Cai Yutang was an elderly Chinese peasant in Pingyu County, Henan province. In 1992, local Chinese officials started to collect money from local peasants to pay for an electricity station planned to be built in their county, but Cai refused to pay. He saw no point in paying for electricity which he regarded as useless, and he had no savings anyway. “Ah! I’m old,” he explained to his daughter Cai Yudi. “These eyes of mine can’t even see. What good is hooking up a television?”

Then at three o’clock one afternoon in November, a band of 19 officials stomped into Cai’s house. They squeezed the contribution out of him, then took all 218 pounds of wheat and 22 pounds of sesame seeds that he had stored in his house. When an official tried to grab a last bag, half-filled with sesame seeds, Cai protested violently. Then the official threatened him: “We’ll tie your daughter up and sell her to a brothel.”

Cai Yutang relented and let them take the seeds, and the officials left. A few days later, some young students were walking by Cai’s house on the way to school when they discovered his body. He had hanged himself form the pear tree by his door.

After Cai committed suicide, the local officials demanded that his family pay $263 dollars, or two years’ income for a typical Chinese peasant, for his burial. By the 1990s, after national land reforms, all Chinese who wanted to be buried must pay for the use of their land, which officially belonged to the Chinese Communist Party.

But Cai’s family now only consisted of Cai’s widow, and their daughter Cai Yudi. Unable to come up with the fees for his burial, the daughter secretly buried her father anyway and when the officials discovered her deed, they drove the widow and her daughter out of the house and ransacked the entire house until it was completely bare. Everything was taken, including their last remaining clothing, bedding such as pillows and lining sheets, kitchen utensils; even toiletries such as toothbrushes, bar soaps, towels, and face-washing basins were confiscated. The daughter, who was 19 at the time, went to protest in front of the government building, and for several weeks led a campaign of shouting, screaming, and physically blocking entrance to the government office.

On January 20th, 1993, three days before the Lunar New Year (the Chinese equivalent of Christmas Eve), two men wearing masks and beige windbreaker jackets came from behind Cai’s daughter, bind her wrists and ankles with electric wires, and disappeared her into a black van.

In the next few days the mother desperately looked for her daughter. Because all their property was confiscated, Mrs. Cai was practically homeless and subsisted by begging and was sleeping on the streets, and two days after the lunar New Year, she froze to death. Her frozen body was discovered by local peasants who were friends with her husband.

In the spring of 1994, relatives to the Cai’s family discovered that Cai Yutang’s daughter was sold to a brothel in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan. Being slender, thin, and white-skinned, (which is prized among Chinese men), Cai’s daughter was very popular with customers, and even though she was constantly crying, her mouth was naturally perking upward at the sides as if it were made to smile. She was forced to receive more than 30 customers per day and underwent two abortion procedures in the span of a year. In addition her thighs and buttocks were covered with scars and burn marks. According to her own testimony, which was obtained by New York Times journalist stationed in China, the day before the 1993 lunar New Year, she was taken to a location outside of Pingyu County in an unmarked black van with no license plates. While inside the van, she was raped by the two men who kidnapped her. Her clothes were stripped off and confiscated, and then she was transferred, naked, to another man and was restrained in the back of his car trunk in a hogtied position for 20 hours. About a week later she ended up inside a three story building with no windows. The entire time she was without a single piece of clothing on her body. She soon learned that the building was the training facility for a brothel. Inside the training facility, she was taught to learn how to please men. For instance, she had to learn to peal a banana with only her lips. When she learned too slowly or tried to resist, she was beaten mercilessly. “The trainer used a cattle prod to strike me whenever I used my teeth on the banana peal,” she said. “The woman [her trainer] specifically targeted my thighs and bottom.”

In November 1994, the daughter was eventually rescued, but lost ability to become pregnant and was diagnosed with STDs. The officials who ordered her kidnappings to this day remain anonymous. Cai Yutang’s younger brother Cai Yuxi was beaten to death with lead pipes by local policemen in Zhengzhou while trying to coordinate the rescue.

However, the daughter’s ordeal did not end after her rescue. Immediately after her rescue, she was arrested, charged, then sentenced to one year in prison for engaging in prostitution by the Chinese government and Cai’s younger brother’s family was ordered to pay remuneration to the brothel in Zhengzhou for property damage in the sum of $ 670 dollars, the equivalent of six years of income for the average peasant in Henan province in the 1990s.