Daughter Fights for Jailed Chinese-Activist Dad

Xu Jin was 8 when the police came to the family home in Beijing at midnight to take her father away.

She woke up and asked him what was going on. “Nothing,” he said. “Just go back to sleep.”

That was in 1981. Now she’s a 27-year-old student at Boston University. And her dad, Xu Wenli, is still a prisoner.

He went to prison for 12 years for advocating democracy, which China’s Communist government called subversion. When Xu tried again to set up a pro-democracy party in 1998, he was sentenced to another 13 years in prison.

Today, with virtually all the leading dissidents in jail or exile, it would seem that the government has won the battle. Xu’s fate is all the more poignant for the marginalized territory he and other democracy campaigners occupy in China. The 56-year-old electrician may be known outside China, but inside, few people have even heard of him.

Keeping Issue in American Conscience

In fact, much larger challenges loom for the communist government from millions of angry unemployed workers and struggling farmers, and lately from the mysterious rise of the Falun Gong movement, drawing millions of followers in search of a spiritual response to the failures of secular authority.

But China’s leaders also face the tenacity of an only child who, though far removed from her Beijing home, has never given up her struggle. By quiet but intensive lobbying, and in short personal essays couched in simple, evocative language, this loving and dutiful daughter has fought to keep Xu Wenli’s plight alive in American minds.

In the New York Times she describes how her home in Beijing is under constant watch by a team of policemen: “Several stand near the front door, while others sit in the apartment next door. We have no back door, just a window facing a schoolyard. Several policemen sit in the schoolyard and stare at the window.”

And the repeated police raids: “. . . they have taken three fax machines, three computers, two photocopiers, one typewriter, a portable telephone, address books, my mother’s personal journal, some novels and any papers they could find.”

In the Washington Post: “It is hard for me to go to sleep every day and think my father is suffering in jail.”

And in an interview with the Associated Press: “I think I’m always . . . daddy’s girl. And the favorite one. And you know how, like, when you have children, you look at your children, your eyes just glow . . . and I miss that.”

After the 1981 arrest, a year passed before the family even knew where Xu Wenli was. For the next five years, they were allowed to visit him once every two months for 40 minutes. Then he smuggled his autobiography out of prison. The punishment: three years of solitary confinement and no family visits.

Computer Is Promptly Confiscated

The next time Xu Jin saw her father she was shocked. “His hair was gray, and his teeth were falling out. He didn’t look like the man I used to know. His hand was shaking because he was too excited to see us. It was sad.”

He was released in 1993 but kept under house arrest. As a dissident’s daughter, Xu was not allowed to attend college in China, so two months after Xu Wenli’s release, she left for Paris and the Sorbonne University.

Moving on to the United States, she graduated from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in May 1998 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. She entered graduate school at Boston University in September 1998. She received scholarships to both schools.

Xu arrived speaking no English, but quickly showed her aptitude for painting.

“She took every job in the place to make money, whether it was waiting on tables, or whether it was tutoring, or whether it was baby-sitting,” recalled Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch in New York, who helped her get into college.

“She was working at $7 an hour, and she saved enough money to buy her father a computer, which she sent to China and which was shortly thereafter confiscated by the Chinese government.” The last time Xu was home was at Christmas three years ago, when her father was under house arrest. The last time she spoke to him was by telephone on her 26th birthday on Nov. 28, 1998. A week later he was arrested again and swiftly sentenced to 13 years in prison. Again the charge was subversion.

Xu Jin says her mother, He Xintong, is constantly followed, and her father has hepatitis B. She says her mother called China’s equivalent of 911 on Oct. 1, the national day, and demanded they treat her husband, change his diet and keep the family informed.

“They’re not doing any of it,” says Xu. “They just don’t want to deal with him.” Police deny he is sick. His wife believes police are mistreating him to force him into exile--something he has refused so far.

In her Boston studio, Xu keeps letters from her father on display.

“Part of home,” she explains. “I miss home.”

Besides lobbying for her father’s release, she is working on her master’s degree and holding down four jobs at Boston University, two of them as a teaching assistant.

Her Washington Post article appeared last April, while Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was visiting the United States. A police officer went to see her mother in Beijing. Xu thinks the police were worried about demonstrations when Zhu visited Boston on his six-city tour.

“They asked my mom what’s my address in the States,” says Xu. “It was very weird. I think they sort of harassed her in terms of saying, ‘We can do anything to your daughter too. You have to be afraid of us.’ ”

When Zhu came to Boston, Xu was among the protesters who greeted him.

Students Admire Her Strength

She shares an apartment with another Chinese student but spends much of her time in her studio. There she has Chinese-English dictionaries and Chinese pop music cassettes from her days as a disc jockey on a Chinese radio station in Paris.

Her students say they admire her.

“She’s a really strong person,” says Grace Cheng, a Chinese American from Nashville, Tenn. “She’s never shown any signs of weakness to me. Xu is a really incredible person, teacher. Most of us feel very comfortable with her just speaking our ideas freely.”

Nicole Langille, of Wayne, N.J., likes her sense of humor. “It’s a little satirical, but it’s quite funny. She’s a really warm person.”

Her mother is able to visit her father periodically, and both women write to him. His replies are addressed jointly to them.

In one letter last July, Xu Wenli said he felt good and was exercising every day.

“The most exciting thing was to see Jing Jing’s recent photo,” he wrote, using Xu’s nickname. “Jing Jing doesn’t look like a twentysomething at all, only like a teenager. . . . Very slim but looks healthy. Competent and dynamic.”

Xu will receive her master’s degree in fine arts this spring. Her mother attended her graduation from Bard College in New York in May 1998, the first time she visited the United States. Her father will inevitably miss her graduation from Boston University, but she hopes her mother will make it.

Xu plans to look for jobs related to art, teaching and graphic design. Then she adds with a laugh: “Or maybe I’ll end up waitressing.”

The other day she was sculpting a boat from papier-mache. Boats figure large in her work. “It’s dealing with moving from place to place,” she says. “I’m sort of very attached with the image of a boat. Tied to my father, tied to my story, yes.”

She made another model boat when she was 12 and her father was serving his first prison term. She wrote a poem to go with it:

I used a piece of bamboo

And made a small boat,

Named ‘Waiting.’

Wish it will grow up,

Mom, Dad and I

Will be on it. . . .

Charles Hutzler in Beijing contributed to this report.