Here in the United States I have a house that has an half-acre yard. When I sit in the kitchen looking at the back yard, I often think of my grandma. She once owned one acre of land in the remote countryside in China. Because of this piece of land, her fate and the fate of her family changed.

My grandma and my grandpa lived in a very poor part of the country. There were mountains around and they hardly could get enough food for their 4 children. My grandpa went to the big city of Wuhan to sell small goods to support the family. Later on, they bought one acre of land in their hometown.

After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over China, the CCP wanted everyone to fill out a form listing everything one owned. My grandma was very honest. She wrote down one acre of land. The CCP then categorized her as a "land owner." The CCP taught everyone that land owners are bad people. Landowners made others poor and so the Party had to take everything away from them, publish their names and re-educate them.

Many land owners were tortured and executed. At that time, my grandma was around 60 and stayed with my aunt in Beijing. She was forced to clean public toilets and community hallways everyday. At the end of day, she was made to stand in front of Mao Zedong's poster to confess her sins and clean her mind with Mao's teaching.

The Beijing city government got tired of having bad people such as land owners and property owners around. The city wanted to clean them out. My grandma had to leave Beijing and traveled to Wuhan to stay with her second daughter. In Wuhan she faced the same thing, and had to leave the city and go back to the remote countryside. Very soon afterwards, she died.

My aunts in Beijing and in Wuhan never forgave each other for Grandma's death. They blamed each other for not taking good care of her. They never thought about how terribly cruel the CCP had been, stealing our family's land and leaving no room for my grandma to survive. For the next 20 some years, my aunt in Beijing made every effort to become a CCP party member. Finally, she was accepted before she retired.

To be the children of a land owner was a big thing. The children basically had no chance to get promoted and the children's children might not even have the chance to get an education. From as early as I can remember, my aunts and my father wrote piles of letters to party leaders explaining how it was a mistake to categorize our family as land owners—the patch of land was too small to fit the standard of "land owner." Under so much pressure, my family never seemed to be able to breathe freely.

When I was 8 years old, my parents were sent to the mountains to work as laborers. I went with my parents and stayed in the remote mountains. It was very poor country. One day, my father brought home one sausage. In order to keep it safe, he hung it on a wire stretched across the room. Very soon, it attracted every rat and cat in the village. They came and fought for the sausage while balancing on the thin wire like acrobats.

All educated people were sent to be re-educated. My parents, architects, had no chance to do any professional work. They had never before grown rice, cut wood or carried water. Now they had to work as hard and as efficiently as the local peasants, or they wouldn't be able to survive. The CCP did not like people who thought for themselves. The Party wanted to humiliate educated people and make sure they followed the CCP's orders. To this day these things never changed.

My mother's brother majored in archeology at the university. Around the time he graduated, Mao asked everyone to speak openly any concerns about the CCP. Many people spoke out trusting in the CCP and hoping their suggestions would make the CCP and the country better. My uncle was a very cautious person. When he was asked to express concerns about the CCP, he simply said "the food in cafeteria could be improved." For this simple sentence, he was labeled a "rightist" and forced to do a laborer's work for nearly 20 years. He never had a chance to do the professional work he was trained for. Those who said more suffered worse fates. Many died.

What happened to my family is nothing extraordinary in China. If I started to tell about more family members and my own classmates and professors, I could fill a book. Even so, many people cannot see the true nature of the CCP. The CCP uses violence, murder, persecution and propaganda to keep its power. It still kills grandmothers for no reason, and still sisters blame each other for crimes that only the CCP committed.

As more people in China come to know the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party," more people in China will understand the true nature of the Party, and will want nothing more to do with it. One month ago, I published a statement renouncing any association with the Communist Youth League. I belonged to it when I was in high school. Now, understanding the whole CCP better, I feel ashamed to have been associated with its name in the past.