God's Double Agent (29 page)

“You’re sharing superstitious messages with the prisoners!” an interrogator shouted at me. “You’re not only destabilizing this prison, you’re destabilizing our Chinese culture!”

“No.” I held up my hands to explain. “Christians actually help society by stabilizing individuals and families. In fact, we have a saying, ‘One more Christian, one less criminal. One more church, one less prison.’”

“If you’re so against prison, why do you spend so much time here?” he snarled.

“If anything,” I added, “we’re true patriots.”

At this, the head security agent stood up, furious, “
You
are a true patriot? Communists are true patriots. And this prison is the holy ground of the Communist Party,” he growled. “You cannot speak of the gospel here!”

When I went back to the cell, I knew someone had ratted me out. I wasn’t eating much food, I couldn’t see very well, and my head throbbed from my blurry vision. I slept very little, I lived in fear of getting beat up, and I witnessed terrible acts of cruelty and torture.

However, there was one aspect of prison that was somewhat appealing: I had absolutely nothing to do. Before I was arrested, my life had become so busy—so amazingly busy—that I used to joke that the only way I’d get a chance to rest was to get arrested. One day, I was looking at the dot of the sunbeam. It was on the twenty-seventh stone to the left of the door, which meant, by my calculations, it was three o’clock. We were sitting in silence, and my lower back was throbbing. In spite of the pain, I felt so thankful to God that I wanted to sing. I cleared my throat and began singing a song from my underground house church days.

“Give thanks with a grateful heart,” I mumbled, causing everyone to—at least momentarily—break form and look at me. Nothing ever happened out of the ordinary during those ten-hour stretches. The most excitement we ever saw was when someone readjusted, or scratched their nose, or sneezed, and got severely beaten if the guard happened to be walking by. However, the guard didn’t seem to be near, and so I added the next few lines. “Give thanks to the Holy One, give thanks, because He’s given Jesus Christ, His Son.”

Though everyone immediately went back into form, I could tell the atmosphere was electrified by my defiance. I don’t remember anyone ever speaking during those torturously long ten-hour sessions, and I certainly never heard anyone sing. Since the guard didn’t come, however, I kept singing.

“And now let the weak say, ‘I am strong,’ let the poor say ‘I am rich,’ because of what the Lord has done for us . . . give thanks.”

When I finished my song, I looked at the gigantic iron gate and waited for a guard to come swooping in with his electric baton. I’m not sure if he was on a break or just not at his station, but since I hadn’t been punished yet, I started my song again.

“Give thanks . . .” To my surprise, another voice joined in with me. I couldn’t see who it was, but the sound emanated at first from a few rows behind me. Then, another voice started singing from my left. We sang “Give Thanks” two or three times. It was an amazing thing because when we started the fourth repetition, every man in the entire cell was singing. Much to our delight, one of the drug dealers knew how to harmonize! I was amazed when we heard the cells on both sides of us also singing to God. I had to believe some of the inmates were sincerely thanking God, while others were singing as an act of rebellion. In fact, most had never even heard of the God to whom they sang. Whatever the motivation, the prison that day was turned into one huge worship center, and it split me wide open.

“Xi Yao Si!” I heard the next morning, then felt the now-familiar
sensation of being jerked from sleep and dragged to the chief security guard office.

“What did we tell you about sharing the gospel?” the irate head security guard yelled.

“You said not to speak a word of it,” I said.

“And yet you led the whole prison in your superstitious songs?”

“Well, I didn’t speak a word of it,” I said. “I sang it!” After another stern warning, they tossed me back into the cell. This time, I was more like a conquering hero instead of a reprimanded prisoner. Everyone seemed to respect me. That day, when we were made to sit like statues in our uncomfortable positions, I knew I’d get beaten if I sang out again. Instead, I simply hummed the tune to “Give Thanks.” Once again, the other men joined in with my humming. Pretty soon, the prison was a gigantic beehive of praise.

With every passing day, I grew closer to my fellow inmates. Little Tiger, Big Brother, and another drug dealer all came to me for advice, and I shared with them the meaning of the song we were singing. There was something transformative about befriending these particular men. In the past, as a student and an intellectual, I had never considered the plight of the prisoner. But being with the same thirty people, in the same two hundred square feet, did something to me.

One day, as our evening slop was being delivered, a guard came to the gate, pointed at me, and said, “It’s time to go.”

I’d been praying that if I were going to be in prison for my entire life, I’d be transferred to a “reeducation through labor” camp. In China, these camps produced any of a number of products, including steel pipes, shoes, toys, chemicals, and clothing for export. Prisoners mined minerals, grew cotton, made tea, and farmed—sometimes twenty hours a day. Many people died
from the exhausting labor, but I thought it would be preferable to only a pinprick of sun for the rest of my life.

When they came to get me that day, I thought I was headed to do some sort of repetitive labor, like packaging ten thousand chopsticks per day. However, the guard looked at me, and said, “Come on. You’re being released.”

I’d been in prison for two months.

The other inmates, some who’d been in jail for years, looked at me and smiled. It felt wrong to leave them, but I couldn’t wait to go outside and breathe air that didn’t smell of thirty dirty men, eat food without worms, and lay down on—I quivered at the thought of it—a pillow.

“Wait,” Big Brother said in a softer voice than I’d ever heard him use. “Let me give you the phone number of my family so you can tell them hello for me.” Little Tiger added, “Yes, and please call my family. They’ll visit you or treat you to a meal.”

I took their information and promised to follow up, but smiled at the thought of welcoming my fellow prisoners’ families to my home. I wondered if they’d bring cocaine with them if they visited and what Heidi would say.

Heidi.

Would she be okay? Had she been tortured? Would she have scars? Did she survive?

Then, I said goodbye to my fellow prisoners—my friends—and walked out of my prison cell, fighting the temptation to run.

20

“We’re finally getting rid of you,” the Communist official said, as he flipped through my release papers. He gave me a small bag with my belongings from two months ago, and I immediately rustled through it for my glasses. When I put them on, I could see everything clearly.

“Will I still be able to teach?” I asked.

“Yes. We want you to stay at the Communist Party School,” he said. “Now that you owe us, you can help make sure others are loyal to the party. But don’t get too excited. We’ll be watching you too. We’ve assigned you two special agents who will be right there with you, every step of the way. In fact, here they are now.”

I followed the direction of his gaze as two officers walked through the door. I was completely shocked when I saw their faces.

“Dingbang?” I said. “Feng?”

I knew them as the two lazy students who sat in my English class at the Communist Party School, day after day, refusing to lift their heads off their desks or learn even the most basic English phrases.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Remember how we told you we’d been watching you for a long time?” the official asked. Suddenly, it all became so clear.
No wonder they were such terrible students. They were spies. They were everywhere. Always watching. Ready to pounce. My jaw hung open, but no words came out. I thought about all the times I’d tried to teach them the basic construction of English sentences, adjectives, and even easy conversational phrases. Had I known they were spies, it would’ve saved me a great deal of time.

“These will be your special agents,” he continued. “They already know everything about you, so don’t try to pull anything over on them.”

“And quit trying to teach us English,” one sneered.

I gathered my things and began to walk out the door, overwhelmed by my situation. Even though I was free from jail, one was never truly free in China. As I turned the corner, I looked down the long, brightly lit corridor and saw a solitary figure walking toward me.

Heidi. She was pale, thin, and—when our eyes met—she smiled. That’s when I knew everything was going to be okay, and so many emotions rushed through me. I wanted to run to her, sweep her up into my arms, and kiss her. Of course, I didn’t. After all, public affection is not the Chinese way, so we didn’t even touch when we met in the hall. However, when we got to the privacy of our little ransacked apartment, I was able to properly show her how I felt. I took her hand, stepped over the overturned lamps, passed the flipped furniture, and led her to the bed. The Beijing police had dumped the mattress on the floor, but I promptly put it back onto the frame, looked at her, and said, “Want to commit a tremendous act of rebellion?”

The Communist Party was so controlling and heavy handed it reached into every aspect of life. China’s notorious one-child policy meant couples had to obtain permits for pregnancy or else the government would force an abortion or even sterilization. Every time Heidi and I were intimate, this threat loomed heavily on our minds. Consequently, we had used contraception without
fail during our entire three-year marriage. In fact, birth control was given out free of charge by the Communist Party School.

“Without
anything
?” Heidi asked. The question hung between us as we considered the prospect. They’d kept us apart for two months, and we wanted to be together without their influence. Plus, our time in prison had created in us a severe disdain for the Communist Party. Heidi smiled, opened her mouth, and said—at the same time as I—“
Beng guan tamen
,” which meant, “Who cares about them?”

Seeing defiance in her eyes, I grabbed Heidi and we practiced our first act of “civil disobedience in the bedroom.”

Noncompliance never felt so right.

21

“I have a surprise,” Heidi said, putting down her trash bag and disappearing into our closet. We were knee-deep in the clutter the police had made of our home, but were slowly putting everything back into its place. There were huge empty spaces on our bookshelves and in our drawers—voids left by the police department. Thankfully, they left the refrigerator, television, and washing machine we had finally been able to afford just before we landed in prison. When Heidi emerged from the closet, she had a tiny book in her hand.

“My address book?” I jumped over a gigantic box of trash and embraced her. “How did you do it?”

“Before they took me to jail, I told them I needed to grab my sweater from the closet. Since they’d already ransacked that area, I knew they wouldn’t return to it. I had the book in my hand like this,” she adjusted it down into her palm with her thumb securing it, “and when I reached for my sweater, I threw it into the corner of the closet.”

I flipped through all of the names of our fellow believers and friends, and was so proud of my clever wife. For weeks, we regaled each other with tales from prison. I was very relieved to hear Heidi hadn’t been tortured, though she was kept with hardened criminals and forced to clean latrines. They called
her “Graduate Student,” because she was apparently the most educated prisoner they’d ever met. She shared the gospel in the cell, very discreetly, and even got to be good friends with someone in prison for financial crimes. I told her about Little Tiger and Big Brother . . . and warned her that we might be getting some visits from their families. I told her about those two heart candies that melted in my hand on our anniversary. But even as we got used to life outside of prison, the government was still looming over our lives.

One morning, the Communist School personnel official called me. “The Beijing Communist Party committee is asking you to leave the school, because you’re not qualified to teach here anymore.”

“I was qualified to teach two months ago,” I protested. “In fact, I’m overqualified. Agent Li said I was supposed to teach. We had an agreement.”

“No,” he said. “We’ve talked to the relevant parties and the decision was made.”

Of course, they weren’t content to merely take away my livelihood. When we were arrested, Heidi was just one week from her final exams at the People’s University. After three years of graduate school, she had already made plans for her life after graduation. However, right after I learned I would lose my job, Heidi received some bad news of her own. First, her graduate school decided not to give her a diploma or degree and kicked her completely out of school. To add insult to injury, the work unit with whom she’d contracted refused to employ her, citing political reasons.