Prisoner to Remember: An American’s Mother Jailed in Hunan
How a chance encounter at a birthday party revealed an incredible story of persecution, faith, and inner strength
I first met Lydia Wang in 2017 at a birthday party for one of my daughter’s friends. A few years later, our girls attended a Chinese-language summer camp together and became close. With time, Lydia’s story slowly came to light—a heart-wrenching account of being forced into exile by a combination of religious persecution and the one-child policy. In fact, if not for her courage to leave China, one of my daughter’s best friends would never have been born.
Today, Lydia still had family back home, including her mother, who has been imprisoned several times for practicing or sharing information about Falun Gong, the meditation and spiritual practices despised and brutally persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the spring of 2022, I heard the news that Lydia’s mom—Aihua Liu—had been detained again.
A year later, Liu was sentenced to prison after a secret trial. She joined hundreds of thousands, even millions, of religious and political prisoners in China, a scale of politicized detention that remains underappreciated in much of the world. Detailed research on mass detention of Uyghurs has shed light on the atrocities facing that community. But even for Han Chinese, the occasional profile of an activist, lawyer, or dissident in a major international paper barely scratches the surface of the reality facing so many families.
I had been thinking about writing up Lydia’s story for this newsletter, but another new Substack “Unsilenced China Voices” has beaten me to it and helped Lydia publish her account in her own words. With their permission and in my first UnderReported China cross-post, I’m sharing it here.
Whenever I read an account like this or interview a refugee, I find that there are so many layers to the story and complexities in how the CCP’s repression affects innocent, good people’s lives. I am also humbled by their courage and persistence as they try to look ahead, pick up the pieces, and help their loved ones still under the regime’s thumb.
Amid all of the speculation about what U.S. policy towards China should or will encompass under a new Trump administration, I hope more attention is given to prisoners like Lydia’s mom or jailed lawyer Xu Zhiyong (see Rory Truex’s recent post on him here). Advocating for their freedom is not only a humanitarian cause, but has strategic value as well. The scale of political and religious imprisonment in China has wide-ranging implications for multiple sectors of Chinese and American society. Exposing and forcefully responding to the regime’s actions would signal that U.S. officials are not easily duped by the CCP’s whitewashing, while helping preserve the freedom—and life—of those in China whose attitudes on human rights align much more closely with the democratic world than Xi Jinping’s do.
A Daughter’s Dilemma
From the Cultural Revolution to the one-child policy and religious persecution, how the Chinese Communist Party’s repression haunts a family
By Lydia Wang
During the summer of 2022, I saw a message from my sister: my mom was missing. She reported it to the police, only to discover that they were the ones who had come and arrested her. When my sister went to check her apartment, the place was a mess; the police had ransacked everything. I put down the phone, shaken. I had known this could happen, but it was still a shock, and I was worried about what might happen to her next.
This was the 11th time my mom had been detained by Chinese police since 1999. We lost my father in 2009 because of torture in custody. My mother has never met her grandchildren. And all because our family practices Falun Gong, a spiritual and meditation practice that has brought our lives health, meaning, and inspiration, but which the CCP is determined to stamp out.
Living now in New York as a naturalized U.S. citizen, I’m grateful for the freedom I have to share my story on a platform like Substack. I hope it gives readers a clearer sense of the depths of the CCP’s depravity and the impact of its actions on generations of Chinese people.
Early challenges under CCP rule
Our history begins like many Chinese families. My parents, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Hunan, grew up during a tumultuous period and witnessed the Cultural Revolution as young adults. My father’s family was already on the regime’s blacklists because his grandfather had fled to Taiwan at the end of China’s civil war.
At the age of 29, my father was finally able to take the college entrance exam and attend university, thanks to the influence of another relative. He met my mother, and they both became teachers, settling down for a busy life as part of China’s emerging middle class.
My two older sisters were born, but then my parents ran up against the regime’s one-child policy. When I was born, my mother lost her teaching job. My younger brother Steven was born in the late 80s; then it was my father’s turn. He was dismissed from his job and, as a CCP member, also fined by the Party for having too many children.
My parents started their own business but despite years of hard work, it failed to turn a profit. We were facing serious financial troubles. The stress took a toll on my father’s health. He suffered from depression and other ailments, the cost of his medicines adding to the economic burden he felt.
A sliver of hope
It was around that time, in 1996, that one of my father’s friends and business associates introduced him to Falun Gong. The practice had started spreading in China in the early 1990s and by then had gained millions of believers. After only a few months of practicing Falun Gong’s meditation and qigong exercises, studying its spiritual teachings, and aspiring to follow its core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, my dad emerged from his depression and looked healthier than he had in years. We all saw the change in him.
My mom and we four children took up the practice, joining him each morning at a meditation practice site in a local park near our home in Hunan to do Falun Gong’s slow-moving exercises. My father was one of the coordinators for the site, which drew 20 to 30 people most days.
The Falun Gong community in the city was broader, though. I recall going to a courthouse to watch videos of Mr. Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong’s founder, lecturing on the practice’s spiritual teachings, with hundreds of people in the audience. In a city whose population at the time was 350,000, that was a notable turnout. I was fifteen years old and oblivious to the preciousness of that brief period when Falun Gong practitioners in China could practice freely.
Dark clouds return
"Where is your mom? Is she okay?" he asked. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had also been detained.
Everything changed the summer of 1999. On July 20, rumors circulated that the regime had banned Falun Gong and that coordinators from meditation sites were being arrested. Two days later, the evening state-run news broadcast announced that Falun Gong was now banned and anyone who continued to practice could face arrest. Television programs, newspapers, and radio broadcasts spouted around-the-clock lies, making it sound like Falun Gong practitioners were crazy, violent, dangerous, and hurt their families.
It was so far away from what we had experienced, but those who didn’t know Falun Gong believed it.
Given the small size of our city, it took time for this latest CCP political campaign to reach us. But in late 1999, police came to our door.
They said they had been monitoring my family for a long time, all the more so because my parents traveled to Taiwan frequently to visit relatives, an indication of potential treachery in the minds of Chinese security services. The police beat my father in front of us until he was nearly unconscious and dragged him away to a detention center. He was interrogated, tortured, and forced to watch CCP propaganda demonizing and distorting Falun Gong.
My father was released, but that was only the beginning.
Within a few months he was arrested again, and so was my mom. My big sister took my siblings and me to see my dad where he was detained. Initially, the police denied us access, but after a relative paid 500 yuan, we were allowed to visit with him for a few minutes. The only way to communicate was by writing on chalkboards and holding them up to the window. “Where is your mom? Is she okay?” he wrote.
We didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had also been detained. We just cried and tried to encourage him.
Those first arrests were a preview of what was to come: an endless cycle of detentions, abuse, release, police harassment, and family separation. Through it all, even when we have been unable to be together, we’ve felt a deep connection—that in following our conscience, persisting in our faith, and speaking out against the persecution, we are contributing to something larger than ourselves and, through our sacrifice, building a brighter future for China and our children, all while advancing on our own spiritual paths.
My father was arrested four times after the persecution began, and each time, he was severely tortured in detention.
On September 20, 2002, he was detained again because he was a well-known local practitioner. After several months at a detention center, his health deteriorated. A doctor told the detention center staff that if he was not released that day, he would die in custody. The detention center initially refused to release him and transferred him to a drug rehabilitation center instead. There, his health did not improve. Finally, to avoid responsibility should he die, the center released him. He was unable to walk, and his kidneys were failing.
My older sister quit her job to take care of him and had to break the news—my mother had been arrested and sent to a labor camp. He was heartbroken when he found out.
My brother leaves home
In 2008, my younger brother Steven received a life-changing opportunity—to move to the United States and become a dancer with Shen Yun Performing Arts. Steven had started dancing when he was eight years old and dreamed of becoming a professional dancer. He was attending a boarding school for aspiring dancers in Chongqing, sparing him from the hardships and persecution my parents were facing during the early 2000s.
At the time, Shen Yun was just starting out. This was a chance for him to contribute to a grander mission of reviving the beauty of China’s traditional culture—a beauty the CCP has sought to destroy and distort to maintain its grip on power—and to give voice to stories of present-day persecution like my family’s own.
So in the spring of 2008, my parents hugged him goodbye. Little did we realize that he would never see our father again.
Despite receiving treatment at a local hospital, my father’s health continued to deteriorate. In September 2009, he died from kidney failure, having never recovered from the damage done to his body during his multiple detentions. He was only 62 years old, and narrowly missed being able to walk me down the aisle at my wedding.
Police probing
“It would be a shame for your baby to grow up without a mother," the agents warned.
It was during this time that the police learned of Steven’s departure for the United States and his start with Shen Yun. Our family became an even higher-priority target, with Chinese security forces claiming Steven’s artistic career was a “threat to national security.”
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when police called me on my wedding day. When I didn’t pick up, they called my husband, asking questions about my brother’s life in the United States and his involvement with Shen Yun.
After my wedding, my husband and I moved to Guangdong Province, which meant I couldn’t see my mother as often. But in 2011, I visited her while on maternity leave after my first daughter’s birth. One morning, my mother had gone out to the supermarket, and my husband, sister, and I were eating breakfast when police came to the door. They asked for all our phone numbers and kept questioning us about my brother. We simply replied that he had gone to study abroad.
A few months later, after I had resumed my job teaching at a college, agents from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) visited me at work. They took me to a room in the school and questioned me for hours about my brother. I suspect they didn’t realize I was also a Falun Gong practitioner, or they would have been harsher. Again, I repeated that my brother had gone to the United States to study, and that my mother had told me Falun Gong was good.
They eventually left, but not before threatening me with arrest and torture. I froze, my blood running cold at their words. “It would be a shame for your baby to grow up without a mother."
They also called my husband with further threats and intimidation.
By the summer of 2012, our family’s situation had worsened. My sisters and I continued to face harassment, and my mom was repeatedly detained. To make matters worse, I discovered that I was pregnant with a second child. Under the one-child policy still in effect at that time, I would either need to have an abortion or face a hefty fine—or even arrest.
After learning about my pregnancy, I decided to visit my brother in the United States.
My family advised me not to return.
Facing my dilemma
My legs were weak when I arrived in New York City that summer of 2012. But with the sunshine peaking over the skyscrapers, it felt like the metropolis was saying hello to me and my unborn baby.
Still, I couldn’t relax—I knew I had to make a decision that could potentially mean life-or-death. And soon. Would my daughters be better off if I returned to my family in China? Or should I stay here in America, where at least one of them would be safe?
I did not know what the right choice was. But I knew two things: I would not give up my belief, and I would not give up my baby’s life.
The CCP and its security forces ended up making the decision for me. In November 2012, my mother was detained again for distributing flyers about the rights abuses facing Falun Gong practitioners and later sentenced to four years in prison. Out of concern for my safety, family members in China told me not to come back home.
Starting from scratch
I decided to stay in America and seek asylum. Yet despite feeling hopeful about the freedoms and my future, it was equally heartbreaking and sobering to realize that I may never be able to go home again. I may never see my mother. My unborn daughter may never meet her grandmother. And she would grow up not knowing her father and older sister.
Soon after making this choice, I gave birth to my second daughter, Evangeline. Lying alone in a hospital bed in a foreign country, unable to understand English, I longed for my mother and ached for my first daughter. The emotions—emptiness, guilt, and a profound sense of loss—were overwhelming and beyond words.
Yet at the same time, I felt incredibly blessed to have Evangeline, born healthy and safe.
She became my source of strength, my inspiration to work harder at learning English, and the joy of my life. Teaching her to tie her shoelaces and tutoring her in math brought pangs of nostalgia, reminding me of my own mother. But the hardest moments were when Evangeline turned to me during our meals and asked about her father or grandmother—I never knew how to answer. Her usual playful, cheeky expression would fade, replaced by a look that was clouded and cautious. I couldn’t bring myself to give her a straight answer.
Thankfully, during those difficult winters and sleepless nights, I had people to lean on. My brother understood what I was going through, the Falun Gong community in New York offered unwavering support, and my new American neighbors and friends became like family.
One step forward, two steps back
In 2016, I finally breathed a sigh of relief when my mother was released from prison. I missed her voice, and I couldn’t wait to talk to her again. I wondered how her health was faring.
When we finally spoke on the phone, the words poured out like a waterfall. Evangeline was now a rambunctious four-year-old, and Steven had met a lovely woman and proposed. We shared our hopes with my mother that we might have a family reunion in 2017 for his wedding. My mother beamed with pride as she applied for a passport in our hometown.
But our hopes were crushed when her application was denied because she practiced Falun Gong. One of the CCP’s many tactics in persecuting practitioners and other dissidents is to deny them permission to leave the country, locking them in. Now my mother had become a victim of that restriction.
Then, in August 2017, the final blow came—she was arrested again for distributing flyers and sentenced to three years in prison without due process. This relentless persecution forced her to miss her youngest child’s wedding and the birth of his two children.
We waited and waited, but my mother wasn’t released until the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. You’d think the Chinese regime would be fully focused on ensuring public health, but security forces were still devoting time, energy, and resources to monitoring Falun Gong practitioners like her.
In fact, reports show that detentions of Falun Gong practitioners intensified between 2020 and 2022, with several high-profile practitioners—like Fang Bin and Xu Na—sentenced to prison for sharing information about conditions in Wuhan and Beijing during lockdowns.
Facing the hard truth
My mother wasn’t spared from these systematic efforts to silence whistleblowers. In July 2022, I got a message from my sister: “Mom was detained again.” Then, on March 10, 2023, after a secret trial, a judge in Hunan sentenced her to four years in prison. She faced such severe punishment for acts that violated neither Chinese law nor the constitution—simply for possessing Falun Gong books and distributing pamphlets to raise awareness about the persecution.
For weeks, I kept this information to myself. I was on autopilot, going through the motions—preparing breakfast, sending Evangeline to school, going to work, coming home, and repeating. The words were stuck in my throat, and my mind was frozen in limbo. My mother had just been released not long ago—how could I possibly tell Evangeline that she was detained again?
So, I began alone, dedicating every spare moment to appealing for help. During work, parenting, and every quiet moment, I thought only of ways to rescue her. As a single mother balancing a job and caring for my child, the added strain was heavy. My mood became somber, and soon my child noticed and grew concerned. I finally decided to tell her the truth: Grandmother was arrested by the CCP’s police.
Evangeline understood and began helping me in her own way. She joined me at parades, speeches, and events around New York, advocating for her grandmother’s release by my side.
Looking to the future
When I stop to think about it, almost half of my mother's life since the persecution began 25 years ago has been spent in Chinese prisons and detention centers. Once the persecution started in 1999, my immediate family (my mother, father, two sisters, brother and myself) have never been able to be together in-person again.
My mother is currently being held at the Hunan Province Women’s Prison. My older sisters have tried to visit her many times, but the authorities have denied them access. My mother’s court-appointed lawyer has refused to help, and the family-hired lawyer was stonewalled.
I don’t have any answers at the moment. I don’t know when this persecution will end. I don’t know if I’ll ever see my mother again, if I’ll be able to ask her how her day has been, or if I’ll get to eat the hearty noodle soup she always made for my birthday.
But I do know this.
My mother—Aihua Liu—is the bravest person I know. She persists in her faith because she believes in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. We will never turn our backs on these universal values. When she distributes a flyer to end the persecution of Falun Gong, she’s not just sharing a message—she’s telling our family’s story. She’s honoring her husband and carrying on his legacy. No matter how much the regime represses Falun Gong, no matter how fearful they are—it may seem like my mother has lost everything, but in reality, she has it all. She hasn’t lost her faith or her hope for a better, more truthful, and freer future.
And I carry her torch and her faith with me. Each time I see my daughter, nephew, or baby niece smile, I have a deep sense of gratitude to have found some modicum of freedom and joy in America, and a sliver of hope that someday in China, people will be able to experience that too.
That hope will never be extinguished.