BARBARA LERNER, NATIONAL REVIEW / JULY 20, 1998

Both parents spent that July night in jail. The next day they got out on a $6,000 bond and immediately began a frantic hunt for their child. They eventually learned that the police had taken her to an emergency room, where she was examined by doctors and the red marks were duly recorded. Finding her otherwise well, the juvenile-court authorties transferred her to a shelter for abused children, where she was interviewed by one of the Cook County Public Guardian's supervising staff attorneys. By then, the red marks were gone. Sylvia said her parents had spanked her a few times before, but never so hard, and that she was not afraid of them and wanted to go home. It took her parents two days to t rack her down; the authorities then spent ten more days investigating the case before they allowed them to take her home, under supervision.

Mr. and Mrs. Li cooperated fully with the investigation. By all accounts, Sylvia was a happy, well-cared for child, earning high marks in the gifted class at school and enjoying day camp. Spanking is not illegal in Illinois, although the Public Guardian disapproves, but the use of "unreasonable force" is illegal, and the Guardian felt that what Mr. and Mrs. Li had done was unreasonable.

Accordingly, they were subjected to five months of counseling and supervision, including "parenting" and "anger management's classes. They again cooperated, and juvenile court authorities were eventually satisfied that they had learned the error of their ways and would never strike their daughter again. Just in case, they gave Sylvia a card to keep in her pocket, so that she could call for help if she ever felt she needed to. The juvenile-court authorities were satisfied; the criminal-court authorities were not.

Insisting that a crime of this severity could not go unpunished, Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine charged both parents with domestic battery. The Public Guardian wrote to him, asking him to drop the charges. No response. The Lis were terrified: conviction could mean deportation. They found an experienced criminal lawyer, Sherman Magidson, who tried to get the state to drop or reduce the charges, if only for the child's sake: if her parents were deported, she would almost certainly be deported with them. No dice.

Magidson demanded a jury trial; it was set for May 11. Enter Maurice Possley, a Chicago Tribune reporter. His story about the case ran on May 7, and the response was overwhelming. The State's Attorney was deluged with angry calls from the Asian and Hispanic communities, and from individual parents of every color and background, native and immigrant alike. That got results: a plea bargain. Mr. Li pleaded guilty to simple battery-which removed the threat of deportation but, because it is a criminal offense, ended his dream of becoming a lawyer in the United States-in exchange for the state's dropping all charges against his wife. His sentence was to spend one more year in a state-run courfsefing and parent-education program.

Afterwards, Dick Devine held a press conference to repeat his mantra, 'This is not a discipline case; this is a child abuse case." Many of the reporters seemed to agree. A mob of them surrounded Mr. Li after his guilty plea, asking him to say again that he was sorry, he had been wrong, he had gone too far." He complied. This public humiliation was painful to watch, but Mr. and Mrs. Li were stoic throughout. Experiences of this sort were not new to them. Both had been re-educated before, in the system that invented the process and carried it out with breathtaking brutality.

Schoolmates in Canton, Hou-Lin and Luyang were 15 when the Cultural Revolution tore up their lives, 25 when it loosened its grip enough to let them resume their academic studies, and 39 when their only child was born. They wanted to raise her in freedom in America but had had to endure a long separation first. Luyang got her visa in a few months; Hou-Lin and Sylvia had to wait five years. When they were all here together at last, they thought they were safe.

My sympathies were with the Lis, but when I interviewed Mr. Li in his home the next day, I inadvertently caused him more pain than all the other reporters. His wife had told me earlier that his Chinese re-education had been harsher than hers because although she, too, was bound for university when the Cultural Revolution began, her father was a mechanic, a politically correct occupation. Hou-Lin's father was a chemistry professor, and hence 'a counterrevolutionary intellectual." As such, he was denounced by a government-incited mob, beaten, goaded to confess his "crimes" in public, and then sent, in his sixties, to be reeducated -through labor on a remote collective farm.

A liver ailment that had dogged Hou-Lin throughout his childhood saved him from the same fate, but he was forced to witness his father's humiliation. When I asked him to describe it, he could not. He had been dry-eyed throughout his own ordeal, but tears welled up in his eyes when he tried to talk about his father's. All he could say, over and over, was that his father was "an honest man, so honest--can you understand?-always honest, all his life, honest man." Like his father, Mr. Li is passionate about honesty. Mrs. Li is too.

That's why they had slapped Sylvia. On that day, they learned that she had lied to them, repeatedly. She lied about stealing a mechanical pencil from another child at school, lied about forging her mother's signature on the disciplinary note her teacher sent home, lied about losing her ring, a special gift she had promised never to take to the park. Mr. and Mrs. Li believe that when it comes to teaching moral values, there are critical periods in a child's life. And, in their eyes, the critical period for imbuing a deep commitment to honesty is when the child is seven to nine years old.

Both said they lied at that age and were punished for it in ways they never forgot, vivid reminders of how strongly their parents fclt about the transcendent value of honesty in a world full of lies, propaganda, and political correctness. That is what they wanted to teach their only child. The authorities, however, wanted her to learn a different lesson, to make her share their false, sentimental view of childhood, their blanket insistence that all "violence" must be outlawed, their smug conviction that baby-boomer niceness is superior to all other moral codes, foreign and domestic.

HE Lis' story called to mind a line of John O'Sullivan's: "In Europe, the fascists goose-stepped; in America, they jog." Two days after our interview, Mr. Li called me. There was something important he had forgotten to tell me, the answer to the question none of us had asked: Does Sylvia still lie? The answer, this proud father told me, is: "No. Since that incident, she never lied to us again." At least for now, the Lis have preserved a value outside the scope of our trendy theories and PC pieties. The rest of us, I'm not so sure about.