A Terrible Salvation

 A terrible salvation
By Jennifer Lin
 Bob Fu, a Glenside theology student and activist, with a photograph of his father, Fu Yubo.

The arrival terminal at Bangkok International Airport was quiet in the empty hours before dawn. Bob Fu paced in a corner, his eyes darting from his watch to the arrival board. The flight from the Chinese city of Qingdao was hours late.
An older American friend waited with him. Two other friends stood on the opposite end of the terminal; a fourth waited outside in an SUV with the engine running.
Fu’s nerves were frayed. The arrival board fluttered with updates on flights, but still no news on the plane from China.
On this April morning last year, Fu was on a rescue mission. His target: a 72-year-old Chinese “house church” leader on the flight from Qingdao.
　 Fu, 35, a theology student from Glenside, knew the man was in trouble with police back home.
To get the man out of China quickly and easily, Fu had arranged for him to join a vacation tour to Thailand, promising six days in the tropics - plus an automatic Thai visa. He told him few details. The less the man knew, the better, Fu reasoned.
At 5:10 a.m., the flight from Qingdao finally touched down in Bangkok. Fu snapped to attention. He motioned to his friends.
As passengers entered the arrival hall, Fu scanned the faces. He saw a cluster of tourists with matching travel bags. And in back, a stooped old man.
Fu and his friend strode purposefully toward the man. They got on either side of him. In unison, they gently took him by the elbows and kept walking.
Across the hall, another friend alerted the SUV driver, who raced to the exit door. The men hoisted the older man into the car, slammed the door, and sped off.
“We want to get you out,” Fu explained quickly. “These are my friends. They will help you.”
The bewildered man looked into Fu’s face in the dark car. Recognition flashed instantly.
“It’s you, Pianyi!” uttered the old man, using Bob Fu’s childhood nickname.
The old man clutched the hand of the son he had not seen in seven years.
“Pianyi,” the old man repeated softly.
Bob Fu became a human rights activist because of his own run-ins with the Chinese police. As a young English instructor in Beijing then known as Fu Xiqiu, he lived a good life. By day, he taught at a Communist Party training school. By night, he held Bible sessions and prayer meetings in his apartment.
China allows the practice of religion, but only in authorized temples and churches that are supervised by the government’s religious affairs department. In 1996, Fu opened his own Christian retreat, crossing the line and angering authorities.
Fu and his wife were detained for two months by police and, after their release, shadowed by agents for China’s powerful and pervasive Public Security Bureau. Feeling trapped, the couple climbed out of their apartment window in the middle of the night and fled to Hong Kong.
The United States granted them asylum and they moved to Glenside in 1997, where Fu took up studies at Westminster Theological Seminary.
Once he was safe in the States, Bob Fu was tormented by a dilemma. He wanted to go public with what he knew about arrests and punishment of underground Christians in China. But he knew that if he did, he could endanger his family back home.
Fu understood the unwritten rules of the game. If he spoke out too aggressively, if he attacked the Chinese government too boldly, even from a safe distance in Philadelphia, someone back home would pay.
Someone like his father, Fu Yubo.
“Many nights, I could not sleep well,” he said. “I looked at it as, do I stand for truth, or do I keep silent?”
It did not take him long to decide to speak out. He traveled to Washington to testify at congressional hearings. He advised human rights monitors at the U.S. State Department. He addressed international prayer meetings.
“Bob’s been very helpful,” said Will Inboden, a special adviser in the State Department’s office on international religious freedom.
But back home in his family’s village in the eastern province of Shandong, security police kept a dossier on Bob that included clippings about him from U.S. newspapers.
Fu Yubo knew little of his son’s activism. He was a village bookkeeper who became a Christian in 1991, a year after his son had. The official church was more than 50 miles from his village. Instead of traveling there, Fu Yubo started prayer meetings in his home. His son provided him with study guides. Many weeks, more than two dozen people came to his house.
Police started pressuring Fu Yubo to go to the official church. To make sure he did, they quizzed him on the weekly sermon at the government-sanctioned church.
After his son and daughter-in-law escaped to the States, police turned up the heat on Fu Yubo, putting him under tight surveillance. Every time Fu called home, his father would preemptively assure him, “Everything is fine.”
But the extent to which his father was paying the price for his activism did not become clear until their reunion in Thailand.
In a Bangkok office building, Fu Yubo’s meeting with U.S. immigration officials was not going well. “Listen,” an American officer said, “your father’s just not cooperating.”
Bob Fu was stunned. Since his father’s arrival in Thailand, everything had gone so smoothly. It had taken the U.N. office in Bangkok only four days to recognize Fu Yubo as a refugee, a process that usually took months. This immediately cleared the way for him to apply for asylum in the United States.
But the U.S. immigration officer told Fu his father was evasive. And if he didn’t start giving clear answers, the officer would cancel the interview.
Since the rendezvous at the airport, Fu had noticed that his father seemed confused at times, but he chalked it up to stress. At the immigration office, Fu tried to hide his impatience, but he was genuinely perplexed. “Dad,” he said in the Chinese dialect spoken in his home province, “you’ve got to answer their questions.”
Fu Yubo sat in a plain room with another immigration official and a translator. He was agitated, confused, peeved. He told his son in Chinese that he couldn’t understand the dialect of the interpreter from Taiwan. He snapped defiantly, “Go ahead, beat me up. I have nothing to say to you.”
Then it hit Fu. The interview room. The officials. The probing questions. Fu Yubo thought he was back in China facing interrogators. Bob’s throat tensed. Patiently, he explained to his father, “Don’t worry. This is not China. Just tell them what happened.”
And slowly, the old man did.
Fu Yubo said he was smacked in the face with the back of an officer’s hand. Another time, he was struck with a wooden stick. The interrogators wanted to know where his son got his information. They asked Fu Yubo where Bob lived in the States and what his phone number was.
The details were jarring for Fu. “I should have been the one enduring those beatings,” he said later.
After the immigration interview, father and son waited at a remote cabin in northern Thailand for a decision on the asylum request. Fu warned his father that even though they were being sheltered by friends, he had to be careful and vigilant.
“Don’t go wandering off,” Fu cautioned. “It’s still dangerous. Chinese secret police could be looking for us.”
“I don’t care,” his father shot back. More than once, he wandered off, confused, and got lost, forcing Fu and his friends to go searching for him.
In late May, Fu got a call from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok: His father’s asylum request had been accepted. On June 11 last year, they left for Philadelphia.
Fu Yubo was a tiny man with a slightly cockeyed face and a bad eye. Born to a farm family, he had taught himself how to tote up numbers and worked for his village as a bookkeeper.
Like everyone in his town, Fu Yubo also farmed a small family plot, growing potatoes, corn, cabbage and other vegetables. This was not a hobby; it was a necessity.
Bob grew up admiring his father for his capacity for kindness. He heard stories about him from the years of famine in the late 1950s, before he was born. His father, then single, would feed beggars who showed up at his doorstep. One was a woman with two starving young children. They married, and she became Bob’s mother.
During the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when neighbors turned on neighbors, the Fus took risks. They sneaked food to the family of a villager who had been branded and ostracized as a “counterrevolutionary.” “Whenever someone would knock at the door, our mother would always tell us to give them some food like potatoes or corn,” Bob said.
When Fu Yubo started his house church in 1991, it drew many villagers - and the attention of police. Always locked in a cat-and-mouse game with authorities, especially after his son fled in 1996, his situation went from bad to worse in early 2002.
Fu Yubo had no way to know it, but on the other side of the world, his son had dropped a human rights bombshell.
Through contacts, Bob Fu came into a trove of secret government documents that outlined a systematic plan to eliminate unregistered churches. The crackdown was spurred by hysteria over the Falun Gong spiritual movement. In 1999, Falun Gong followers staged a big protest in Beijing, infuriating China’s leaders who vowed to wipe out all “evil cults,” including underground Christian churches.
Friends warned Fu about releasing the material. They advised him against associating his name with the documents. He decided otherwise. “Someone had to do it,” Fu said. “Someone had to add credibility to the documents.”
On Feb. 11, 2002, hundreds of pages of translated documents were released to the media. And in a move that surely angered China’s leaders, Fu made sure that President Bush got copies of his report on the eve of his trip to Beijing later that month.
News of the documents, as well as a list of 123 jailed Christian leaders, made headlines from London to Tokyo. U.S. lawmakers and human rights activists pressured Bush to confront China’s leaders on the abuse of underground Christians, adding to the summit agenda an embarrassing item that Beijing wanted to avoid.
As Fu gave interviews to reporters from across the country and overseas, his father in Shandong was summoned by police.
Everything about America was so alien for Fu Yubo and, at times, disorienting.
His son lived on a busy four-lane road with a sidewalk out front that no one seemed to really use for walking, and plants in the yard that were only flowers for decoration.
Fu Yubo spent his mornings reading books in Chinese. And when his granddaughter came home from school, they sat together to watch television, even though he couldn’t understand a word that the cartoon characters were jabbering.
Fu Yubo, whose wife had died years ago, heard his son preach for the first time, at the Allentown Chinese Christian Church. Father and son took long walks on the grounds of nearby Arcadia University.
For the first time since he was in high school, Bob Fu was sharing a house with his father. It became obvious to him that all was not right. His father was absentminded, prone to losing his train of thought in mid-sentence. He became agitated around strangers.
Maybe this was just his father’s temperament, Fu thought. Maybe it was the new surroundings, or stress from his dramatic escape. Or maybe. . . .
Fu started checking the Internet and asking friends, “Do you know anything about Alzheimer’s disease?”
In October, Fu took his father to see a neurologist. As a first step, the doctor recommended an MRI. The test revealed that Fu Yubo had two tumors the size of eggs in his brain. The tumors were benign, but the surgery to remove them left Fu Yubo in a vulnerable state.
Medically, his needs were beyond the care Fu and his wife could give him at home. His father was not eating properly and had to have a feeding tube. He was admitted to a nursing home.
His health seemed to improve, even as his frustration over the strangeness of his new surroundings was increasing. One day, he fell getting out of his tall bed. Weeks later, he tumbled again. “I have a headache,” Fu Yubo complained.
After his father’s second fall, Fu returned home from teaching a Sunday school class to find a message from the nursing home: His father had been admitted to the hospital.
Just days later, on Jan. 13, 2003, Fu Yubo died.
In the year since Bangkok, Bob Fu has asked himself many questions.
Did the beatings by police exacerbate his father’s health problems? Or was it the stress of the Bangkok rescue?
Was surgery the right course to take? Would his father have done better recuperating at the family’s home instead of a nursing home? Should he have been taken to the hospital immediately after his second fall?
Would he still be alive today if he had stayed in China?
Can anyone really say?
“The most important thing, the thing that really comforts my heart,” Fu says, “was knowing we could be together as a family again in a place without fear.”
Jennifer Lin is an Inquirer staff writer. Contact staff writer Jennifer Lin at 215-854-5659 or jlin@phillynews.com.

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