BARRHEAD - If they had to do it all over again, they would … not that they had a choice in the matter.
“God had a plan for me,” Kevin Garratt told an audience of about 200 people at Barrhead’s Bethel Pentecostal Church Feb. 10.
Kevin, along with his wife Julia, visited the church to tell people about their two-year ordeal in China’s legal system.
The couple, who are originally from B.C., had spent the better part of 30 years in China as teachers, entrepreneurs, and Christian aid workers before the Chinese government arrested them accusing them of being spies.
Their arrest was in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Chinese businessman Su Bin; in June 2014 for extradition to the US. Su Bin was accused of stealing data about military projects and selling it to China.
The Garratts were arrested less than two months later on Aug. 4 while the couple was having dinner with a group of friends. A large contingent of agents from China’s Ministry of State Security took them into custody following their meal.
“China took us to trade,” Kevin said. “The problem is Canada doesn’t trade and we were not spies.”
At first, the Garratts did not know what was going on. The restaurant was on one of the upper floors of a Dandong (a city in China’s Liaoning Province near the North-Korean border).
They entered the restaurant’s elevator after the dinner and the doors opened onto a large crowd of people, many of them were holding video cameras.
“I told Kevin I thought we had stumbled into a wedding reception,” Julia said.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The couple was separated and taken out of different doors to awaiting cars.
Kevin was taken to their apartment while Julia was moved to a detention centre.
That was the last time the couple saw each other, not including a brief moment six months later, until the entire ordeal concluded two years later.
“They kept saying ‘we are not interested in your Christian work,” Kevin said.
But if it wasn’t about their “Christian” aid work, then what could they want, Kevin asked himself as the eighteen agents went through their apartment.
“There’s nothing else we are doing here. We run a coffee shop, work with an orphanage and do our aide work and they keep talking about North Korea. I thought this is going to be quick because they are not going to find anything,” Kevin said.
Going through the apartment, the agents would point out items they claimed proved they were spies, whether it was one of their children’s binoculars or a laptop computer the couple had stored in a cabinet.
“They said, ‘why are you hiding it if you are not spies?’” he said.
Detention centre and interrogation
Kevin would then be brought to the detainment centre where Julia already was, although he did not know that.
“They verbally threatened many times,” he said. “They threatened me execution, they threatened to send me to North Korea, they said you could get seven or eight years in prison but they never physically hurt me in any way.”
It would be about two months into their six-month stay at the centre before the couple deduced that they were being held in the same building.
“[Kevin] realized that I would be taken out for my walk around the courtyard just after he was and he started leaving little heart’s by planting his boots in the snow,” Julia said, noting many times the guards would erase Kevin’s message, but those that remained meant a great deal to her.
In the initial stages of their confinement in what Julia later described as a ‘black jail’ that was off the grid, their detention was relegated to two rooms: the one where they were confined and the interrogation room. Thanks to the efforts of the Canadian consulate, they were eventually granted 15-minute exercise periods in the courtyard. It was only then the couple devised their makeshift communications.
They each faced daily six-hour interrogations by a team of three men. Armed with years of emails, Skype messages and surveillance records, the interrogators accused the Garratts from everything from hosting Canadian and American diplomats at their coffee house, showing her pictures of countless people she did not recognize to lists of names she supposedly had e-mailed from China and abroad over the last decade.
“They would just keep firing questions to me about spying. They would tell me that my Christian work was just a cover and we were hiding GPS chips in all the baby hats we were donating ... you do that so that you can have secret intelligence on the whereabouts and thoughts of people,” Julia said. “Things beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”
They threatened Julia that if she didn’t sign a written confession confirming that she was a spy, they would arrest her youngest son Peter, who had been living with them and was going to a local university.
“We know he is studying to learn Chinese so he can work with the Canadian government, they would say,” she added.
Due to the constant grilling, Julia said her mind would go down different rabbit holes, some of them to the point where she started to doubt herself.
“Everything that was done was to wear you down so they could get a confession,” she said.
If it were not for her faith, Julia isn’t sure what would have become of her.
In the middle of her six-month confinement, she also made the conscious decision to love them.
After all, she noted the guards are the only people she had so it would be in her best interest to befriend them.
She started by giving them English names, Steven, John and Benjamin.
It turns out to be a joke among the guards, as Benjamin means “foolish chicken” in Chinese.
“I could hear them laughing down the hallway that the youngest interrogator had been called a ‘foolish chicken’ by the spy,” Julia said.
Besides giving them names, when October rolled around she decided since she couldn’t celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with her husband and children, she would at least mark the occasion by giving Thanksgiving Day cards. She wrote the notes, which she folded in the shape of a card on the backs of scraps of “confession” paper — the notes her interrogators kept documenting her movements.
On one of the notes, she complimented the guard for her purple/red shoes. “They bring colour into my room, thank you,” she wrote.
“She reads it and I can see tears coming down her face,” Julia said.
Another way she managed to survive her confinement was by reading her Bible. She had no way of knowing that when Kevin returned to their apartment he convinced the guards that they could take their Bibles, which was later given to her.
Canadian consulate officials had also arranged for them to be able to speak with them for about 30 minutes each month. During these visits, they would give them several books to read.
In addition to reading her Bible and the other books, Julia would write daily thank you notes.
By months three and four, she started to get more and more disheartened. However, she said God would send her little moments of joy, such as hearing a child laugh through an open window that helped her endure.
After six months, Julia learned she would be allowed to go back to their apartment and await trial under house arrest. The charges were later dropped. At the same time, Kevin would be transferred to a prison an hour and a half away. But before that happened the couple were granted a brief visit, under strict surveillance.
Shortly after their visit, Julia returned to her room and went to the opaqued window.
“Coming down the window were these two little drops of water and I heard God’s voice saying ‘Sorry Julia’. That’s the comforter, he shares our suffering,” she said.
It is for this experience, that their book Two Tears on the Window is named.
Prison
If Kevin thought things couldn’t get any worse, they were proven wrong on Feb. 3, 2015. That is the date he was moved from the detention centre to a prison housing 900 inmates.
“In a Chinese prison, it is all about making you feel useless and hopeless,” he said.
For the better part of the next 19 months, he lived in cell 318 with 13 other inmates. The cell was roughly 12 paces long and five paces wide. The bathroom was a small, almost square glass-enclosed structure two paces long by one and a half wide. The lights were constantly on and there was absolutely no privacy.
If an inmate was not under the watchful eye of a guard, in person or by the prison’s extensive camera network, there was always another inmate watching him.
The beds were wooden boards with thin cotton pads on top attached to the wall.
Kevin noted the cameras covered the entire prison except for one small area against an outside courtyard wall.
It was here inmates were expected to shave.
“They don’t want a record of you shaving,” he said, noting the shaving periods were infrequent and with an electric razor.
Food was delivered through a hole in the wall via a ladle into a bowl, which three or four inmates would eat from.
In a Chinese prison, inmates or their families have to pay for everything they receive, including food and water. The problem is that even if inmates had money, there was not always food to buy.
Kevin calculated that during 28.4 percent of his time in prison there was a shortage of food.
Despite the challenges and tribulations, his faith never waivered, although at times he wasn’t sure he would be able to endure.
But whenever those times arose, when God would do small things to let him know he was still there, like the day he saw a bright-yellow dandelion. Moments before, he had been crying, telling God he wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on.
“But I saw this dandelion and I knew God was there and he kept doing these things time and time again,” Kevin said.
It was these moments, that gave him strength along with reading his Bible, which he usually did between 3:30 a.m. and 6 a.m. when the majority of inmates were sleeping.
However, he often was observed reading and then asked questions about his faith from the other inmates.
That is often how the Garratts would minister to people in China during their time there.
“You might not be able to build a church but you can always answer questions,” he said earlier in the presentation.
The Garratts’ ordeal in China concluded with Kevin being found guilty of espionage and being sentenced to eight years in prison. Two days later, he was on a plane bound for Toyko where he was reunited with his wife.
“God chose us to spend time with the Ministry of State and Security, he chose me to spend time in that prison because he had a plan and a purpose. He wanted the light of Jesus to go into that place and I had to join him in what he was doing,” Kevin said. “Yes, it was hard and I don’t want to repeat it, but I don’t want to change it.”
Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com
