Editor’s Note: Jimmy Lai, a Catholic free speech advocate in Hong Kong, has been imprisoned since 2020 under the Beijing-imposed national security law. One of his five children, Claire, shares how his imprisonment has spiritually impacted the Lai family.
In the silence of my father’s imprisonment and the intensity of his suffering, he has gained greater knowledge of the sufficiency of God’s grace. Before this trial, I believe that my family, or at least I, never truly understood what St. Paul was told by God: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).”
While much of what we have lost in the last few years has been very public, what we have gained — the way our family has grown in faith, at times when physically we felt weak — has been less visible.
My father did nothing wrong. For decades, he ensured the free flow of information and ideas in Hong Kong. He defended rights most would see as fundamental, and he did so peacefully and lawfully. They were rights promised when China, in the exercise of its sovereignty, signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984) prior to the handover
