On August 3, 2004, a tragedy happened in Weimiao Village, Wangchenggu Town, Puyang County of Henan Province: a villager named Zheng Suxia committed suicide by taking pesticide.
Seven years later, correspondent of Kaiwind.com visited the village and interviewed her family members and local people.
The victim's family used to be a big and happy one. Zheng was a diligent and able woman who took good care of her parents-in-law and daughter and settled the house in neat order. Wei Chengen, her husband, was an honest and kind man. Their daughter was attending elementary school then. Besides raising crops, Zheng and her husband also ran a piggery that yielded dozens of grown pigs for sale every year, which brought them substantial profit and a reputation in the village as a well-off and harmonious family.
In 1997, Zheng, only past 30, began to suffer constant pain in the nape, shoulders and legs due to years of toiling. She would lose control of her limbs occasionally. When she went to the county clinic to see a doctor, she happened to meet Cao Lijuan from the neighboring village who told her that practicing Falun Gong could eliminate her distress and she did not need to take any medicine or injection, or be hospitalized. Under the persuasion of Cao, Zheng was deluded into practicing Falun Gong. And she bought books and cassettes about Falun Gong for that purpose.
At the beginning, her practicing was limited to reading books and listening to and following tape recorders at home, and joining collective practicing of Gong mates occasionally. But gradually, when the idea of Consummation had greater appeal to her, she was no longer satisfied by Falun Gong's functions of improving health, curing diseases and eradicating "karma", but started to yearn for purifying her soul in order to become a Buddha and ascend to heaven in the end.
Her activities influenced her husband Wei Chengen and he joined her in the practicing. Sometimes they took their little daughter to attend collective practicing. Since then they were all into Falun Gong. They practiced all day long at home and left their crop fields derelict. And the piggery went broke from absence of attendance. In only two years' time, they surrendered to Falun Gong all of the 30,000 yuan saved from running the piggery painstakingly for so many years. To accompany her parents in practicing, the little girl found going to school an increasingly repulsive distraction. At first she started going to school late and leaving early, afterwards she skipped school from time to time, resulting in a free fall of scores. Instead of worrying about her scores, Zheng thought that following the Master would pave her greater prospects than working hard at school.
To her parents-in-law who were nearly 70, Zheng used to be a model daughter-in-law renowned in the local area for her filial piety and diligence. She often made them meals rich in both flavor and form, and always prepared clean and neat clothes for them, when laundry could be backbreaking in the country. Whenever either of them was ill, she was always the busiest one to wait upon them, doing all the trivial yet considerate service without complaining a word. But since her plunge into Falun Gong, Zheng was no longer the woman she used to be. She had since never paid any attention to farm work or housework, or looking after her parents-in-law and daughter. She seldom talked to her husband except for learning Falung Gong. The couple insulated themselves from the neighbors and did nothing but practicing at home with the door tightly shut.
In July, 1999, the government banned Falun Gong according to law. However, the couple had already been too obsessed to be pulled back to reality. They were deeply convinced that the Consummation preached by Li Hongzhi was at their fingertips, so long as they followed his requirements and redoubled their efforts to learn and practice Falun Gong, totally breaking off from worldly attachments. They believed that by doing so their Gong would continue soaring and reach higher levels, they could reach Consummation as soon as possible, and enjoy the eternal blessing of heaven together with their daughter.
At the end of 2002, Wei Chengen, deluded by the new scriptures of Li Hongzhi, left home to "promote the Fa, the true sutra", deserting his aged parents and little daughter. He had never been heard of ever since.
As witnesses of the falling apart of their happy family caused by Falun Gong, Zheng's parents-in-law and other family members tried to persuade her time and again to give up practicing. However, Zheng had lost herself in the daydream of Consummation. Any disagreement to her was like noises. She viewed them as "common" people who had no idea of what real cultivation was, and "demons" who stood in her way to Consummation. Her radical bigotry left her parents-in-law at the end of their rope. The villagers thought she had lost her sense to practicing Falun Gong, and shunned her like plague.
Before long, she became weirder and weirder, sitting still alone like a statue with fixed and hollow eyes for a while, and then bursting into yelling gibberish like "Master is waiting for me. I'm to reach Consummation. I'm going to the heaven and become a Buddha."
At the noon of August 3, 2004, she locked herself in the room, drank omethoate and killed herself, holding the book Zhuan Falun tight in her chest. In this way, Zheng Suxia, at the age of 39, climbed the "ladder" she thought leading to heavens, with her beautiful and bubbly fantasies of Consummation bearing in mind.
As parents to a son who has left home and never returned, and to a daughter-in-law who committed suicide, Zheng's aged parents-in-law are now living a harsh life together with the little girl. And driven mad by tearless grief, they would curse between their teeth at the mention of Falun Gong and their son and daughter-in-law.
