By Stephanie Lam

When we buy pistachio nuts from the store, their shells are always open. Pick one up with the opening facing you, and you'll see a smile. That's why Chinese people call pistachio nuts "happy nuts" and make it a tradition to eat them during the Chinese New Year. The processing of the food before it is sold, however, isn't that joyful. In unfavorable weather or when the tree is infected with fungi in the Alternaria genus, pistachio nuts will be harvested with their "mouths" shut. When that happens, the tears of many people create that smile.

William (Kui) Huang is one of the people who spent their youth cutting open the nut shells with pliers. During an interview he told me that he had to work at least sixteen hours a day. The work was done in Cell No. 27 of Zhuhai 2nd Detention Center, which according to Huang was less than twenty square meters in size and was home to over twenty people. The room was full of products and the raw materials that they are made out of. To attend to natural calls one had to climb through these materials to reach the latrine pit in a corner which was not separated from the rest of the room. The room was never cleaned and the air was turbid. Huang witnessed a prisoner dying, not because he was beaten, but because he couldn't stand the environment.

Huang recalls the bed that he shared with all the other detainees as a single piece of big wooden board, which during day time, became the table on which they processed pistachio nuts and other goods such as ornamental flowers and Christmas lights. Huang has shockingly seen these exact same products on the shelves of the grocery stores that he is now shopping at in the United States.

Huang goes on to say that the nuts came from a factory nearby. When they arrived at the prison, each detainee was given a pair of pliers. From 6am to 10pm-sometimes until midnight and even overnight-every day, they were made to create slits on the nut shells. I was stressed by Huang's description of the work: Hold the tiny nut in one hand, and the pliers in the other. Carefully, press on the pliers and cut the shell-not too hard, not too soft. You have to do it slowly and with strength. Yes, that is hard, and over time it leads to blisters forming on your hand, or old blisters breaking and thus releasing pus and blood, which then might drip onto the nuts. But remember, it is not acceptable to make the slit too big or too small, nor to break the shell even a bit. Doing that to too many nuts would result in less profit for the factory and the prison guards, which meant punishment of all prisoners in the cell. What kind of punishment? The ones that were imposed on Huang include being forced to squat for three days consecutively, being deprived of sleep for a month, and being shocked with high voltage electric batons. But don't be too careful either, because those two fierce eyes of the prison guard are constantly staring at you. How dare you do the work so slowly?

Huang said that if the prison guard is in a good mood, maybe he will just have you stay up all night to finish the required amount of work, but if he is not happy at the moment, then you might be subjected to violence. What's more, don't breathe hard no matter how stressed and tired you are. According to a prison guard, right before they were sent to the detention center, the pistachio nuts were fumigated with industrial bleach to expel borers and to make their color brighter. Because of the poor environment, the deficient in nutrition, and the lack of sunlight and exercise, most of the detainees were sick, and Huang has seen some of them faint while cutting open the nut shells because the bleach was concentrated.
So what crime did Huang commit to be treated that way? "Subverting the political power of the state", or in other words, not agreeing to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) atheistic ideas and exposing its crimes against humanity.

Huang's story began in 1998, when he was a senior in Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University majoring in precision instruments and mechanics. At that time, the traditional Chinese cultivation practice Falun Gong was very popular in China. It consists of exercises and meditation but also requires its practitioners to improve their character. According to government estimates, within seven years since its introduction to the public, 70-100 million people were practising Falun Gong, and its central book, Zhuan Falun, was listed as a bestseller by the Beijing Daily, the Beijing Youth Daily, and the Beijing Evening Daily. Huang recalls that there were Falun Gong practice sites in almost all the parks in China, and in Tsinghua's campus alone, there were ten of them.

Since its teachings on morality attracted him, Huang started doing the practice that is based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, in the beginning of that year. As a university student, Huang had to spend a lot of time studying, and if he sat for too long, his legs would get cold. However, within a month after he started practicing Falun Gong, this problem disappeared. He became more energetic and was able to concentrate on his studies more. Besides, Zhuan Falun answered his question about the purpose of life, and guided (and is still guiding) him to be a better person. He found that after following Falun Gong's teaching, he was also able to resolve problems better. As a result, in the Moral and Intelligence Assessment that year, he came in first in his class for both aspects, and later he was accepted into a PhD program in Tsinghua without testing.

Huang's story was just one of many. In 1998, the Chinese government did a health survey on 12,731 Falun Gong practitioners, and found that their overall rate of health improvement through practicing Falun Gong was 99.1 percent. Of the 80.3 percent of the practitioners who had obvious health improvement, 58.5 percent experienced complete recovery of sickness. Besides, 96.5 percent of the practitioners felt a significant improvement of their mental well-being.

An overseas example could be Sterling Campbell, drummer of the B-52's, who no longer had the desire for smoking, drinking, and taking drugs within a month after he started practicing Falun Gong or retired computer programmer Jane Chen, who after reading Zhuan Falun, accepted the fact that her son is mentally retarded, and began to find her happiness.

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But despite the benefits that Falun Gong has brought to the society, the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong began. The CCP saw Falun Gong's popularity the same way it did with religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Muslim. Since there were more Falun Gong practitioners than CCP members, the CCP, especially the then-president Jiang Zemin, felt that Falun Gong was threatening the people's loyalty to the Party and the president.

Huang's copy of Zhuan Falun was a pirated edition, because since 1996, Falun Gong books have been banned from publishing. Since then the police had been interfering with the Falun Gong practice sites all over the country. Some broadcast unpleasant noises with loudspeakers, some drove tractors next to the practice sites, and some even used high-pressure hoses to shoot water at Falun Gong practitioners to force them to leave the practice sites. Huang mentioned that he and other Tsinghua students were forbidden to put up Falun Gong banners, and Tsinghua's secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party told them not to be involved in Falun Gong affairs.

On April 11, 1999, Teenager Expo, a magazine in Tianjin, published an article comparing Falun Gong to the Boxer Rebellion, a violent movement at the end of the Qing dynasty, or late 19th century, that was anti-foreign and anti-Christian. Since the article was full of fabrication, many Falun Gong practitioners went to the editorial office of the magazine to tell the editors their own experiences and to ask them to retract that article. On April 22 and 23, armed policemen beat Falun Gong practitioners in front of the magazine's office and detained 45 of them. Then they suggested Falun Gong practitioners at the scene to go to the central government in Beijing to address their grievance because the Public Security Bureau was involved in this matter, and they could not release the practitioners without the authorization from the central government. So on April 25, over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered outside the State Council Appeal Office, which is near Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound, to request the release of the detained practitioners and the lifting of the ban on Falun Gong books. Soon after the petition began, the police told the practitioners to follow them to Zhongnanhai. They divided the practitioners into two columns, and instructed one column to match from south to north, and the other from north to south. As a result, the two columns met at the gate of Zhongnanhai, encircling the compound (The Conscience Foundation 14). Although representatives from the practitioners were able to talk to the then premier Zhu Rongji and the detained practitioners were released, Huang heard that some plainclothesmen took some practitioners from foreign provinces to an unknown place, and Falun Gong was later incriminated for "besieging the central government".

Then, just a few days later, Huang said, some Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents spread the rumor that some Falun Gong practitioners planned to go to Xiangshan (Fragrance Hill), a park in Beijing, to set themselves on fire on May 1. And more was yet to come. On June 10, the CCP formed the 610 Office specifically to persecute Falun Gong. This agency has absolute power over each level of administration in the CCP and all other political and judiciary systems.

After a month of preparation, the 610 Office was ready to start the nightmare for millions of Chinese people. On July 20, 1999 at midnight, Falun Gong's voluntary coordinators in various parts of China were arrested simultaneously. Huang remembers that the coordinators in Tsinghua were monitored. Policemen stood outside their homes, keeping watch on them. Their phones were tapped, and even their Internet activities were spied on. In the next two days, Huang, along with many others, went to the State Council Appeal Office once again to petition. This time, no government official talked to them. It was the police who was waiting for them. They used violence to force the Falun Gong practitioners to get into trucks. They were taken to Shi Jing Shan Stadium and Feng Tai Stadium, where they were beaten and met by the police from their hometown, then taken away. Huang, who was taken to Shi Jing Shan Stadium, witnessed over a dozen of policemen beating a practitioner who refused to get into the car. Another practitioner was beaten with a baton so severely that his t-shirt was broken into strings. Soon Huang was taken back to school by Tsinghua officials.

On the 22nd, the CCP's mouthpiece CCTV started broadcasting programs that slander Falun Gong. All over China, work units requested the workers to stop their work and watch CCTV. At about 3pm, Huang and his classmates were told to go out to the hallway of their department building. A big television stood there, informing the students that the Falun Dafa Association was banned, and that CCP members were not allowed to practice Falun Gong.

Huang told me that he was originally accepted as a PhD student in Tsinghua, but that fall he was forbidden to register for classes. Later he was interviewed by Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy founder Frank Liu Siqing. In October, he accepted another interview from an Australian reporter, and as soon as he stepped out of the reporter's apartment, he was arrested by the Ministry of State Security and was interrogated. After that Huang had to go into hiding because the police was constantly looking for him. He could not go back to school, and no company would employ him because of his belief. In light of the government-controlled media fabricating incidents of deaths and suicides to demonize Falun Gong so as to justify the persecution, Huang and ten other Falun Gong practitioner started the Epoch Times to clarify the truth and to report on all kinds of human rights abuses in China, since the victims of these issues had no means to voice their opinion.

They rented an apartment in the Guangdong province, thinking that the police wouldn't know where they were. But on December 16, 2000, more than ten policemen broke into the apartment, arrested everyone and took all the equipment. The chief editor of the Epoch Times was a Macau resident, but he was still sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and is still in jail.

Without any legal process, Huang was put in the Zhuhai 2nd Detention Center, where he faced interrogation every day. Meanwhile he was put to work for 16-20 hours per day, making export goods in the prison cell. He once went on a hunger strike to protest, and after five days without food or water, the prison guards chained him to a cross made of wooden planks. They pried his teeth and held his throat open with chopsticks, then force-fed him with rice porridge.

After ten months he was finally tried, and another year later, charged with "subverting the political power of the state", he was sentenced to another three years in Sihui Prison. On top of slave laboring, he was given brainwashing sessions there. He painfully recollected the memories of being forced to read books and watch videos that traduce Falun Gong, while prison guards would talk to him to convince him to give up his faith. At one point he was brainwashed for a whole month non-stop. Three prison guards, each working eight hours a day, made sure that he couldn't sleep at all. Another practitioner, Tantai Dongdong, was beaten so severely that three of his ribs broke.

One day the guards organized a denunciation meeting for Huang and Fan Chenyu, another steadfast Falun Gong practitioner. There were anti-Falun Gong slogans and banners on the walls, and in front of hundreds of prisoners, they were forced to kneel. Huang refused to do it, so the prison guards kicked him to the ground. Then more than ten prison guards shocked each of them with high-voltage electric batons. The worst part, Huang said, was that they shocked him in sensitive parts like his palms and ears.

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That, however, is just a small part of the violence imposed on Falun Gong practitioners. The United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, has reported that, "Falun Gong practitioners made up the vast majority of torture victims in China, who experienced beatings, electric shocks, painful shackling of limbs, denial of medical treatment and medication and hard labor". As quoted in an article in 2002 in the Guardian, Chinese dissidents have been locked up in mental hospitals and labeled as "political maniacs". Recently an old woman in the Hubei Province died after being forced fed harmful drugs and injected with toxic medication. What's more, living Falun Gong practitioners in labor camps have had their organs harvested for the organ transplant industry. In 2006, human rights lawyer David Matas and Canada's former Secretary of State for Asian Pacific Matters David Kilgour conducted an investigation on the matter and confirmed the allegations. They reported an interview with an accountant and ex-wife of a surgeon of a hospital in China. She mentioned that in 2001, she noticed a sharp increase in the hospital's purchase of food and surgical equipment, and later her former husband told her that he had to remove the corneas from Falun Gong practitioners. In some phone calls made by people pretending to be interested in purchasing an organ, Chinese doctors have also admitted that healthy Falun Gong practitioners are the sources of the organs. Some detained Falun Gong practitioners' families have received their corpse after they were persecuted to death, and their organs are missing. Moreover, practitioners who have escaped being killed have reported that they were given intensive medical tests.

But Huang and his fellow practitioners wouldn't give in, because they know that Falun Gong is a practice that truly guides people to righteousness, and it also brings good health. Falun Gong can solve the conflicts between people and bring good effects to the society, Huang said. "The persecution is wrong," he added, "it is based on lies."

Many may remember the so-called self-immolation of five Falun Gong practitioners in the Tiananmen Square on 23rd January, 2001. The television in Sihui Prison was always turned off, but on that day, the prison guards turned it on and Huang saw that fabricated news. As a scientist, it was very obvious to him that it wasn't real. If it was real, he said, how come Wang Jindong's hair didn't catch on fire? How come the plastic bottle between his legs didn't burn? When someone sets themselves on fire, the surrounding air would become so hot that it hurts the throat when they breathe. However, the little girl Liu Siying could yell loudly for her mother. Could all that be true? This is why the brainwashing and torture could not change Huang's mind.

In December 2005, Huang was released. The police escorted him back to Tsinghua and had him report to the 610 Office there. He was monitored by the school's secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and a year later, some police talked to him to work out how strong his faith still was. Because of these pressures, he decided to go to another country so that he could have an unrestrained cultivation environment, and so that he could tell other people about his experience and expose the CCP's persecution.

He arrived in the United States on March, 2008, after receiving a scholarship. When he goes to the grocery stores there, he would often see the products that he had once processed. On top of feeling sympathetic for the customers who buy these products without knowing about the poor environment that they were made in, he would recall the days when he was in Cell No. 27 building the smile on the nuts with his own tears, and wonder how his friends who are still imprisoned are. In order to help the people who are still suffering, he has written articles and accepted interviews in the United States to let the world know what is happening in China.

When asked if he wants to go back to China, he said sadly, "I can't anymore." But if the persecution ends, he would love to go back, because "after all, I am still a Chinese. That land is still my motherland."
Now, perhaps because it reminds him most of his beloved motherland, we can see Huang promoting the Divine Performing Arts' Chinese New Year Spectacular in grocery stores. As he hands out the flyers, his heart is with his family and friends in China. He calls on the people in the free world to pay attention to the events happening in China, and to write to their governments and international organizations asking for the resistance of such persecution, so that the "happy nuts" on the shelf next to him would once again be a symbol of happiness, not oppression.