(LAT/WashPost) Nien Cheng, 94 - survivor of torture during China's Cultural Revolution
BobF
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-nien-cheng9-2009nov09,0,5650075.story
OBITUARY
Nien Cheng dies at 94; survivor of torture during China's Cultural
Revolution
Cheng recounted her 61/2 years of imprisonment in an acclaimed memoir,
'Life and Death in Shanghai.' Despite solitary confinement and losing
her teeth, she refused to succumb to her interrogators.
By Patricia Sullivan
November 8, 2009
Nien Cheng, whose memoir "Life and Death in Shanghai" was widely
praised as one of the most riveting accounts of the Cultural
Revolution, died Nov. 2 of cardiovascular and renal disease at her
home in Washington, D.C. She was 94.
At a time when China's Communist leader Mao Tse-tung was trying to
purge political rivals and reassert his authority, Cheng, the wealthy
widow of an oil company executive, was one of untold numbers of
professionals who were evicted from their homes by the Red Guard. She
was arrested in August 1966 and falsely accused of being a spy.
Cheng endured 6 1/2 years of solitary confinement and torture in
prison, refusing to confess or bow to the will of her interrogators.
On her release, she discovered that her only child was dead,
purportedly by suicide, but actually beaten to death by Red Guards.
In simple, exquisite detail, Cheng's 1987 book describes the
maddeningly circular reasoning of those caught up in the revolution.
Her interrogations were contests of will, with Cheng refusing to
confess or responding with quotes from Mao's "Little Red Book."
Her captors responded with beatings. So tightly handcuffed that she
feared losing her hands and confined in a frigid cell too small for
her to lie down in, Cheng lost her teeth, caught pneumonia and had
hemorrhages. She defused the misery by laughing at her accusers.
"Far from depressing, it is almost exhilarating to witness her mind do
battle," Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times review
of her book. "Even in English, the keenness of her thought and
expression is such that it constitutes some form of martial art,
enabling her time and again to absorb the force of her interrogators'
logic and turn it to her own advantage."
Readers were mesmerized by the story, pushing the book to the top of
the bestseller list. The timing was right; totalitarianism and
communism were under attack worldwide.
After she was released from prison, Cheng found herself still under
suspicion. She was forced to share her home with other families and
was wrenched from a comfortable life into the grinding poverty of the
masses.
By 1980, she had managed to leave China for Canada. Three years later
she moved to Washington, using money her husband had left her in
overseas bank accounts. In 1987, she was a guest at a White House
state dinner, where she chatted with President Reagan. Her book was
excerpted at length in Time magazine. She became a U.S. citizen in
1988.
"There were many Chinese who fought back and many who suffered much
more. Some of them have never recovered," she said. "But my privilege
has been to write about it, and that's only been possible because I
could leave."
Cheng was born Jan. 28, 1915, in Beijing, the daughter of a naval vice
minister who belonged to a wealthy family of landowners. In 1935 she
went to study at the London School of Economics, where she met her
future husband, Kang-chi Cheng.
The couple returned to China before 1940, and her husband joined the
ministry of foreign affairs for the Kuomintang, the ruling party at
the time. The couple were sent to Australia to establish an embassy
and then were transferred to the ministry in Shanghai until Communists
came to power in 1949.
With the approval of the government, Cheng's husband became general
manager of Shell Oil in Shanghai. He died of cancer in 1957, and she
joined the oil company as an advisor. Her daughter, Meiping, was an
aspiring actress. The Communist regime left professionals like her
alone until 1966, when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution.
Increasingly concerned about the Red Guards parading down her street,
she wasn't surprised when "suddenly the doorbell began to ring
incessantly.
"At the same time, there was a furious pounding of many fists on my
front gate, accompanied by hysterical voices shouting slogans," she
wrote.
The 30 to 40 high school-age students were let in.
They ransacked her home, insulted her and derided her defense of
ancient Chinese porcelain cups they were smashing. A month later, she
was taken to a meeting at which she was denounced and held in a
detention center for political prisoners.
After her years in custody, she was told March 27, 1973, that she was
being released because of an "improvement in her way of thinking and
an attitude of repentance."
She refused to accept that statement and vowed to remain in detention
until prison officials officially declared her innocent and published
an apology in Shanghai and Beijing.
"The No. 1 Detention House isn't an old people's home. You can't stay
here all your life," the interrogator told her. "I have never seen a
prisoner refusing to leave the detention house before. You must be out
of your mind."
Cheng was forced out of the prison and learned about the death of her
daughter. She leaves no immediate survivors.
Sullivan writes for the Washington Post.
--
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
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BobF
[Default] On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:21:19 +1300, BobF
<b...@surfwriter.net.not> magnanimously proffered:
>Nien Cheng dies at 94; survivor of torture during China's Cultural
>Revolution
An amazing tale of courage and determination in the face of mob
mentality and cowardice.
Requiescat in pace
Matthew Kruk
news:7lpo9mF...@mid.individual.net...
>
> [Default] On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:21:19 +1300, BobF
> <b...@surfwriter.net.not> magnanimously proffered:
>
>>Nien Cheng dies at 94; survivor of torture during China's Cultural
>>Revolution
>
> An amazing tale of courage and determination in the face of mob
> mentality and cowardice.
Makes a lot people problems seem very very small.