NEW YORK—Fears of police harassment and arrests have plagued 23-year-old Zhang Minghui ever since she turned one, the year Chinese police officers beat her father with wooden planks until his feet swelled up and turned a dark purple color, and burned his arm with a lighter.
When she was not yet two years old, police locked her and her grandfather in an unofficial detention facility for a week. Provided with no food or drinks, they had lived on whatever morsels secreted in by a kind-hearted friend of her grandfather.
The detention in that dark room with only 2 small windows made up part of the fragmented memories of her childhood. When she was little, she had wondered whether it was all a bad dream.
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