God's Double Agent (33 page)

We were blessed to receive all of this attention. However, it didn’t seem to be helping.

“Bad news,” the legislative assistant said after she walked out of the US Consulate in Hong Kong. I had been waiting for her outside the compound, because I was not allowed to go in. “The United States will not take the Fu family, period. Apparently, they’re very concerned about offending China during this transition.”

Sweden and Switzerland, I soon learned, felt the same way.

“Sorry, we can’t help you,” representatives of both countries responded.

Our tenuous circumstances made it quite difficult for Heidi, whose belly was growing larger every week. Weeks passed, then months, and our case was not one inch closer to resolution.

“What will happen if I go into labor?” she asked.

“I have to believe God hasn’t taken us this far only to abandon us here.”

The ring of the phone interrupted our conversation. “This is the Hong Kong immigration office,” a man said. “We need to see you and your wife in our office tomorrow morning.”

Because we’d stayed in Hong Kong longer than expected, we had to get a temporary permit to live there. Every three months, we trudged to that office, filled out a form, and came home. “Will you tell me what this is about?” I asked. As far as I knew, we were current on our paperwork, so I hated to drag Heidi through the streets of Hong Kong as close as she was to delivering the baby.

“You must come in.”

Reluctantly, we went to the office, once again, watching our backs the whole way. When we got there, the clerk at the immigration office said, “The Hong Kong government has agreed to give you a temporary residence card.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This will entitle you to the benefits of a Hong Kong resident until you are able to leave.” He said it very matter-of-factly, but I wanted to reach over and hug him. “Please stand here to be photographed for your identification.”

As we left the office, Heidi and I were practically skipping. “Did we apply to be Hong Kong residents?”

“I didn’t!” I said. “It’s not possible.”

Though Moses parting the Red Sea was probably a more dramatic miracle, Heidi and I must’ve praised God just as earnestly as the children of Israel. Only recently did I discover that a Hong Kong pastor who had helped a few hundred Chinese students escape after the Tiananmen Square massacre had arranged this for us. To this day, I’ve never met with him or been able to properly thank him.

Now, as Hong Kong residents, we could deliver the baby for free. Which is exactly what happened one week later, on April 4, 1997. Heidi went into labor and was admitted to Prince of Wales public hospital at absolutely no charge.

I was told I couldn’t stay with Heidi during her labor, and we soon found out why. Heidi was in a room of thirty other laboring women. Every few minutes, a baby arrived and the nurses would move on to the next screaming woman. Though it was customary for men to wait at home, I waited in an area outside the elevator, one floor down from the labor and delivery floor. Nurses constantly rolled babies by me on their way to checkups, and I’d look at every one.
I wonder if that one’s mine,
I’d think, peering into the mobile bassinettes to determine if any resembled Heidi or me. The next day, I wandered over to a room where babies were lined up like Chinese dumplings, peered through the glass, and saw Heidi’s name next to a tiny, beautiful baby wrapped tightly in a mobile cart.

“He arrived last night,” a nurse said.

He
.

His Chinese name would be Boen, which means “abundant grace.” But in English, he would be called Daniel, because he was born while we were still in the lion’s den.

“I like that,” said Heidi, who was recovering from her delivery in a room of fifty women. “He was born as an exile. He has no motherland. No country will recognize him.”

“Yes,” I said, tracing my finger through his wispy hair. “But his citizenship is in heaven.”

Day by day, every television channel, radio station, and newspaper had a countdown of the days remaining until the handover. On June 4, Prince Charles and Hong Kong Governor Christopher Patten held a joint commemoration of the historic occasion. I attended a large gathering of over a hundred thousand people at Victoria’s Park, because it was the anniversary of the 1989 massacre. In the crowd was a palpable fear that Hong Kong was about to be taken over by a nation capable of such violence against its own citizens. Looking out into the crowd, I was
touched that people were intent on remembering what had happened in Tiananmen Square. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light. A political dissident who’d been unable to attain refugee status had lit himself on fire. People began to scream as he sat there. A human torch. The Hong Kong police ran over and promptly put out the fire that was ravishing his body. However, his actions showed the desperation we dissidents felt.

As we fought off despair, many people advocated on our behalf. Danny Smith, founder of the Jubilee Campaign, heard about our case. The Jubilee Campaign is an organization committed to ending slavery, childhood prostitution, and other injustices, so he flew to Hong Kong to advocate for our freedom. He gave a personal letter from Lord David Alton, a British upper parliament member, to Governor Patten. However, the American consulate doubled down. “We can assure you that the US will not accept the Fu family,” they responded. “Find somewhere else.”

We were already exhausted from staying up all night with our new baby, who screamed unless he was in constant motion. This news was almost too much to take.

“If America will not accept you,” Danny said when he saw our crestfallen faces, “Great Britain will.”

“Oh, are we going to ride on the same plane as the prince?” I asked, but no one was in the mood to laugh.

We exhausted every avenue, even applying to a Baptist seminary in the hope that student visas could give us some time to figure out our immigration status. To my surprise, I received a terse response. “Unless you are members of a Baptist church, you cannot get into our school.” Though I had no idea what a “Baptist” believed, I looked in the phone book, found a Hong Kong Baptist seminary, got a copy of the Baptist confession, memorized it, and tried to look for a Baptist church to join. However, when we contacted the school with questions, they responded, “You won’t be considered a member unless you’ve been at that church for three years.”

In other words, we were a family without a home—spiritually or nationally.

One day, I went to a McDonald’s in Hong Kong, where I was eating and reading a newspaper with a headline that screamed, “Seventeen Days Until the Handover.” Though I sometimes wanted to forget my plight, I couldn’t look anywhere without a reminder that the handover—and my family’s certain demise—was 17 . . . 16 . . . 15 . . . days away.
Time is running out
, I thought, as I took a bite of my hamburger. Just then, I noticed a little excitement as a film crew came through the doors of the restaurant. One guy had a camera on his shoulder, and another was holding a microphone labeled “ABC.”

“Hello, I’m doing a segment about the handover for
ABC News with Peter Jennings
,” the man said to me at my little table. “Would you like to tell us your views on it?”

I looked around at the other people in the restaurant. I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, as the Chinese police were apparently trying to kidnap dissidents seeking asylum. However, I couldn’t turn down this opportunity to plead my case on national television in America. Reluctantly, I agreed.

“We’re speaking to Bob Fu here in a McDonald’s in Hong Kong,” the reporter said, sticking the microphone in my face. “Bob, are you apprehensive about the handover?”

“Actually, I’m a religious dissident from China, and my family will certainly be arrested—again—for our Christian religious beliefs unless the United States government will act on our behalf,” I said.
How’s that for keeping a low profile?
“The countdown to the handover is a countdown to our imprisonment. Please, America, stand up for religious freedom.”

Everyone around me in the restaurant got silent as I pled my case to the American people. Though I feared for my immediate safety, it was my last chance. Diplomacy, after all, hadn’t worked.

“Reporting from Hong Kong,” the reporter said. “This is ABC.”

With this one small interview, awareness of our situation spread throughout the United States. Though we didn’t know it at the time, several prominent people worked on our behalf behind the scenes. The Voice of the Martyrs organization published a letter signed by dozens of US senators requesting the United States accept our family. Robert Schuller, of the famed Crystal Cathedral, wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton requesting he personally intervene on our behalf. Senator Jessie Helms, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, faxed a letter to the Hong Kong US Consulate asking that they speed up the process of our release.

And lastly, the president of the National Evangelical Association, Don Argue, phoned President Clinton. At the time, Don was a member of President Clinton’s Committee to Review Violations of International Religious Freedom and Persecution, so he reported on religious persecution around the world. When the president picked up the phone that afternoon, Don encouraged him to pay attention to my small family across the world. “I think you should intervene in this case,” he said. “Getting the Fu family out of China would give a great boost to your leadership in promoting international religious freedom.”

One week before Hong Kong was handed over to China, Danny got a phone call in the middle of the night from the US Consulate. It was the White House National Security Council with a strong and decisive message from the president: Let the Fu family go.

Bill Clinton saved us!

All refugees are required to have an official sponsor in America, and my church sponsor was King’s Park International Church, the home church of Pastor Ronny Lewis, and my government-appointed sponsor was World Relief. When the consulate discovered he’d been overruled, he suddenly sent word of a requirement that any refugee needed to have an American bank account with $10,000. This was the first time we’d ever heard of such an
onerous requirement. How could a refugee set up an American account? How could they get such a large amount of money?

Desperately, we contacted Pastor Ronny and asked for a very big favor.

“Can you set up a bank account and give us $10,000?”

Ron had a decision to make; everyone else at the church had already gone home and the clock was ticking. Without even asking permission from King’s Park, he transferred the money into an account with my name on it. (He didn’t even know my Chinese name, so it was created for “Bob Fu.”) I was astonished at the trust he put in me, and that money was our last roadblock to overcome before heading to America.

On June 27, we were called by the United States with the official word of our travel—one hour before our flight was to take off. We were taken to the Hong Kong airport and used a special back entrance to board the plane so the Chinese PSB agents wouldn’t seize us. In God’s perfect timing, it was the last working day of the old Hong Kong government.

Finally, we were free.

24

We arrived in America with nothing but a diaper bag and a long list of people to thank. First, we landed in Dulles International Airport, where a World Vision official helped process our refugee paperwork at customs. We also met two friends, Dr. Carol Hamrin, who had worked at the State Department as a senior China analyst for decades, and Mr. Greg Chen, assistant to the mayor of Washington, DC, who’d worked tirelessly behind the scenes on our behalf. Then I went to Raleigh, North Carolina, where I thanked Pastor Ronny and promptly transferred the church’s ten thousand dollars back into its account.

I also thanked King’s Park International Church for being my sponsor, and one of its congregants for letting us stay in his family’s home for the first couple of weeks of our residency. I went to Washington, DC, where I thanked Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck, who’d also worked so diligently for our freedom.

And we still weren’t done thanking people by the time we arrived in Philadelphia, where I would attend Westminster Theological Seminary. There, the first thing I did was find Charlie, the businessman who gave us food money every month while we waited for freedom. He and his wife were so kind, and it was wonderful to finally meet them.

“Where are you staying?” Charlie’s wife asked, after I
explained how much their money had helped us. “Do you already have food?”

“With a friend and—honestly—where do you buy food around here?”

“Let’s go.” She laughed. “The first week’s supermarket bill is on us.”

“What’s a supermarket?” Heidi asked as we pulled into the parking lot. The store had gleaming white aisles and was stuffed with beautiful, fresh tropical produce, even though we were in the middle of a northeastern city.

“How do you decide?” I asked, gawking at the green grapes, red grapes, purple grapes, and seedless grapes. This was the first time I realized a free society had its own kind of torture: the agony of unending choices. We filled our cart with foods we’d never seen before, without paying attention to the price. When we got to the cash register, I was embarrassed we’d racked up a two-hundred-dollar food bill.