WASHINGTON — Sitting on the couch in her apartment near the Washington National Cathedral this summer, Chinese author Nien Cheng said: “I don’t want you to write about me. When I die, you can write about it. I will die soon.”
CNBC was blaring in the background. Cheng had just finished cleaning up after frying a week’s worth of vegetables, she had e-mails to return, and the central fact of her of life had been pared to its seven-word core, prompted by a glance at a beautiful and haunting black-and-white portrait in her tidy study: “That’s my daughter. She was 19. Terrible.”
In 1966, years after that photograph was taken, Cheng was hauled from her elegant Shanghai home filled with antiquities to the No. 1 Detention House. That was the start of more than six years of shackles, beatings and bouts of pneumonia as one of the 20th century’s great spasms of political insanity and violence unfolded in Mao Zedong’s China.
Cheng, who died last week, left China and settled in Washington, D.C., where she wrote “Life and Death in Shanghai,” a best-selling account of stubborn survival. Published in 1987, it was praised as a courageous and sharply drawn portrait of Chinese repression. But it was also a hit that shaped the views of many Americans who knew little about Mao.
Cheng dedicated the book to her daughter, Meiping, and in it describes the moment she finally walked out of the prison and saw a young woman standing by a blue taxi waiting for her.
But it was not her daughter. Meiping had died in 1967, the year after her mother was taken away, but Cheng did not know that.
It would take her years to undo the official verdict of suicide, and to uncover her daughter’s abduction and death at the hands of brutal political activists competing to outdo one another’s fervor in Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
But on this afternoon, more than two decades after Cheng began telling and retelling the worst parts of her life on book tours, at colleges and corporate retreats, and in her living room, a 94-year-old woman was just trying to conserve the energy she needed for a graceful end to her story.
“I’m too old. The book’s too old also. Now we just be quiet,” Cheng said.
There are consequences for spending decades talking about a daughter’s death. It both sapped and sustained Cheng.
She felt a “lightening of spirit” after finishing the book, she wrote in the epilogue. It also brought her friends from around the country. “My husband died of cancer. … My daughter died, and I was imprisoned for so long. Literally, I had no home. Only when I came to America did I really enjoy life,” she said.
She started a scholarship fund honoring her daughter at Slippery Rock University in western Pennsylvania, where some students are the first in their families to go to college. “It’s the most important thing I did,” she said. “When I’m nearly finished, I will call them and they will come with a truck and take away all my books.”
Her history as an executive at the Shanghai office of the oil giant Shell, a job that had tarred her in China as a capitalist sympathizer and foreign spy, made her an attractive speaker for corporate clients. She traveled to the United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong, giving business leaders tips on deciphering Chinese bureaucracy, etiquette and power plays. “I usually tell them, ‘Don’t send your number one on the first contact,’” she said, explaining that it’s best not to seem overeager. “If you are in a hurry, you are a loser.”
She tried to set an endpoint. “I gave myself a deadline. I did 10 years of lectures,” she said.
But the book talk has never ended.
That’s because people keep finding it, just as Toni Clark, a 71-year-old retired receptionist, did at a library book sale in Schaumburg, Ill., in 2004.
“She endured so much and she fought for what she believed, and she told a story, she told a wonderful story, and she told us what was going on in the Mao Zedong days,” Clark told me.
She tracked Cheng down, then flew with a friend to Washington to see her. “We danced all the way there, and we danced all the way back. … We actually got to meet a real-life heroine in our lifetime,” Clark said.
But in years of e-mail between the two, Cheng sometimes showed the strain of keeping the conversation going with her community of readers.
She wrote that she understood her book was no longer going to be in print. “Soon I hope my name will disappear, too,” she wrote.
This summer, Cheng lost consciousness at home but later returned from her hospital stay marveling at her own resilience.
“They thought I was dead. And somebody in the hospital said, ‘Let’s give her a chance,’ and they gave me a chance, and I came back,” she said. “It’s true.”
She had the voice of someone with a story to tell.
Her book is filled with moments whose authenticity lies in their absurdity. When her interrogators forced her to write a confession on paper with the words “signature of criminal” printed along the bottom, she kept adding the phrase “who did not commit any crime.” In their fury, they threatened that she would be shot. “But Maoists were essentially bullies. If I had allowed them to insult me at will, they would have been encouraged to go further,” she wrote.
At her apartment, Cheng told me how she wore high-heeled shoes and Chinese gowns to her speeches, how she talked for hours to audiences a little younger than her daughter had been and offered motherly reprimands if they wasted food.
She had been trying to get all her investment papers together and said the financial crisis had slashed her savings. She was impressed with President Obama and liked how he seemed to be cooling international tensions. “Live and let live,” she said.
I told her that some scenes in her book reminded me of a story Chinese dissident Xu Wenli told me at a restaurant in Beijing, where I spent much of the 1990s as a reporter. He was jailed for more than a dozen years starting in 1981, after a failed pro-democracy movement. When a new warden took over the prison, he ordered Xu to sit in a cartoonishly tiny stool placed before him. But Xu refused.
Xu, who now teaches at Brown University, lists Cheng’s book among his recommended reading on China.
Cheng insisted I take a paperback copy with me when I left her condo. She had taken to giving copies away. “They want to have it, so I give it,” she said. She also gave me a copy of the letter establishing the scholarship in her daughter’s honor.
“When the time comes for me to go,” she had written to her fan Clark two years before, “there will be a big smile on my face.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
