While staying in Flushing, New York, Hu Liren met a Shanghai couple who practice Falun Gong. The wife said she had served two years in a Shanghai women's prison, where every day she was handcuffed behind her back and hung from a railing for hours, only being lowered during meals, which damaged the nerves in her hands and left her disabled. After her release, the couple hand out leaflets exposing the Chinese Communist Party every day in front of the Flushing post office.