One Falungong family’s distress letter from Thailand

We are Falun Gong practitioners from mainland China. We are a family of three. We are UN refugees who have been stranded in Thailand for more than 8 years. Our financial and spiritual endurance, especially for our son, has nearly reached the limit. We hope that distinguished officials will help us leave Thailand as soon as possible and settle in a third country to start a normal life. Let our son has chance to start his own life.
My name is Ying. I started practicing Falun Gong in 2006. Soon my vascular headaches and other diseases quickly disappeared, and I became light-hearted. My husband saw me get healthy through practicing Falun Gong he also started practicing in that same year. My son was unable to live and practice normally in China after I practiced, I successively participated in the work of four large-scale Falun Gong truth clarification material producing sites in Qingdao, one of which was in the factory where my husband and I worked. I mainly produced the books “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” and “Disintegrating Communist Party Culture.”
On January, 2008 this site was found by the police. The owner of the factory was taken by Qingdao police as was my husband also kidnapped. I managed not to be taken as I was at another producing site. My sister also a Falun Gong practitioner pretended to be me so to stop the police from chasing me and finding the other site. The police detained her, but she managed to escape, thanks to the kindness of some other people as well.

My husband was kidnapped by the Qingdao Public Security Bureau and handcuffed to an iron chair for three days and nights. He was denied food, toilet and sleep. A deputy police director grabbed his hair, stepped on his feet and threatened to shoot him, all in an effort to force him to divulge the source of the truth clarification material, about his contacts, my whereabouts, etc. My husband gave them nothing and the police eventually released him after several days. The factory owner, was illegally sentenced to seven years in prison. The four material producing sites were destroyed by police. Everything was taken away, people in charge and the staff were kidnapped and sent to prison or labor camp.

Torture Re-enactment: iron chair
In order to avoid the persecution, I took my 11-year-old son back to my hometown, Gaomi City, Weifang District, Shandong Province. After staying at my relatives’ house for three months, we rented a house.
On the morning of December 6, 2013, the police broke into my house on the grounds of checking our household registration. Seven or eight policemen took away all my Falun Dafa books, materials, printers, a recorder, two computers, more than 300 CDs and printing supplies, etc. They kidnapped me and took me to Weifang Detention Center and illegally detained me for 15 days [4]. The police warned that if they found me printing and distributing materials again they would put me in jail. During this period, my husband’s spirit was hit hard. Our then 16-year-old son rode a motorcycle from Gaomi to Weifang to try and find his mother, but he did not find me.

After returning from the detention center my body was very weak and I was under a lot of stress. I really wanted to continue to distributing truth-clarifying materials, but I was worried about being persecuted again. On April 4, 2014, a large number of Falun Gong practitioners were kidnapped in Gaomi City. This made me even more worried. We knew that the CCP would not ignore us. In China, we had been ransacked and harassed by the police to the point where we had nothing left and no fixed place to live. We had been taken away the right to practice and clarify the truth. Only in a free country can we continue to expose the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong.

To survive in Thailand, we had to take risks to work illegally. On November 10th, 2014, our family arrived in Thailand and registered with the UNHCR on November 12th. In September 2016, we were granted UN refugee status. We have been in Thailand for mare than 8 years. Life has been very difficult for us because we cannot work and have no financial resources. We have not received any subsidies. We are hardworking and have good cooking skills. We opened restaurants in China and our business was good, but we can’t do it in Thailand. We can only rely on borrowing money and working illegally.

After coming to Thailand in less than one and a half years, we used up the money we brought. We borrowed some money for another one and a half years. Three years had passed and we hadn’t been resettled. In order to survive, we had to risk doing illegal work at the end of 2017. The work we got was hard and tiring, long working hours and very low salary. If we are caught working illegally the employer and ourselves would be fined and we would also be sent to jail and then at the end, we would be detained in the Immigration Detention Center until being resettled in a third country to gain freedom.

In 2018, my son got a job in a private incense factory. He worked long hours and got very tired. He was exposed to the sun every day. At night he was stung by mosquitoes when sleeping. One day he even got two hundred stings, all with red spots. He got very dark, his back peeled, and he fainted once when he was so tired. He only got 6,000 baht (approximately RMB 1,200) a month. During the COVID-19 pandemic it was harder to find work, but he recently found a job, and works 12 hours a day. To travel to his place of work takes him 45 minutes one way. He pays for the transportation fees himself. Sometimes he works overtime (with no overtime pay) and comes back late — he can’t sleep enough and has to get up the next day to go back to work which is very hard.

In 2018 my husband was doing renovations work for a company when the Immigration Bureau went to check. The boss told him to hide and later did not dare not continue to hire him. In July 2019 he found another job in Pattaya. One month later, the Immigration Bureau checked on this workplace but he managed to avoid being caught. That boss didn’t dare to hire him anymore and avoided paying his salary. We called that boss many times and managed to get half of the salary. The other half of the salary has still not been paid.

After arriving in Thailand, regardless of wind or rain, we went to the Grand Palace attractions to display truth-clarification boards and distribute truth-clarification material to help Chinese tourists understand how wrong the persecution is in China. In October 2015, my husband was arrested by the police when he was distributing material to Chinese tourists at the Grand Palace attraction. He was sent to the Khao San Road Police Station for three days and nights, and was rescued by the UN and the Falun Dafa Association of Thailand. This incident caused a lot of mental stress to our son. He was afraid that one day he would lose his father and mother. He said: “Mom, didn’t you say that we would be free when we are in Thailand? Why was my father arrested again? Arrested in China and arrested again in Thailand, when can we live a normal life?”
In 2018 seven fellow practitioners were arrested when they were clarifying the truth at the Grand Palace’s attractions. My son became more nervous and felt insecure.

My son was not yet 18 years old when we came to Thailand. As we have not been able to be settled, he has no legal status. He cannot go to school, has no friends, no career, no safety guarantee. He has nothing but a lot of mental pressure. He is almost desperate and feels hopeless. Dejected, he stood alone by the Chao Phraya River twice. He thought it would be better to close his eyes and jump down into the water……Then there would be no such troubles. Then he thought about his father and mother, fearing that we could not bear the blow, and the pain would be even worse if we lose him. So, he went home crying.

Hearing this, I was shocked and speechless for a long time. It felt as if a knife was twisting in my heart. Tears could not stop flowing. The pressure was greater for me. My husband and I were very worried about our son. We were afraid that he would do something extreme. We were tormented every day.

As he grows older, he has matured a lot, and his endurance has increased, but he is still very depressed. He often asks me: “Mom, is there any news recently? When will we be able to resettle? I am 26 years old. I want to have my own career. If we don’t get resettled, I feel like I’m going crazy. Without legal status I can do nothing. Maybe I will be arrested someday. I won’t be able to go to the third country, and I won’t be able to return to China. My youth has been wasted. Is it going to kill me?!”

We uphold Falun Gong’s faith in truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. We are committed to being good people, but we are persecuted by the CCP with almost nowhere to go. For this reason, we call on the kind people of the international community to jointly resist the CCP’s penetration of the international community and the persecution of the good people, to help us get out of our current predicament, to rescue our family from the tribulations, and start a normal life in a country that has human rights and freedom of belief. We believe that the light of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance will illuminate the earth. Justice will surely defeat evil, and our lives will surely usher in hope and light.

Thank you very much.