In Memory of a Mother | Part 5

The cult had long been officially forbidden by the Chinese government and her messianic Master had fled to America to lead a luxurious life. Despite all that, the brainwashed cultists like her even felt honour bound to defy local governments, which, according to their dogma, was some sort of soul-cleansing proceedings, wake-up-the-public jihad and save-the-world crusade.

2008, she and her friends were caught into a detention center, for they blatantly distributed brochures of the cultism in the downtown area. Policemen busted her home for criminal evidence. They confiscated the computer, DVD player, and books, all of which they claimed had bearing on the flagrant distribution of the cultism.

Several months afterwards, her husband was demanded to pay 80000 Yuan to the police for her "study expenses". She was held in captivity, subjected to reform through labour and an 8-hours "study of ideological transformation" per day. The mandatory condition of release was to write confession letters, in which she had to profess she had turned against the cult, and then she had to read those words in a local TV programme.

She would have remained defiant to the end, but she compromised, for the simple reason that the police threatened her that "if you stubbornly resist the conversion, your son will be tagged, and deprived of the opportunity to finish his college education, and from now on whenever he uses his ID card, he will be revealed to be connected to a political criminal, so his civil rights will be restricted." By no means would she allow herself to be the one who should sabotage the future of her son.

After her funeral, her son packed up assortments of her personal items, and stumbled upon several letters she had written in that detention facility 13 years ago. Most of them were addressed to her husband, telling him not to worry about her; a few were about why she had become an adherent in the first place and how grateful she felt to the police for helping her get rid of the pernicious influence of that religion, all of which was no more than a LIE.

Her son was sure that she never forgave her husband nor turned her back on her faith, till the end of her life.

The only way her son could squelch his simmering anger was to repeatedly fool himself into believing that those who died of faith died with mirth.