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 became the first bestseller in English. Life and Death in Shanghai (1987) is a memoir of huge sorrow and triumph by Nien Cheng, who died aged 94; it can be read as symbolic of the story of modern China itself.
She was born Yao Nien Yuan into a rich landowning family in Beijing and studied 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 war-torn China in the 1940s he joined the ministry of foreign affairs. They lived in Australia briefly, setting up an embassy there. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 meant that Kang-chi’s political affiliations were potentially a problem. But he died of cancer in 1957, while serving as a general manager for Shell, one of the few foreign companies that maintained a presence in Mao’s China.
After his death, Nien became the political adviser to Shell and lived with their daughter, Meiping, a successful actor, in a large house in Shanghai, with antique furniture, servants and a good standard of living. But as Nien was to explain vividly in Life and Death in Shanghai, all that ended brutally one day in 1967 when she was visited by one of the newly created Red Guard rebellion groups. And so she was initiated into the terrifying world of the Cultural Revolution, which had started formally months earlier in Beijing.
Her memoir documents her house arrest and the many 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 placed in solitary confinement for more than six years. She was released in 1973, as the Cultural Revolution was winding down. She was told almost immediately that Meiping committed suicide in 1967. Nien did not believe this and found out subsequently that Meiping was murdered by Red Guards.
This shattering revelation, and further attacks from leftist activists, made her decide to apply to leave China in 1980. She went to Ottawa, Canada, and then in 1983 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 of the events of the late 1960s were not easily erased.
Nien told Time magazine in 2007: “In Washington I live a full and busy life. Only sometimes I feel a haunting sadness. At dusk, when the day is fading away and my physical energy is at a low ebb, I may find myself depressed and nostalgic. But next morning I invariably wake up with renewed optimism to welcome the day as another God-given opportunity for enlightenment and experience. My only regret is that Meiping is not here with me.” — © Guardian News & Media 2009