God's Double Agent (20 page)

Since Chinese people were interested in foreign and exotic experiences, they sometimes went to Christmas services as a cultural curiosity and to be in a spiritual atmosphere, even if they weren’t interested in the faith. Consequently, the government-sanctioned church always planned a very nice Christmas Eve service and invited everyone to come with a sign on the outside that said—in English—“Merry Christmas.”

“We should invite everyone we know to the Christmas Eve service,” a friend named Andrew said.

“And once they get there, we can hand out pamphlets in case they want to learn more,” I added.

“But where can we find religious tracts around here?”

“Let me see if I can work on it.” I knew of an elderly Christian couple who lived near campus. Because they had many connections with international students, they were a hub of information, news, and materials that they freely provided. Everyone was excited about the possibilities, and we ended the night with a prayer.

“God,” Andrew prayed. “Please help us shine your light on this campus.”

The next day, I went to visit the elderly couple, who welcomed me into their home for dinner and served me a delicious, home-cooked meal. While I was there, they told me stories about persecution. The wife had gotten in trouble for following a famous preacher in Beijing who’d refused to join the government church and was imprisoned for eighteen years. Because they’d been in school in America, they had contact with many international Christians. Their house was always full of believers from all over the world, so the couple collected and distributed religious materials. Their house was a virtual library of the underground Chinese church.

“Do you have anything we could hand out at the Christmas Eve service?” I asked.

“I think I’ve got just the thing,” she said. “Let me go check.”

The next day, I rushed into our dorm meeting holding a box of tracts. “You won’t believe what I have!” I said, putting the box on the coffee table. Andrew rubbed his hands together, carefully unfolded a pamphlet, and began reading as the others sat down in chairs to listen.

“You are created by God,” he read. “But you are a sinner, and you need salvation through Jesus Christ. And the good news is that He wants to forgive you.”

After reading the entire tract, which was a very simple presentation of the gospel, he said, “At the end, it leaves room for anyone to do follow-up. Should we put our name there?”

“Sure,” several people said, nodding.

“Well, we’d need a contact person,” he said. Everyone looked at me and smiled. I was the one who’d organized the dorm fellowships as well as the one who’d obtained the tracts. We opened the box, passed out pens, and dumped several hundred tracts on the table. For the entire night, we made sure that every tract had my name, my dorm’s phone number, and my address. By the end of the night, our hands were cramped but our hearts were hopeful. We ended like we always did, with a prayer.

“Dear God,” I prayed. “Please cause the people who casually attend Christmas Eve service to want to know more about You.”

When Christmas Eve finally came, we were smiling from ear to ear. The church building was packed, and the crowd included students we’d seen around campus and friends we’d invited. We divided into four groups and sat strategically near the four corners of the building. The service was beautiful, and the pastor spoke eloquently of Christ’s birth. When the last hymn was sung, we activated. Each of our four groups got up, positioned ourselves near the four exits, and handed out the pamphlets.

“If you’d like to know more about Jesus,” Andrew said, “here’s the rest of the story.”

“Join our university dorm fellowship,” I said to a student I had invited from the cafeteria at school.

Generally, people smiled as they took the pamphlets and stuck them in their backpacks or purses. After the last person left the building, we gathered outside on the steps.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“We had great success!” Andrew said. “And the people seemed actually interested.” People from other groups told stories about how some asked about the dorm fellowship. Others expressed that they wanted to know more. Some, as expected, politely refused.

“Are there any left over?” Because they were so hard to come by, we made sure we collected all of the remaining pamphlets. There were about fifty extras, and I tried to place them in my backpack in such a way that the corners wouldn’t be folded or torn.

As we walked back to the campus that evening, we happily chatted about the people we met and the inroads we’d made. It really seemed that God was moving mightily in Beijing, and we were happy to play a small part in His plan.

“Merry Christmas,” we wished each other, laughing, as we departed. Chinese people don’t grow up participating in foreign holidays, and even though we were Christians, “Merry Christmas” still felt novel rolling off our tongues.

The next day was Christmas, which—of course—meant nothing. When the alarm sounded, we all jumped out of our bunk beds and headed to class. I had trouble paying attention to the professor that day. While I didn’t have “visions of sugarplums” dancing in my head, I did daydream about the lives that could’ve been touched by the little tracts we’d handed out. My academic life was challenging and fun, but I was much more interested in sharing the gospel with my classmates than discussing the
political intricacies of Thailand. When the class ended, I grabbed my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and headed out the door. My next class was all the way across campus, so I needed to rush to get there in time. To my surprise, however, a university police guard was standing at the door.

He was wearing a dark uniform, white gloves, and a crisp hat that covered a very short haircut and shaded his eyes. “The Beijing police want to talk to you,” he said.

I turned around to make sure there was no one else behind me. “Me?”

Without another word, he grabbed my arm and ushered me off campus. I felt a little ridiculous being shoved through the idyllic campus by a Beijing police officer. More than being embarrassed, however, I was perplexed. What could I have possibly done to merit this?

We walked up the stairs to the station, which had a blue sign on the front of the building marked “Police,” and into an interrogation room. It had a bright light hanging over a table with two vinyl chairs shoved up to either side of it. A folding chair sat near another smaller table in the corner. The walls were windowless and stark, except for marks and scuffs from what looked like previous altercations.

“Sit,” the officer said to me, which was hardly necessary since he practically shoved me down into one of the chairs. I dropped my red backpack on the floor, but the officer grabbed it and placed it on the corner table. He told me to wait, which I did for what seemed to be a long time. Finally, the door opened and another man, wearing a white button-up short-sleeved shirt and suit trousers, walked in.

“Where is the illegal literature you were handing out?”

“I didn’t hand out anything illegal,” I protested.

“We have reports that you were handing out these pamphlets at the church.” He slammed a copy of the pamphlet down on the table.

“That’s against the law?”

“So you’re admitting you handed them out?”

“Yes,” I said, calmly. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t want to lie. Not that it could’ve helped me. I’d handed out at least a hundred, in plain sight. “There was a Christmas Eve service last night, and we handed those out to the people who attended.”

“We?”

“I did.”

He laughed, mocking me by picking up the paper by a corner like it was poisonous.

“All alone?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Where is your stash of those pamphlets?”

I forced myself not to look at my red backpack that sat on the table in the corner. After the service, I had gone to my dorm and fallen asleep. When I got up to go to class, I didn’t take the time to unpack my bag. The materials the police were looking for were right there in the room, almost under their noses. I didn’t breathe and stared right into the interrogator’s face. It was pudgy like a baby’s, even though he was at least fifty years old. When he talked, any trace of innocence disappeared into crevices created by years of scowling. Right there, while the interrogator stood over me, I said a silent prayer.

Please don’t let them find the pamphlets in my backpack, Lord. Just blind his eyes from seeing them.

“What are the names of the people you gave them to?”

“I didn’t ask their names,” I said.

“No, that’s right,” he said. “You gave them
your
name on the back of each pamphlet. Very clever.”

“It’s not ‘clever,’ it just shows that I had no idea I was doing something wrong.”

“I’m not complaining. In fact, you made it easy on my comrades. They already saw you. They were at the church. The only
reason they didn’t grab you then was because they didn’t want to disrupt the worshipers to arrest a criminal.”

“I’m no criminal.”

“Funny, that’s what everyone who sits in that chair says . . . at least at first.”

“What crimes have I committed?”

“Oh, do you want me to limit it to last night, or do you want to go all the way back to 1989?” There was a folder on the wooden table between us, which he slowly opened. There were pages and pages of documents, which he carefully turned over one at a time. He lifted up each page with almost delicate hands, pretending to read each one. When he said 1989, of course, he was referring to the Tiananmen Square protests. “Hmm . . .” he said, pretending to familiarize himself with me. “You’ve been a troublemaker for a long time, haven’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Well, let me give you some time to think about that,” he said, carefully shutting the folder, standing up, and sticking it under his arm. He shoved his chair back under the table and left the room.

It was quiet except for the occasional muted conversation as people walked by the door.
Is it locked?
I wondered, but I knew it didn’t matter. On the other side of that door was a bustling office of uniformed Communist police officers. There’d be no way to escape.

“Why are you so careless?” I quietly reprimanded myself, putting my head in my hands. “Why do you think the Communist government will let you operate like a free agent? You’re indiscreet. It’s one thing to get yourself in trouble, but it’s another to pull your friends down with you.”

I kept talking to myself, to avoid looking at my backpack. I didn’t know if I were being watched somehow, so I didn’t want to draw attention to it even if I was alone. My stomach growled. My mouth was dry. I needed to go to the bathroom.
When will he come back?

When the door finally opened again, I jumped and the interrogator smirked. “Am I interrupting something? I can come back later,” he said.

I didn’t respond. “May I have some water?” I asked, weakly.

“No,” he said, unscrewing the top of the water bottle he carried and taking a long drink.

“May I at least go to the bathroom?”

“Guard,” he snarled.

The same officer who’d apprehended me earlier appeared at the door and grabbed me by the arm. He led me into a small bathroom, and then followed me inside. “Go,” he demanded, pointing to the toilet. It was less than dignified.

When we walked back down the hall, I could see the rest of the station going on with its business. Phones rang. People walked around with coffee mugs. We walked by another interrogation room, this one with a window, which I glanced into as we passed. I stopped in my tracks, causing the officer to tug on me before he followed my gaze. There, sitting behind a big wooden table, were all of my roommates. A large, tall officer stood above them, lecturing them. They didn’t notice me gawking at them before the policeman yanked me back to my own room.

“Why are my roommates here?” I asked the interrogator, trying to keep the panic from my voice. He looked at me sternly.

“You refused to tell us where you were keeping your illegal materials,” he said. “So we decided to go look for ourselves. You might want to start keeping your room a little more tidy.”

“What do you mean?”

“When we got there, the beds were turned over and all of your drawers were dumped out. It looked like you’d been robbed or something.” I swallowed hard and tried not to cry. Oddly, I felt more violated about them going through my belongings and talking to my friends than I did about being detained in the police station. “But we are having a nice chat with your roommates. They said they didn’t know where you kept your
illegal Christian material, but that you keep a backpack with you all the time.”

At the word backpack, a chill ran all over my body. It was sitting not ten feet from me, and it was bright red. Had he turned around and opened it, he would’ve found the whole stash. Those tracts had been smuggled in from Hong Kong. Plus, if they found the tracts, they might charge me with possession and keep me for days.

“Where’s your backpack with your illegal literature?”

While I was being interrogated, the urge to lie was so strong that I had to force my mouth to remain shut while I considered my options. I didn’t want to be put into prison, but I also knew God could protect me without me having to use deception. In the Bible, He broke Peter out of jail. I shrugged my shoulders, and decided to be honest.