Da Jiaha, I'm Nathan Rich, aka Huoguo Tao Wang. I've been hearing a lot about boarding schools that claim to help kids with their internet addiction recently. There's a lot of talk about them online and I wanted to contribute my own story as well. You may not know, I was actually sent away to a punishment boarding school in America myself. The repercussions echo throughout my life to this very day. My family was originally all Jewish, but by the time I was born, most of them were part of an American cult, Scientology. Yes, the same expensive, ridiculous UFO cult that Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Elizabeth Moss are in. Everyone but my grandfather was part of it. My mother cut out my father and his part of the family from our lives before I had my first memory, and I have no siblings, so I grew up in an apartment in Hollywood with only my mother. As a child, I played with our two cats and spent most of my time alone. I fought back against the cult from literally as far back as I can remember. I never wanted to be part of it. I just wanted to be a normal kid. I was sent out to cult daycare centers and schools, and by the time I was eight years old, I had already started to rebel against them. Though I loved my mother more than anything else in the world, she sent me to a cult boarding school in Palmdale, California. It was called the Mace Kingsley Ranch, or just the Ranch, for short. In that boarding school, I was subjected to various forms of punishment for not wanting to be part of the cult. In X-Marine ran the place, and he beat us with a wooden paddle. I was also thrown into a horse trough in the winter, and made to do military-style jump squat push-ups in a mound of freshly gathered horse manure. They scrubbed my skin with a metal fence brush and did other humiliating things to me. After eight and a half months, I finally got out of the ranch, but not because I had changed. My grandmother had been pressuring my grandfather to join the cult so much that they got a separation after 39 years of marriage, and while they were separated, he died of a heart attack. He was the backbone of the family financially and otherwise. His death shattered the stability of the family, and I was taken out of the ranch when I was nine years old. Unable to communicate with my family about the abuses I experienced at the ranch, I contemplated suicide when I was nine. Thankfully I did not go through with it. My mother decided to move us out to Florida to be at the headquarters of the cult. When I was ten, the pressure to be in the cult was so strong that I tried to commit suicide by laying in a street, the only method I could think of at the time. Unfortunately, this attempt was unsuccessful, and I never told anyone about it. I continued to talk back in the cult schools, and by the time I was twelve, I had gotten kicked out of every school I was sent to, and my mother was forced to put me in a private non-cult school for the first time in my life. All the bad grades and trouble I had gotten into as a youngster had suddenly stopped as soon as I was in a normal school. My grades went from D's and C's to A's and then A plus's. I was even named the junior high school valedictorian at age 13. So I had never finished a single year of school before this one. I was finally doing great. I had an amazing teacher who actually wanted me to learn about the world, rather than just in Dr. Anation. My refusal to participate in the cult practices eventually boiled over, and my mother had enough. I woke up one morning to find the very same Mase Kingsley Ranch security guard who scrubbed me with a metal fence brush six years before, sitting on my bed. After some arguing back and forth, he grabbed my leg. I kicked him and he twisted my arm around my back and started to drag me out of my house. He was taking me back to the ranch, whether I liked it or not. I was kicking and screaming for my mother to help me as he dragged me through the apartment. When we got to the kitchen, I saw my mother smiling. In front of her were signed documents. She had signed over my power of attorney to the cult. They were legally my parents and could do with me what they wanted. When we arrived at the airport, we were escorted by armed police officers to the plane. We flew from Florida to New Mexico and drove nearly four hours into the depths of the Heila wilderness, a remote forest. My mother specifically requested I not be allowed to contact my family until I was a graduate, a willing cult member. So I was not able to communicate with my family in any way for almost three years. The punishments usually involve forcing the children to live on beans and rice, isolating us from the other kids, and watching us 24-7. They made us do manual labor day after day and had punishment camping trips with even more hard labor. With no hope and a family that didn't care about me because I wasn't part of their cult, I felt I had no hope, no reason to live. When I was 15, I tried to kill myself again. I took an entire bottle of extra strength Tylenol and waited to die. Instead I vomited and felt sick for around a week. I was not given medical attention of any kind, but was instead punished further. My family was using money from my grandfather's estate to pay the cult. They had already spent literally millions of dollars over the years. The ranch alone cost them around $75,000 per year, significantly more expensive than the most expensive private schools. By the time I was 17, I had been there longer than almost anyone else there, even the staff. They wanted to push me through the program so that I appeared to be a success story for them. So suddenly everything became easier and easier, and I graduated the program. They needed me to be a graduate before I turned 18 because they knew otherwise I would just walk out the door when I legally could and they would look ineffective. The vastness of three years in a prison-like boarding school is indescribable. The torture of that place unimaginable. The effects are still with me today. These are the memories that come back to me when I hear the stories of the people on the internet today. After I graduated, my family's expectation for me to be a cult member grew to an all-time high. I was able to cope with it, I started to rebel and ran away from home only two months after returning. I went all the way to Washington on a five and a half day bus trip. My family had made it clear they were never going to love me unless I went along with their plan and I just couldn't do it. I just wanted to be normal. A short while after running away, I regretted it and tried to go back home. I called my mother but she refused to take me back. She told me never to contact her or my family again. It was clear to her that no matter what they did, I just was never going to be part of the cult and that meant they could never accept me. At age 17, I was without friends or family. I had no job or money, no skills or way out. My mind was different than most. I was raised in a destructive cult and my thoughts and worldviews were warped from it. I was dying inside. So in the spirit of solidarity, I want to take a moment to pay respect to everyone who has had this type of experience in their lives. I'm just one of many and I want to show these people with similar experiences that there can be a bright future even with a dark past. You are not alone anymore because the world is waking up to these abuses. And this isn't the end of my story. While we do need to honor the past, we need to stay focused on the future. The second video in this two-part series will explain how I turned my situation around and after some extreme hardships, I eventually became successful and more importantly, a happy person. Thanks everybody for listening.