Cheng Nien (鄭念), whose memoir Life and Death in Shanghai offered a harrowing account of the Cultural Revolution in China and her years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Red Guards, died on Nov. 2 at her home in Washington. She was 94.
The cause was cardiovascular and renal disease, said Catherine Mack, the executor of her estate.
As the widow of a diplomat and businessman and an adviser to a foreign oil company, Cheng found herself in a politically dangerous position as the Cultural Revolution gathered strength in the 1960s. In 1966, she was arrested by Red Guards and charged with espionage.
She spent the next six-and-a-half years in solitary confinement at the No. 1 Detention House in Shanghai, harshly interrogated and beaten by her jailers, to whom she responded with defiance and mockery.
“I grew up with a strong sense of loyalty and duty to my country,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “I felt humiliated that they should accuse me, who loved my country, of being a spy. I could not accept it, I had to fight. In prison, sometimes I would get so mad — I was rarely depressed — by and large my predominant emotion was anger.”
In 1973 she was told that the authorities had agreed to release her in recognition of an “improvement in her way of thinking and an attitude of repentance.”
She refused to leave and vowed to stay in prison until the government declared her innocent and issued an apology in the press.
Astonished prison officials pushed her out the door, grumbling that “in all the years of the detention house, we have never had a prisoner like you, so truculent and argumentative.”
Once outside, she learned that her only child was dead. The official explanation was suicide, but Cheng learned that her daughter had been murdered by the Red Guards for refusing to denounce her mother as a class enemy.
In 1987, after emigrating to Canada and then the US, Cheng published her memoir, which began with the sentence, “The past is forever with me, and I remember it all.”
The book won critical acclaim and became a bestseller.
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