Renowned Chinese Chef Fed to Mosquitoes

A room full of hungry mosquitoes was only one of the many torture methods used on Luo Zizhao, a master chef of Chinese cuisine who was illegally arrested three times in China for his spiritual beliefs.

In order to protest this injustice, Luo went on a hunger strike while imprisoned.  In a biographical feature story on Luo, the Epoch Times called him “a master chef who believes that without freedom of belief and freedom of speech, food is not worth eating.”

The feature story describes how Luo and his wife – along with tens of millions of other Chinese people – began practicing the meditation discipline of Falun Gong in the 1990s.  Falun Gong is based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and as a result of the practice, Luo’s wife calmed down her fiery temper and Luo got rid of his mistresses.  Needless to say, their marriage improved greatly.

In 1999, the Chinese Communist Party began a nationwide persecution of Falun Gong, feeling threatened by the practice’s soaring popularity.  Luo and his wife were arrested and released the next day as a sort of warning.

That was the first of Luo’s three arrests, each lasting longer than the previous one.  The second time, he was detained for several weeks after he joined a peaceful protest against the persecution in October 2000, the Epoch Times reported.

He was held in the Sheng De detention center in Canton, where he “stopped eating, but he kept working. As the days went by his vision blurred and his movements slowed,” according to the Epoch Times.

After a few days, however, Luo ended his hunger strike when he found out that a young guard could lose his job if Luo died.

Luo was arrested for the last time in 2002, and he was held in the the Guang Dong San Sui labor camp for over two years.  There, he endured the punishment of sitting with his back straight on a small stool for eighteen hours a day for six months.

“For the next punishment, he was fed to the mosquitoes,” the Epoch Times stated.

Luo was placed naked in a room full of mosquitoes.  The article describes how he shooed the insects away until his arms became too tired, and after that, he could do nothing but wait as the mosquitoes feasted on his blood.

Luo suspected that the large amounts of blood on the walls did not only come from smashed mosquitoes, but from people who tried to kill themselves.

“There was no light in the windowless room. He could not tell if it was night or day or how many days and nights had passed,” the Epoch Times reported.

To hold onto his sanity, Luo recited passages from Falun Gong books.  He was released in 2004 and came to the United States with his wife in 2011.

“It took some time getting used to an environment where you have the freedom to live,” Luo told the Epoch Times.

Luo Zizhao is now the executive chef of a sophisticated Cantonese restaurant in New York City.  He has won the first prize in NTD Television’s International Chinese Culinary Competition, which aims to bring back the art of traditional Chinese cuisine.

“I felt that there was something very meaningful about taking part in that,” Luo told the Epoch Times. “It helped me take my mind off of me and my experiences in China, it made me feel that I can still contribute to a greater good for the world.”

Sources: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/522171-this-is-new-york-luo-zhizhao-the-master-chef-who-refused-to-eat/?photo=2