God's Double Agent (43 page)

“I can push him wherever you need to go,” a dark-haired Thai college student named Kasem smiled as he rolled a wheelchair around for us. He had volunteered to work at the Bangkok airport that day and had been assigned wheelchair duty. “Did you have a fall?”

Peter looked at me, opened his mouth slightly, remembered our stern instructions, and frowned.

Good boy
, I thought.

“So where are you from?” I asked, engaging Kasem in small talk. “This is Tracy,” I pointed to Sara. “And this is Daniel,” I said, pointing to Peter. We chatted through customs and in the immigration line.

There, time died.

Catherine and Qing, who were about fifteen people in front of us, easily got past the immigration agents and casually walked off to the side. Sara and Peter didn’t say a word as Kasem chatted about his new job at the airport.

As I stood in the airport, I remembered the fear I felt when Heidi and I were escaping Beijing during her pregnancy. In a weird way, this was more horrifying. Now, I had so much more to lose—Heidi, three children, a nonprofit organization fighting
injustice, and a home in America. Plus, I was responsible for another family’s well-being. The line in front of me grew shorter.

We were up.

Kasem pushed Peter up to the immigration officers as they took the three passports from me. Mine was on top of the stack. They looked at me, then at the passport, and nodded. Then they opened Tracy’s passport, looked at the little picture of my daughter, back at Sara, and back at the passport. After about two seconds, the immigration agent nodded. I tried not to look relieved or excited.

When she opened the last passport and looked at Daniel’s photo, I felt my heartbeat in my ears and neck. Daniel was six years older than Peter, and they looked nothing alike. I’d banked on having a careless agent, but I could tell this lady meant business. Her uniform was perfectly pressed, her shoes were shiny. Her bun was pulled so tightly it made her face taut.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, very casually. “There are no problems?”

She shook her head, and said something to her co-worker in Thai. Though I couldn’t understand her language, her tone of incredulity told me she was probably saying, “Does this boy look like his picture?” She held the passport in front of her co-worker’s face. He squinted, then nodded slightly.

“What is your name?” she asked him, but Peter—true to form—didn’t answer. We’d told him to act shy, but he was taking it even further by acting dumb. “Grhumph,” he said.

“Name?”

“Grhumph!”

“My son’s not well,” I explained.

The agent took out a flashlight and shined a light on Peter’s ears, like she was inspecting him after he took a bath.

“See, these ears just don’t match.” The minute hand on a giant clock in the terminal had gone around about ten times since we’d first approached this agent. They were onto us, but
the agent hadn’t yet ordered the officers to arrest us. I smiled and said, “Just let us through,” I said. “My children are tired.”

“Why are you in a wheelchair?” She knelt down before Peter. He mumbled unintelligibly, and—had I not been so terrified—I would’ve been impressed by his acting skills. Even at his young age, he seemed to understand what was going on.

“What happened?” she asked me.

“Oh, we had a terrible vacation,” I said. “He fell.” Instead of telling a detailed story, which I thought might make me look guilty, I didn’t elaborate. She lifted up his blanket, looked at his short, six-year-old legs, and examined his bandages.

It’s over
, I thought.
No one could think this kid is a twelve-year-old.
I wondered how my demise would happen. Would these officers arrest us immediately? Would we be separated? Would Catherine and Qing explain to Heidi what happened to me?

Just then, Peter did something so gross—so brilliant—I couldn’t believe my eyes. He began to foam at the mouth. Perhaps, when she began to inspect his legs, he suddenly felt the peril we were in. The entire time we’d been held there, he must’ve been saving up saliva in his mouth. When she got close to his bandages, he started drooling all over himself.

The officer immediately stood up, her eyes wide in disgust. They handed up tissues, while they brought other officers over for their opinion. While they examined the documents, I didn’t say anything. I just prayed.

Save us.

After about thirty minutes, I’d practically sweated through my shirt and was thankful I was wearing a jacket. “Come on,” I said, finally. “There’s no problem.”

The immigration officer turned to Kasem, who’d been standing there the whole time silently, his hands on Peter’s wheelchair. “What do you think?” she said, handing him the passport. “Do you think the little boy matches this photo?” She pointed to the picture.

“Absolutely!” Kasem said, with a big smile. I was thankful I’d built up a rapport with him.

“Okay,” the agent said, biting her lip. I didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. As she was handing me the stack of passports, I walked past her as quickly as possible without looking guilty.

“Thank you,” I said to Kasem, as I took control of Peter’s wheelchair. “I’ll take it from here.”

I didn’t breathe until we were safely in the air. The fact that we made it this far was nothing short of miraculous. When we landed in the Dallas airport, I wanted to stand up and cheer. We’d made it! We were free! I couldn’t wait to be reunited with Heidi to tell her all we’d managed to pull off. I wanted to rustle Daniel’s hair, to hug Tracy, and to kiss Melissa’s little feet. However, the customs agent took one look at our passports and said, very sternly, “All of you. Come with me.”

I should’ve realized our arrival would raise red flags in their system. After all, how could “Daniel Fu” and “Tracy Fu” land in Dallas if there’s no record of their departure? We were led into a special room, where there was one long table. I’d managed to keep the kids out of Chinese prison only to deliver them to an American detention center.

“We need you to come with us,” they said to Sara. She stood silently, and walked out of the room like a gladiator going into the Coliseum.
If she’s not out in twenty minutes
, I thought,
I’ll surrender
. I’d prepared all of the documentation for their asylum papers and was carrying them in my suitcase.

Sara knew some English, but not much. The officers from the Customs and Border Protection used an AT&T operator on the phone to translate for her. She insisted repeatedly I was her father, but I didn’t feel right about letting her be questioned by American police all alone. After twenty minutes, I went to the little window where an officer was standing and said, “I have a story to tell.”

The officers gathered around and I told them everything. “Well, it all started in China, when . . .”

Immediately, the whole office began scrambling.

“Where’s the mother, sir?” an enormous officer barked at me. He wasn’t interested in my tale of religious persecution. About halfway through my explanation, I was accused of child trafficking.

“She’s already through customs,” I said. “She might be in the luggage area or the pick-up area.”

He wheeled away from me and spoke into his walkie-talkie. The entire airport police force scoured the airport in search of an Asian woman who matched the description I gave them. When the airport police surrounded Qing, they also apprehended Catherine.

For seven hours, I sat in that room as they asked me questions dripping with the kind of contempt reserved for a kidnapper.

“This is a high-profile case,” I warned them. “You should handle it very professionally.”

I heard one of the senior officers in an adjacent room say, “Okay, guys, let’s do everything by the book. This is big.”

To add credibility to my story, I pulled out their petitions for asylum, then showed them some of my state department contacts who were familiar with the case. Eventually I was released, Guo’s family was placed in immigration detention, and Catherine’s passport was stamped “Seven Years No Return” and her green card was confiscated. She was punished the most severely, and still can’t return to the United States even though her brother lives here. Guo’s family finally got their political asylum approved a few months later, after the Manhattan-based Human Rights First enlisted the pro bono help of a law firm in Dallas. My children’s passports were confiscated, and it took two years and nine trips to Houston to get new passports. The Dallas prosecutor’s office dropped their charge against me for child trafficking. Qing, Sara, and Peter settled into Midland very
seamlessly. The kids attend a private Christian school where Sara, a couple of years later, was even elected Homecoming Queen.

Guo, who is not a believer in Christ, was amazed when he heard the story of how we protected his family. Ten days after he was released from prison, he wrote me a letter.

“I believe the sacred cause of Christianity will play a crucial part in the spiritual life of a free Chinese society to come. Inspired by your virtue and holiness, I will always preserve in my heart my best wishes to you and to Christ-followers all over the world.”

The letter blessed me so much.

Jesus once asked, “What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?” During this experience I learned the opposite is also true: if you’ve rescued one soul, it means more than the whole world.

29

One of our most recent cases made my iPhone famous.

The case centered around Chen Guangcheng, a blind man from Linyi County, Shandong Province, which also happens to be Heidi’s hometown. He lost his sight as a young child, and was illiterate until he was in his twenties. After teaching himself to read braille, he taught himself the law, and began successfully advocating for the rights of the disabled. But when he started interviewing people in Linyi County about their experience with forced abortions, local officials grew incensed.

Chinese political structure—from the national level all the way down to the village level—has family planning commissions with almost unlimited power. If a woman manages to hide her illegal pregnancy and has an “extra child,” the commission can make her pay fines worth three to five times the family’s income, confiscate property, or throw her in prison. (China collects more than ten billion US dollars in “family planning” fines every year.) But if the woman is unable to hide her illegal pregnancy, officials will inject her with a poison regardless of how far along she is. Every day, thirty thousand women are forced to have abortions, no doubt contributing to Chinese women’s astronomical suicide rates. China boasts that it has successfully prevented
four hundred million children from being born, more than the entire population of the United States.

This commitment to the eradication of so many children requires the complicity of the whole community. In Chen’s area, a newly married couple’s neighborhood, both sets of grandparents, and the couple’s parents all must sign a joint family planning covenant that makes them liable for the couple’s fertility. If the couple violates the “family planning” policies, these friends and family members are held responsible. This means that a woman must hide her pregnancy from everyone or she’ll be reported. She must also submit to embarrassing monthly exams to make sure she’s not pregnant.

When Chen began interviewing his neighbors, it caused a huge stir. No one dared question this sacred core of Communist Party doctrine, which is actually written in the constitution and is called “State Basic Policy.” No court in China is even allowed to take cases related to the issue. But when this blind man began walking around and simply asking women about their experiences, he heard chilling stories.

One woman told him she was forced to have an abortion in her seventh month of pregnancy, then was forced to be sterilized. He learned of an elderly villager who was kidnapped, starved, and beaten when his daughter failed to show up for a tubal ligation sterilization check. He learned of officials breaking brooms over elderly people’s heads. One woman who became illegally pregnant told him that twenty-two of her relatives were seized, including three children, one pregnant woman, and an elderly grandma. He learned of elderly siblings—a brother and a sister—who were forced to beat each other after the woman’s daughter-in-law got pregnant. He learned of a farmer who committed suicide when his family and neighbors were tortured because his son had an “extra child.”

Chen documented that, in 2005, there were 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in his area alone.

His research, of course, put him on a collision course with the Communist Party. In 2007, he was arrested for “blocking traffic” and spent four years and three months in jail. Chen was associated with the human rights attorneys with whom ChinaAid worked closely, so we immediately advocated for his release. Certainly prison was worse for Chen, who couldn’t even see his torturers. After his release, we’d hoped conditions would improve for Chen. Instead they actually got worse. He was immediately put under house arrest with his wife, young daughter, and mother who was close to eighty years old. The government hired over sixty officers who took turns surrounding his home every hour of every day. They also jammed his cell phone signal, built walls around his house, and beat any visitors. When Guo, for example, insisted on seeing him, the guards overturned his car.

In fact, for five months, no one really knew what had happened to Chen. Then, in November of 2011, Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing, managed to secretly record a video showing the condition of their house arrest. They showed their dilapidated farmhouse, their dwindling supply of food and firewood, and a man peering over a wall into their living area.

ChinaAid smuggled out the video, which immediately went viral. A website asked people to send in photos of themselves wearing sunglasses like Chen’s, as a sign of solidarity with Chen’s family. People sent thousands of photos from all over the world—from Provo to Paducah, from China to Uganda, from New Zealand to New York. “Free Chen” bumper stickers began showing up on the cars of people concerned about human rights.