![]() Years later, under post-Mao reforms, the man responsible for Meiping’s murder received only a two-year prison sentence. But after an exhaustive investigation, she discovered that her daughter had been beaten to death during interrogation concerning her mother’s alleged crimes as an imperialist spy. Upon Cheng’s release, she was told by the authorities that her daughter had committed suicide. Her only child, Meiping, a spirited young actress at the Shanghai Film Studio, also disappeared during her mother’s imprisonment. Not only did Cheng, the widow of a Shell Oil executive who died of cancer in 1957, suffer imprisonment and torture. Her only crime: wealth, position, and an appreciation of Western art and culture. ![]() It is also far different from what Nien Cheng saw through the rusty, thick-barred window of a bare prison cell, her home for more than six years after Mao’s purges engulfed her. The view is far different than the one she enjoyed from her elegant home in Shanghai, before the chaotic days of the Cultural Revolution. She wrote her book on a manual typewriter on a mahogany desk near a window overlooking Cathedral Avenue. ![]() Today Nien Cheng lives in a one-bedroom condominium in Washington, D.C. “The past is forever with me and I remember it all.” So begins the haunting first chapter of Life and Death in Shanghai, the vivid portrayal of one Chinese woman’s life, imprisonment, torture, and release during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s. Knowing the Lord was with her sustained Nien Cheng in a Red Chinese prison. ![]()
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