(Minghui.org) I am my father’s favorite child among my three siblings, and I love him dearly. My mother, my elder sister, and I are Falun Dafa practitioners.
My mother was the first to take up the practice and it healed her many ailments. My father thought it was great that she became healthy again without having to spend money on medical treatments. He was very supportive and allowed her to promote Falun Dafa at his workplace.
He made sure the house was well heated in the cold months when other practitioners came over to watch the video recordings of Master’s lectures. My sister and I soon followed in our mother’s footsteps and became Dafa practitioners.
Father's Attitude Changes
A brutal campaign to persecute Falun Dafa was launched in July 1999 by Jiang Zemin, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At first, my father did not waiver in his support and even helped us make truth-clarification pamphlets.
As the persecution intensified, however, my father became very worried for our safety.
My mother, older sister, and I were arrested in November 2000 when we went to Beijing to appeal for Dafa.
We managed to return safely, but the incident left a mental scar on my father. He attributed our arrest to Dafa rather the CCP’s absurd and wrongful actions, and he became hostile toward the practice.
My sister and I were arrested again a month later. My mother was lured to the police station and subsequently detained, as well. That left my father alone in that big empty house.
My uncle kindly invited him over to his house for Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner. It was the first time in a long time that our family was not celebrating the New Year together. Missing us terribly and overwhelmed by sadness and loneliness, my father broke down and cried at my uncle’s house.
When my sister was falsely accused and sentenced to prison in 2002, my father blamed my mother for introducing her to Falun Dafa. He hated my mother and finally divorced her without giving her a penny.
On reflection, our lack of a real understanding of the Fa at that time was a factor in the divorce. We failed to recognize that our father was just as much a victim of the persecution as we were. As practitioners, we should have been kind and compassionate toward him, and tried to see things from his perspective. However, we took a stand against him as we thought we were affirming our commitment to Dafa, when we were in fact doing the opposite of what Master asks of us.
Trying to Help My Father
As our understanding of the Fa and our personal cultivation improved, we wanted to clarify the truth to our father and have him renounce any associations he had with the CCP. We took every opportunity to reach out to him in 2008.
On Father’s Day, my sister bought him flowers and took her child to visit him at work. On the Moon Festival, my sister visited him with a fresh basket of fruit. My husband, child, and I visited him and took a laptop with us to play a DVD about Dafa for him. During that time, my sister also wrote to him.
None of it seemed to help, however. We felt tired and discouraged. We looked inward and discovered that we were still harboring resentment toward him, and were not genuinely concerned about saving him.
My sister was sentenced again in 2013. Our father went berserk and screamed hateful words at our mother over the phone. He also went around looking for me. It frightened me so much that I dared not pick up his phone calls.
I spent a lot of time clarifying the truth to strangers face-to-face, but failed to help my father. I told myself that I must help to see the wicked CCP for what it is.
Master said:
“You should remember that they, too, are sentient beings in the human world, instead of thinking of them first as your family. And you should find out what in their minds is unresolved. Once you work those things out everything can be resolved.” (Teaching the Fa at the 2004 International Fa Conference in New York)
I invited my uncle and my father over for a meal. My uncle talked to him about quitting the CCP, but the conversation didn't go well. I was upset and in despair. After my father left the room and went for a nap, my uncle consoled me, “Just let him be! It’s no use!”
Writing a Letter
I felt terrible, but knew that I should not give up. So I decided to write a letter to him.
Master said:
“... it takes more than one cold night to form ice three feet thick: the things that have formed are hard to purge in one shot, for you haven’t sufficient heat and haven’t reached the point of being able to melt it. So you have to make many attempts on it before you can melt it away. If you cultivate well today, that much will thaw; cultivate well tomorrow, and that much more will be melted away; cultivate well the following day, and that much more will melt. And it will continue, little by little, till the point that your righteous thoughts are truly sufficient. At that point the amount of heat you generate will have increased, and you will be able to fully melt it away.” (“Fa Teaching Given at the 2010 New York Fa Conference,” Collected Fa Teachings, Vol. XI)
Writing a letter is an enormous challenge for me as I only received a primary school education. I thought about what I’d put in the letter during every waking moment. Whenever a good sentence formed in my mind, I immediately stopped what I was doing and wrote it down.
As soon as I started to work on my draft, events around me threatened to derail it. My mother suddenly became ill and my brother-in-law filed for divorce while my sister was incarcerated. My husband further exacerbated the situation, saying, “Your brother-in-law still owes your father over 200,000 yuan. You need to let him know about their divorce so he can get his money back.”
Of course, I didn't want to let my father know because he would only hate Dafa more if he knew about the divorce. My husband was angry with me, and the stand-off lasted for some time.
Although I felt my husband’s distant and cold manner hard to bear, it did not change my resolve in the least.
Master said:
“When it’s difficult to endure, you can endure it. When it’s impossible to do, you can do it.” (Lecture Nine, Zhuan Falun)
I locked myself in the room to concentrate on my letter and would not let anyone interfere with what I was determined to do.
While writing about withdrawing from the CCP, I was in tears and called out to my father in my heart. I wrote “I am not sure how best to express myself to make you understand the reason I desperately want you to withdraw from the CCP and be saved.”
I took my finished draft to a practitioner’s home and wanted their feedback. I started to read it out aloud:
“Dear father, I hope you are well. I am writing this letter to you because I have found it difficult to clearly express the many things I wanted to tell you when we talked. I hope you will read this patiently to the end...”
With tears streaming down my face, I held back my emotions and finished reading my draft. I noticed that a male practitioner was weeping along with me.
Everyone approved of the letter.
I wrote my draft neatly and planned to give it to my father the next day – the day of the Moon Festival.
When we met, my father asked me what was in my paper bag. I told him it was a Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party DVD. He stiffened up. Without giving him a chance to speak, I said, “I certainly would not be doing anything to harm you!”
I passed him the letter, and said, “I have written this for you. Please read it later.”
I felt so relieved on my way home. One of Master’s poems from Hong Yin Vol. II came to mind:
Deterrence
The divine pens deter those demons in human skinLike sharpened blades, they extirpate rotten spirits(Hong Yin Volume II, Translation Version A)
I called my father a few days later to see how he was doing. When he picked up the phone, I felt as if he was waiting for me to bring up the matter of quitting the CCP. I could almost sense him saying, “Yes, please withdraw for me.” But that didn't happen.
I rang my father again and arranged a time to meet.
I sat across from him in the restaurant, and said, “Father, time to withdraw your CCP membership?”
He glanced sideways and said uneasily, “What good does it do?”
“Why do you want to hold on to the membership?” I inquired. “It's not good for you, so why not quit it?!”
The words slipped out of his mouth so easily this time, “I will quit, if you say so.”
I sat next to him. Holding his hands with tears running down my face, I went on to tell him a lot more about Dafa and the persecution.
Good Things Happened
My sister was released from prison in 2016.
My father now often recites “Falun Dafa is good” as he walks along.
On August 27, 2018, my father left the woman he had been living with and came back to our family.
On the evening of September 12, he said to me, “I am going to join you all in doing the [Falun Dafa] exercises tomorrow morning.”
It is a real challenge to save people these days because they have been brainwashed by the CCP’s lies and propaganda, making it difficult for them tell right from wrong. But despite the enormous challenges, we must firmly keep in mind our sacred mission to save people and assist Master in the Fa-rectification.
