NEWSWEEK: The Dangerous Pilgrimage: A woman's own tale of imprisonment and suffering

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

Feb. 5 issue - You ask me why I'm crying," says Wang Meihong. After wiping her eyes, the slender young woman from mainland China-sitting in a Falun Gong conference in Hong Kong-tells her story.

SHE IS TOO FRIGHTENED to publicly reveal her occupation, hometown or age. (Her name is fictitious.) But she will explain why she's a Falun Gong follower, and why she's made a dangerous pilgrimage. Her account is impossible to corroborate, but it is consistent with those of other Falun Gong followers who've been jailed by Chinese police.

Wang says that when her father fell ill from a stroke 15 years ago, she resigned herself to paying his medical bills and to caring for him at home. By 1997, she was in a deep depression. A friend introduced her to Falun Gong, and she found the movement's message of self-abasement brought her spiritual strength. She taught her father the slow-motion breathing and arm movements that are said to promote good health. When Beijing abruptly banned the movement the following year, Wang went directly to the provincial government, her father's medical records in hand, to complain. She and the many others were dispersed by the police.

A sense of deep injustice welled up in her. She began to make journeys to Beijing to petition the central government. She was arrested several times. Her husband and mother berated her for getting into trouble with the government. Wang's husband feared losing his job. Outraged by reports of torture and killings, she traveled to Beijing. In Tiananmen Square, she joined other believers living fearfully in a farmer's hut. They persuaded her to travel to remote parts of China to encourage practitioners. She left with them, feeling guilty. "I discovered my own selfishness," Wang says.

Her sacrifice would come soon enough. She spent two months in Sichuan and Hubei, rousing discouraged followers. Last April she went again to Beijing. Standing in Tiananmen, she unfurled a yellow banner in praise of Falun Gong. She was grabbed by undercover policemen and shoved into a van. When she pleaded with them to stop beating another practitioner, a policeman slapped her numerous times, saying, "Who's hitting people, who saw someone hitting people?"

After refusing to identify herself, Wang was held in a prison near Beijing for two weeks. When a policewoman ground her heel into her neck and arm, Wang said to herself: "I hate her ugly face. I then realized I needed to practice [Falun Gong principles] even more." After three days she was tied down and forcibly fed, though she had not been refusing food. A doctor admitted that it was a method to get her to reveal her identity. Wang was moved to a mental hospital. Her guards told her the milk and water being fed into her nose was kept in an unwashed basin the mental patients used to bathe their feet. In her cell she scratched phrases from the Falun Gong book on the wall with the end of an aluminum zipper.

The police finally learned Wang's true identity when a fellow prisoner, working for the authorities, tricked her into revealing it. Wang was then sent to a prison in her home province for two weeks.

There she was forced to assemble light bulbs each day. When she eventually refused to work, saying she had committed no crime, she was beaten severely.

When Wang was released, her husband divorced her. Now she attends mandatory education classes, tailed by guards. When she heard of the Hong Kong conclave, she knew it was her only opportunity to learn if the movement was still alive. She risked even harsher punishment by slipping across the border to attend the meeting, then sneaking back home again.

Sitting in the audience earlier this month, listening to other accounts of torture and abuse, Wang discovered that other followers had suffered more than she. But she no longer felt unworthy. "I felt personally we are all one body; there are no differences in our hearts. No matter where I am, in Tiananmen or in prison, we all have the same goal, to spread the law." That, she said, was the reason for her tears.

With Zoran Cirjakovic in Bratunac

2001 Newsweek, Inc.

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