(a) "Since [YT] Wu’s death in 1979, these dueling legacies have haunted his son, Wu Zongsu 吴宗素. Now 84 and in the twilight of his own life, the son is spending his final years and a small fortune trying to piece together a more nuanced portrait of his father.
"The key to that, however, lies in a 40-volume collection of diaries that the younger Wu says he lent to the Communist Party days after his father’s death and has been unable to recover.
"Wu believes that if church scholars could access his father’s early writings, they would understand his original vision for China’s churches — a vision he says the Communist Party later twisted to suit its own purposes.
"In a phone interview from San Francisco, where he now lives, Wu called the lawsuit against China’s government a last-ditch effort that has slim chances of succeeding.
(b) "With the late-1960s Cultural Revolution, [church] registration became moot. All religion in China was banned, and even previously state-backed church leaders were sent to labor camps, Y.T. Wu among them.
"But from that repression emerged a thriving illegal underground church movement, whose growth outpaced that of the government’s Three-Self churches when they were restored in 1979.
(c) "The son said he became disillusioned with Communism in 1989, when Chinese troops opened fire on Tiananmen Square activists. He was teaching at the time at a university in San Francisco and decided to remain there.
(d) "He also wrote a 60-page paper on his father’s beliefs and work that caused ripples of controversy among scholars when it was published four years ago. Based on his father’s writings and his own recollections, the work is surprisingly unsentimental and unsparing in parts.
"Only the title betrays Wu’s sympathies: “Fallen Flower, Ruthless Waters.” The flower refers to his father, Wu explains, the waters to the party.