Product Description

This is a first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms offered by her interrogators. When she was released from prison she was told that her daughter had committed suicide. In fact Meiping had been beaten to death by Maoist revolutionaries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107526 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Review
The sufferings of a rich woman during China's Cultural Revolution. Cheng was part of a family associated with Shell Oil before the political mood changed in 1968. Now a resident of Washington, D,C., Cheng looks back with horror at her six and a half years of imprisonment and psychological torture, as well as the brutal death of her daughter. In formal, sometimes stiff English prose, Cheng recounts the weird atmosphere of the days when schoolchildren would follow her in the street, calling her "Spy! Imperialist spy! Running dog of the imperialists!" An anonymous ill-wisher even wrote on her front gate, "An arrogant imperialist spy lives here." Indeed, she would soon be arrested on charges of being a British agent. Yet before this, Cheng suffered through "frequent nightmares in which I saw my daughter brutally beaten, tortured, and killed in a blood-splattered room." Almost as bad were visits from strangers bearing gifts who claimed to be friends of her daughter. Cheng later witnessed her daughter's murderer being freed as part of a general reprieve. In length and grimness, this tale achieves something of the effect of one of Solzhenitsyn's works, though it is less pretentiously written than anything by the Russian. Cheng even offers a bit of anticlimactic wit: on the plane leaving China in 1980, she was taken aback when a stewardess offered her a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: she associated these drinks with instruments of torture. An ennobling and vivid accounting of an indomitable spirit. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
This is a first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms offered by her interrogators. When she was released from prison she was told that her daughter had committed suicide. In fact Meiping had been beaten to death by Maoist revolutionaries.

Customer Reviews

A personal tragedy well observed
A delicate and intelligent woman, imprisoned and mistreated, with tremendous courage to fight for her own dignity and the truth of her daughter's mysterious death in Cultural Revolution. With great sympathy towards her personal tragedy, I also very much appreciated her profound observation on the human natures in such historical environment. Those characters around her were truly unique and vivid, for example, her "special" student Da Teh and her local policeman Lao Li, to name but a few. A touching and sorrowful memoir worth its own account enhanced with skilful writing, showing the full strength of a truly original literature work.

What an eye-opener!
When this book was chosen as our latest book club text, initially I felt really unsure about it. I'm not a big reader of biographies, and somehow the cover made it look dry and uninteresting, so I placed it on the pile of books 'to be read - sometime' and overlooked it. What a huge mistake I nearly made! Without a doubt, this is a MUST READ type of book.

When I eventually opened it this Half term, I found myself totally engrossed - enthralled by the horrors and longing for some evidence of justice within its pages. Although I already knew something of the horrors of the Cultural revolution from previous reading and from my own, recent visit to China - where we had been lucky enough to have had a local guide who was a Social Historian and who wasn't afraid to tell us about his life; this was still something of an eye-opener, focussing as it does on the experience of one, normal, upper middle-class person.

As I read on, I found myself asking...
... how could one man have such a cult following that it took over such a huge nation so totally - particularly so soon after the rest of the world was still reeling at the horrors of the 2nd World War?
... what made them think that he was right? Some of his ideas were so ridiculous, but millions of people jumped at his every word as his "awesome power (spread) like a banket over China, threatening to smother whomsoever he chose." (p.199) And even now, many years after his death, this blanket is still evident.
... how could cultural anihilation to this extent be called a Cultural revolution? And how come so many wonderful treasures survived? How many must have been lost?

But more than anything else, I found myself asking ...

... how could one woman suffer so much pain (both mental and physical) and so much injustice - and yet still survive?
...where did she find her strength?

Our book club discussions have never been so deep or so involved. Every one of us had been caught up by this one woman's story. Her amazing strength of will and courage is an example to us all. I feel priveleged to have read her autobiography. Thank you for sharing your story with us, Nien Cheng.

One of the best books I have EVER read
Fantastic read - you won't be able to put it down. Nien Cheng describes EXACTLY what happened to ANYONE who was middle class or above in the cultural revolution. As a westerner if you don't know what happened during that period PLEASE READ THIS BOOK.