Home Ransacked by Police | Emma Guo

My name is Xin Shui Guo and I am a Falun Gong practitioner. My husband is an engineer, and we live right now in North Carolina, USA. I started practicing Falun Gong with my mother in 1995. At the time, my mother's health was very poor, and the hospital said she wouldn't have long left to live. In the summer, I would cover her with three or four blankets, but she would still shiver from the chills. She also had a herniated disc, so she was hunchbacked at a 90 degree angle, so she wasn't able to stand up straight. One day, my mom felt extremely sick, so she told my father she wanted to go to the park. And as soon as she entered the park, she saw a banner hanging between the trees that read, Falun Gong Buddhism. And as soon as she saw that, she wanted to learn it immediately. And amazingly, after practicing for just a month or so, one day, I suddenly noticed that her back was straight. I said, Mom, how did your back become straight? She didn't even notice it herself. She said, Oh, right, my back is straight now. Because I saw this miracle happen, I started learning the practice with my mom. And on the day of July 20th, 1999, all of the TV channels suddenly went off the air. Every channel was instead broadcasting the same story, which is that Falun Gong had been classified as a cult and should be banned. And at the time, my mom was still meditating outside. I was at home watching TV. So suddenly she came rushing in saying, Quick, we must hide all the Dafa books. She had already been through many of China's cultural movements, so she was sensitive to the situation. We felt that the suppression was unreasonable, but there was no place to appeal to. So my mother decided to post flyers around the neighborhood, something we had personally handwritten to explain the situation. And we posted so many times that the police became suspicious of us. After seeing countless posters and banners appearing in the park, the police began raiding homes. The most devastating raid was one morning when four trucks came in front of my house. Our house was surrounded by a crowd of neighbors who wanted to know what was happening. And the police banged on the door yelling, If you don't open up, we'll kick down this door. They broke the door open and we never repaired it afterwards. The police stormed in our home, both upstairs and downstairs, instantly filled up with policemen and women, my father's motorcycle, two TVs, a tape and a disc player that I had bought from Japan. Everything valuable was taken away. All the cash they found was seized too. And they even wanted to take away the mahogany furniture. And the neighbors were very angry seeing this, saying the police had gone too far. They defended our family, saying that we were good people and shouldn't be treated this way. The police then attacked the neighbors and threatened to detain them too if they didn't shut up. I was upstairs because I was too scared to go downstairs. And two policemen rushed up to my room and I was holding one of those cassette players for learning English. But the police snatched it from my hands in one go. And like that, they went back downstairs and dragged my mother away. And the last thing she said to me was, take good care of your brother.