10/01/00
A UAB AIDS researcher and his wife, who had been unable to leave China for nearly a month because of authorities' concerns over their practice of Falun Gong, may return to America later this month.
Shean Lin and his wife, Xiaohua Du, have told relatives they now have their passports and airline tickets back from police and only have to obtain visas to return to the United States.
"Everything seems fine," Lin and his wife said in an e-mail message sent Friday to Lin's brother-in law Hong Zhou, a software engineer who lives in Baltimore. "We'll try ... to get the returning visa as soon as we can. But because of (a) seven-day long national holiday, we may not be able to come back until the middle of October."
When they were detained, Lin and Xiaohua Du had just flown to Fuzhou, in southern China, to be with Lin's dying father. Both are Chinese citizens, and friends, relatives and colleagues feared they would be unable to leave China or even be prosecuted because of their Falun Gong beliefs.
To head off those possibilities, supporters contacted the news media, mounted a petition drive, contacted the State Department, 6th District U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus and other federal lawmakers, and presented a letter to the Chinese embassy in Washington.
"I believe all of those had a major impact on the (authorities') decision to release the passports and the airline tickets," Zhou said Saturday.
Last Thursday in an e-mail message, Christian Sanford from Bachus' office told Zhou that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had advised the U.S. embassy that Lin and his wife were "free to travel." Sanford also said the State Department had suggested that the couple go to Fuzhou police to get their airline tickets and passports.
Lin, who has been in the United States about seven years, works at UAB's Center for AIDS Research. His wife has a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and works in Atlanta for Siemens Corp. The two met during a gathering of Falun Gong faithful and married last February.