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Nien Cheng, Memoirist, Is Dead at 94

November 7, 2009
Nien Cheng, Memoirist, Is Dead at 94
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Nien Cheng, 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 last
Monday 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, Mrs. 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, Meiping, an actress with
the Shanghai Film Studio, was dead. The official explanation was
suicide, but Mrs. 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 United States, Mrs.
Cheng published her memoir, which began, memorably, with the sentence
"The past is forever with me, and I remember it all." The book won
critical acclaim and became a best seller. Stanley Karnow, reviewing it
in The Washington Post, echoed the prevailing critical response when he
wrote that "her narrative deserves to rank with the foremost prison
diaries of our time."

Yao Nien was born on Jan. 28, 1915, in Beijing. Her father, the
descendant of wealthy landowners, was a vice minister in the navy. In
1935 she went to study at the London School of Economics, where she
became a fervent socialist and met her husband, Kang-chi Cheng.

Mr. Cheng entered the diplomatic service after returning to China and
was posted to Australia, where he and Mrs. Cheng spent the war years,
returning to China in 1948. When Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists
fled to Taiwan the following year, the Chengs remained in China. Mr.
Cheng became the general manager for Shell Oil in Shanghai, and after
his death in 1957, Mrs. Cheng became a special adviser to the company,
negotiating its tenuous relationship with the new Communist government.

She later speculated that her interrogators were eager to compile
evidence that would incriminate Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, who
opposed the Cultural Revolution. Specifically, she theorized, they hoped
to extract a confession that a business trip to Britain that she and her
husband had taken with Zhou's approval was in fact a spy mission.

After being released from prison, Mrs. Cheng, still regarded as
politically suspect, moved back into her house, now subdivided and
occupied by numerous tenants. In 1980 she gained permission to leave
China. Once abroad, she had access to money in her husband's overseas
accounts and was able to live in relative comfort in Washington.

There are no immediate survivors.

"She was a humble person," said James A. Dorn, the vice president for
academic affairs at the Cato Institute and a friend of Mrs. Cheng's.
"She said: 'I didn't really do anything. I just recorded what I saw, and
I wrote it for my daughter.' "

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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