God's Double Agent (27 page)

After she yanked out her pockets, she pulled her hands away. From across the room, I could see the corner of the address book right there in her hand. However, the officers’ eyes were fixed on her pockets, which they’d anticipated would contain the money. When the pockets hung out of her pants, some lint fell out and onto the floor. The officers were so surprised her pockets didn’t contain money, they stood there transfixed, staring at the cloth lining. They didn’t even notice the book in her hand.

The head officer’s face grew red and splotchy. “Well, if you think you’re so clever that you would steal money from police officers, maybe we should arrest both of you.”

I’d never considered that Heidi would possibly be put in jail as well, and I wanted to cry out to her. Just then, one of the officers shouted because he’d found the money under a stack of counterrevolutionary magazines.

“Take him away,” the head officer said to another officer, who shoved me out the door. “I’ll take care of his wife.”

19

“How did you organize the underground church training center?” the interrogator asked. The room had a desk, a few stools, and no windows. It had been days since the police had taken me away from our apartment and dragged me to a car waiting on campus. For hours, I had watched from the backseat as they carried boxes of our belongings into a truck. I noticed a wedding photo fall on the ground into a puddle. An officer stepped on it and stuck it back in the box.

I looked away. I knew the contents of those boxes were merely “things,” cheap mementos of past events, and it was the events themselves that were important—but the photos, love letters, and posters were tokens that caused us to pause, remember, and smile. As I sat there watching those items taken, combed over for evidence, and destroyed, it felt so personally insulting, like they were denigrating enormous portions of our life together.

When I arrived at the prison, I resolved not to give them the names of my other Christian friends.

“Who was involved?” he asked, leaning across the table. He waited for only a second before he yelled, “Who provided the teachers?”

I sat up straight on my stool, jarred by the volume of his questioning and the spittle that landed on my face. My head
pounded.
What did they do with Heidi? Did they find the little address book? Are my friends being detained because of me?

Suddenly, a thud on the side of my head caused me to wince.

“Who are your foreign connections?” he snarled. “Now do you hear me?”

“You have to obey the law,” I said, with as much authority in my voice as I could fake. “I have a law degree from the People’s University, and I know there are laws that govern how prisoners are treated.”

The guard who’d whacked me massaged his knuckles, and another pulled him aside. “Don’t hit him. He’s a lecturer at the Communist Party School, an intellectual. And put that away.” He pointed to the electric shock baton the guard was holding, a commonly used torture device that had a voltage as high as 300,000 volts. “He knows the law. If he gets out of here, he might know some important people who can discipline us. Plus, it looks like he’s been preparing for this moment for a long time.”

Secretly, I was gratified I was holding up well under the questioning. I felt God’s presence surround me in the interrogation room, and I found some degree of peace.

“Oh, the law?” My interrogator threw his head back and laughed. “If you cared about the law so much, why did you create an illegal Christian training center?”

“Doesn’t the constitution say Chinese citizens have freedom of religious belief in Article 36?” I said. “I’m a Chinese citizen!”

“You need to read the Constitution carefully,” the interrogator said. “It doesn’t say ‘religious freedom,’ as you claim. It says ‘freedom of religious belief.’ If you’d simply believed and kept those beliefs to yourself, you’d be home with your wife today.”

“But doesn’t the universal declaration of human rights in Article 18 give me protection?” I asked, realizing there was no use seeking to iron out our different interpretations of the Chinese constitution.

“You’re employed by the Communist Party School,” he
scolded. “You know you aren’t an ordinary citizen and should conduct yourself more properly. Why do you insist on talking about this Jesus?”

“The Lord died for me and saved me from despair,” I said simply. “I wanted the others to know about God too, so I—”

The interrogator slammed his fist onto the table. “Nobody will utter the word ‘God’ in this room!”

As I sat there, deprived of sleep and water, the temptation for sarcasm was too great. After all, I was already in prison. So I said, in a very serious tone, “Oh no. You just now mentioned the forbidden word!”

All of the guards whipped around to look at my interrogator. They apparently weren’t used to jokes, because my flippant answer incensed him.

“Enough!” he yelled, baring his teeth. “Do you think you’re impressing us with your stubbornness?” He walked around the table and sat down beside me on a stool. His mouth got so close to the side of my face that I felt his breath in my ear. It was hot, a strange sensation because the room was so cold. “Well, your wife is
much
more stubborn than you. She hasn’t said a word . . . yet.”

I swallowed hard. My fears had been confirmed. Heidi had been arrested.
She’ll be okay
, I thought.
After all, she’s prepared
. In fact, both of us had been trained on how to survive an interrogation. Jonathan Chao had taught us from a handbook based on interviews with hundreds of tortured Christians. Heidi and I knew how best to resist coercive techniques: we needed to come to terms with our imprisonment, to appear submissive, and to remain silent. But I could tell my refusal to answer questions was wearing thin.

“We need the names of your accomplices,” he said. “Do you know Jonathan Chao?”

“No.”

“Answer us honestly!”

“I only obey God.”

“You don’t obey the Bible?”

I paused, and then answered hesitantly. “I try.”

“All of it? Even Romans 13?” I nodded, a little shocked that this man could name a book of the Bible. “Because there’s one verse in there which might apply to this case. It says, ‘Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.’”

I didn’t move.

“Are you deaf? We’re God’s servants, according to your own Scriptures,” he said. “We’re hired by God.”

He got up from his stool and began to pace back and forth in the small room. “So according to the Holy Bible, we have authority over you, so you need to obey us.”

He paused a moment, then swung back to face me. “So now tell us who helped you set up the school. Was it Jonathan Chao?”

Is he telling me the truth, God? Should I obey him?
I prayed. Though I knew it wasn’t the Lord’s will that I endanger His church, I also knew He didn’t approve of deception. Should I make up stories, or would that cause more harm to my fellow believers? Had Heidi been able to keep the book safe, or were my Christian friends already on their way to the station?

“No,” I lied. I’d been interrogated for days and—at the time—it felt like the best course of action.

“You apparently don’t realize that we’ve been following you for quite some time,” the interrogator interrupted. “I know you aren’t telling the truth.”

My shoulders slumped and I put my head in my hands. He was right about my deception, and I felt so guilty that I wanted to hide my face. However, once I was in that slight position of repose, I felt I could shut my eyes and rest forever. The palm of my hand was as comfortable as any feather pillow, and the arms of sleep wrapped around me like a blanket. The harsh light of the room dimmed and I felt a tingly sensation all over my body. Suddenly I felt warmth, joy even, then—

Thwack
!

My interrogator stood before me and I felt a stinging sensation on the side of my face.

“Wake up!” he said. “Bad Christians like you don’t deserve to nap. You think because we’ve been in here for three days that I’ll tire of questioning you. But that’s where you’re wrong. I get to leave this room and rest in my big, comfortable bed, and another person is ready to question you. We could do this all week. I’m going to ask you this again. Do you know Jonathan Chao?”

“I do not!” I exclaimed.

My interrogator—with a rather unnecessary dramatic flourish—then placed a single photo on the table in front of me. It was of me, Jonathan Chao, and the illegal Bible printer, Zhuohua Cai.

“Don’t you?”

When I realized an agent had been following me with a camera, I relented. They knew. I knew.

“Okay,” I said. “I do know Jonathan.”

It almost hurt my mouth to say my mentor’s name. I respected him more than anyone, and had benefitted so much from our fellowship. However, as an American citizen, he’d offered himself up as a possible way to get out of interrogation. I recalled his suggestion, when I had shared my fears about prison with him, that I use him as a way to deflect attention.

The interrogator’s eyes lit up as he slid a piece of paper and a pen across the table. “Tell me what you know about the notorious Mister Chao.”

My hands were shaking with guilt when I took the pen. However, I simply turned this confession into a mission statement. I explained Jonathan’s vision for China, which included the “evangelization” of China, the “Christianization” of Chinese culture, and “kingdomization” of the Chinese church. In English these all end in “ization,” but in Chinese they ended in “hua.” Using several pages, I elaborated on what Jonathan called the “three huas.”

“Basically, Jonathan’s plan is to share the gospel to as many as possible in China and to shape the Chinese culture into Christ-like culture,” I wrote. It was hard to write coherently when the lines on the paper kept moving. Sleep deprivation was supposed to make me more suggestible and less resistant to questioning, but it also made my vision blurry. My speech was slurred. My head was pounding. At first, I tried to remember everything about Jonathan’s ministry without compromising the secret details of operations. Plus, I wanted to defend his name. “Jonathan loves China more than anyone else. He’s not anti-China. He’s an American citizen. Why does he come here to sacrifice so much? Every time I met with him he was tired. He wore himself out trying to help China.” By the end of the tenth page, I had trouble keeping my pen on the paper.

When the interrogator came back into my room, he looked like a dog anticipating a meaty treat. But when he was finished reading the papers, he slammed them on the desk and yelled, “This is what you give me? The three huas? Jonathan Chao is not a friend of China. You’re trying to lure me with this so-called gospel. But you can’t spread that venom here.”

He knocked on the door and a guard appeared. “Take him away!”

Finally, my interrogation stopped after three days and nights.

It felt good to stretch my legs and to actually be moving, even if I was moving toward prison. Had I said the correct things? Had I compromised Jonathan? Were they torturing Heidi? The guard escorted me from the interrogation center, a building adjacent to the prison, to the first gate of the compound, and tossed clothes at me. Apparently, the interrogators tried to get you to talk, whereas the guards made sure you didn’t. In fact, no one was allowed to talk in the prison compound, so I silently unfolded the uniform—a long-sleeved blue shirt and black trousers,
with no belt. After I put on the clothes, the guard walked over to me and pointed to my face. I didn’t understand until he reached up and yanked my glasses off.
Suicide prevention
, I thought. No one was allowed to have anything that could be used to kill oneself. I tried not to panic as my eyes adjusted to the room without the aid of my glasses. Severely nearsighted, I could only see things that were close to me, whereas distant objects were blurry.

Without a word, he moved me from the room and down the dark corridor. I’d never been more fatigued, and every motion was an act of will.
Left foot, right foot, left, right
.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp kick to my back, and I fell to the floor. For the next few minutes, the guard beat me because he’d apparently motioned for me to move over to another room to get fingerprinted. Since I couldn’t see his gestures, he used his feet to “speak” to me. He grabbed me by my shirt to lift me off the ground, and then kicked me all the way down the hall until I made it to the correct location to get my fingerprints taken. I limped into the room as quickly as I could.

After I was fingerprinted, we walked down the corridor and stopped at the west prison cell, in section one, room four. From that moment forward, I was no longer Xiqiu Fu. My new name was Xi Yao Si, which meant “west side, section 1, room 4.” The iron door slammed shut behind me. My new home was about two hundred square feet and had a toilet and a sink in the corner of the cell, behind a glass wall. I instantly shuddered at the thought of going to the bathroom in plain sight. There was a long limestone bench along one of the walls. Some of the men there stood, others sat on the floor. But one—and only one—was reclined on the bench. When I walked in, they all turned to stare.