Wen Chen's View

Bill is my only sibling. We haven’t seen each other in 27 years—our lives split by fundamentally different choices. Bill joined the Chinese Communist Party and worked for the government. I left China 31 years ago and later became an activist for human rights in China. Our parents, deeply scarred by the Cultural Revolution, gave us a childhood steeped in confusion and fear. That brutal movement led to the deaths of two million intellectuals. Our mother, a political science graduate from a prestigious university, was sent to work as a secretary in a car manufacturing plant. Our father, who dreamed of becoming a nuclear scientist, was forced into a coal mine thousands of miles from home for a decade. He was only transferred to a post near Mom when malnutrition-induced illness left him seriously ill. In their eyes, academic brilliance was a curse—a mark for political persecution. Though Bill and I excelled in math and science, our parents feared for us. To protect us, they enrolled us in a...

  Today I recalled my experience after June 4, 1989. The Tiananmen Square Massacre changed my view about this world. This 50min conversation with Bishop Dennis Eversen covered my experience in the past 30 years as a scientist searching for truth.

Students from totalitarian regimes more or less have some fear even after they arrive in the land of freedom. The main reason is that their fellows may act as spies to report their speeches or actions to the embassy.    In 2000, I was a fifth-year graduate student at Caltech. My personal life was simple. I played badminton three times a week, meditated daily with Falun Gong practice, and served as a treasurer for the Caltech Chinese Student Club (Caltech C). The Chinese authority started persecuting Falun Gong in 1999, but I continued to meditate on campus every morning. I noticed some Chinese folks took pictures or videos of us during the meditation sessions. One day, the president of the Chinese student club warned me. " Wen, you better be careful. " said he, " The Chinese consulate asked me to report your activities. " He said he was probably not the only one who got this " reques t ".   It happened to many universities. A few years ago, a colleague...

At the start of elementary school, I often found myself wondering why I couldn’t understand what many of my friends conversed about, despite our common learning grounds. What was vacation like? What was it like to have aunts, uncles, and cousins? My friends were shocked when I asked them these questions and couldn’t fathom why I had never met any of my relatives. I didn’t have an answer either. It wasn’t until the last few years of elementary school that I could understand my family’s circumstances. When my parents first came to the U.S. for graduate school, they picked up the practice of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice. However, in 1999, only a year before they were due to graduate and return to China, the Chinese government began mass persecution of Falun Gong, sending millions of meditators to prisons where they were tortured, forced into slave labor, and killed. Many became victims of the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, allowing international patien...

  Before I came to the U.S. for graduate school, I grew up in an education system filled with communist propaganda. In 1995, as a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology, I argued with my colleagues, insisting that the Tiananmen Massacre never happened. After they showed me pictures and videos, I broke down in tears. As a high school student in China, the official message I received about 1989 was that students were "anti-China." and killed many soldiers. We even saw pictures of Chinese soldiers' burnt bodies on all TV programs and newspaper pages. I believed every word the Chinese government said. Ever since I had a memory, people told me that the Party loved me more than my parents did. Just a couple of weeks after June 4th, 1989, I came home seeing my Dad shouting at the TV, "You said nobody died, what about those red marks on the Square?" He was trembling with anger. The moment he saw me, he kept his mouth shut and left the room. My parents n...