When he was 8 years old, Jimmy Lai got a job carrying luggage to earn money after his mother was arrested by Chinese Communist Party officials and sent to a labor camp. One day, a customer tipped him with a half-eaten chocolate bar. After tasting it, Lai was desperate to know where the man was from. “Hong Kong,” the man said. Three years later, in 1960, Lai escaped mainland China as a stowaway on a boat to Hong Kong. There, he began working in a garment factory. Lai taught himself English and how to read balance sheets and would go on to found his own clothing company, which made him a very wealthy man. The Chinese government forced him to sell the business, however, when he spoke out against the massacre of the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. With that, Lai used his fortune to establish a news service, which became Hong Kong’s largest media company and critic of the mainland Communist government. In 1997, Great Britain transferred governance of Hong Kong to China, which made Lai and his company more vulnerable to state interference. In 2020, he was arrested for allegedly violating a national security law. While free on bail, awaiting trial, Lai could have used his status as a British citizen to escape a likely prison sentence. But his conscience would not permit it. He said: “If I go away, I not only give up my destiny, I give up God, I give up my religion, I give up what I believe in.” Last month, Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He is 78 years old.
Lai became Catholic in 1997 after years of attending Mass with his Catholic wife. Writing about her father, Lai’s daughter has remarked: “Humility is not a virtue my father was previously known for. Yet those close to him will attest that through experiencing the sufficiency of Our Lord in imprisonment, it is [a virtue] he has come to embody.” From his cell in solitary confinement where he is deprived of sunlight and suffers conditions that alternate between severe heat and severe cold, Lai has drawn images of the crucifixion and the Blessed Virgin Mary. In letters he declares his conviction that, thanks to the prayers of fellow Catholics, he has received the grace to unite his sufferings to those of Christ and all who suffer injustice for the sake of goodness and truth. Lai’s daughter hopes that someday her father will be released. But she also says that when she feels anxious, she finds new strength from a prayer Lai composed in his cell: “O Lord, in prison you have taken me out from my own keeping. I resign myself entirely to your will. Therefore, Lord, I cry out to you and entreat you that you would keep me from myself and from following any will but yours. I bargain for nothing, but to serve you the rest of my life.”
Jimmy Lai started his life with nothing and achieved immense power and wealth through hard work and natural talent. Now, despite having lost everything, he seems to have found something even greater. “I am so thankful the Lord gave me a new life, a life I was [previously] blind to – a life of true peace, joy, spiritual concreteness and meaning – as opposed to my muddling in life in pursuit of purposes bound into the narrowness of my ego before. Now I am free because I can see.” Say a prayer for Jimmy Lai as he undergoes his passion, and for all who suffer as he does.
posted 3/7/26
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 