Love, Justice & the American Way
- Source: Global Times
- [22:52 November 22 2009]
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By Yin Hang
Julie Harms petitions the Supreme People's Court in Beijing on November 13.
A slim blonde waited in line to enter the US embassy at about 2 o'clock on the afternoon of November 17.
It was the second day of US President Barack Obama's State visit and as the motorcade approached, security guards and officers refused to hand her letter to the president.
As she left the Beijing embassy, US citizen Julie Harms was stopped and taken to Maizidian police station where she was interrogated for two hours. Harms repeated several times her reasons for wanting to see the president and then waited for them to rule her off their blacklist.
"My fiancé is innocent," Harms, 31, told the Global Times. "He has already been waiting too long for a verdict he should never have had to face."
When the reporter asked Harvard University graduate Harms, why she hadn't married her now-jailed fiancé Liu Shiliang earlier in the year, she choked up for a few seconds, sighed and said, "How could we have anticipated that? We were busy doing our jobs, fighting for our future.
"We were just … we really didn't know that …" she paused a moment and then took a long, deep breath.
True romance
Harms' fairy tale romance with a humble peasant from Wuhe county of the prefecture-level city of Bengbu, Anhui Province, in eastern China, has turned into a Kafkaesque legal odyssey through the police stations, courts and petition offices of the Chinese mainland.
Her road to petition, mentioned in the undelivered letter to President Obama, begins in the summer of 1998 when she was a college sophomore traveling through China and bumped into a security guard at a post office in Hefei, capital city of Anhui Province.
