he nearly suffocated. In a bid to force Mr. Han to insult his belief, they handcuffed him to a door frame so that his bodyweight rested entirely on the handcuffs. They then swung his body to aggravate the pain. He stayed in that position for a full night. The scars on his wrists remain to this day.
In another jail in 2006 that lasted for 1.5 years, the police sometimes put tape over his mouth to prevent him from shouting “Falun Dafa is good.”
Twice his beverage business fell apart because of the arrests.
After jailing him for more than two months in 2016, police put Mr. Han under house arrest under international pressure. Mr. Han evaded his monitors and hid in rural areas. He didn’t reveal his location even to his family. For several years, he didn’t use a phone or a computer.
“He lived like a caveman,” said Mrs. Lu. “I didn’t dare to ask where he was.”
Ms. Han’s worst fear through all these years is that she might not be able to see her father again.
As a seven-year-old, she had visited her dad in prison in 2007 and found him in a room that looked to her like a cafeteria. He said very little and kept smiling at her, but Ms. Han noticed his teeth seemed crooked. He lost one front tooth during the stint under the rough conditions there, the family said.
In the days without her father, the house felt “very empty,” she recalled. “I was afraid that my classmates would ask where my dad went. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Even in those days, when they were together in China, fear of a possible arrest was always in the air. Each time a phone call to her father didn’t get through, it frightened the family.
Ms. Han appeals to Americans to help put the spotlight on the plight of the persecuted people like her father, whose love she has been deprived of for over a decade because of the regime. If nothing else, she said, she wants to see the authorities set him free, to know that at least he’s safe.
The Chinese Communist Party has “no right to persecute anyone,” she said.
From The Epoch Times
