Nien Cheng:SEVERAL YEARS before Jung Chang's Wild Swans(1991) proved a sensation in the West, the work of another Chinese woman who suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution's years of turbulence had become the first bestseller in English about this period. Life and Death in Shanghai(1987) is a memoir of huge sorrow and triumph by Nien Cheng, who has died aged 94; it could be read as symbolic of the story of modern China itself.
She was born Yao Nien Yuan into a rich family in Beijing and was studying at the London School of Economics in 1935 when she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng. A supporter of the Nationalists, on the couple's return to wartorn China in the 1940s he joined the ministry of foreign affairs. The foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 meant Kang-chi's political affiliations were potentially a problem. But he was to die, of cancer, in 1957, while serving as a general manager for Shell.
After his death, Nien took up the position of political adviser to Shell and lived with their daughter, Meiping, a successful actor, in Shanghai, with servants and a good standard of living. But as Nien was to explain vividly in Life and Death in Shanghai, all that was brutally ended one day in 1967 when a visit by a Red Guard rebellion group heralded her own initiation into the terrifying world of the Cultural Revolution.
Her memoir documents her house arrest and the hours of interrogations, in which she used Mao's words and slogans back at her own captors, and showed a proud, unbreakable spirit. She was in solitary confinement for more than six years, and was released in 1973.
She was told Meiping had taken her own life in 1967. Nien was to find later that she had been murdered by Red Guards. This revelation, and further attacks from leftist activists, meant that, in 1980, she applied to leave China and went to Canada, and then to Washington. She was based there for the rest of her long life.
With the publication of her memoir she received acclaim. The book was reviewed warmly, partly because it told the inhuman and incomprehensible story of the Cultural Revolution in a human, comprehensible voice. But the trauma that the events in the late 1960s had left on Nien were not so easily erased.
Nien Cheng: born January 28th, 1915; died November 2nd, 2009