LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI

by Nien Cheng ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1987

The sufferings of a rich woman during China's Cultural Revolution. Cheng was part of a family associated with Shell Oil before the political mood changed in 1968. Now a resident of Washington, D,C., Cheng looks back with horror at her six and a half years of imprisonment and psychological torture, as well as the brutal death of her daughter. In formal, sometimes stiff English prose, Cheng recounts the weird atmosphere of the days when schoolchildren would follow her in the street, calling her ""Spy! Imperialist spy! Running dog of the imperialists!"" An anonymous ill-wisher even wrote on her front gate, ""An arrogant imperialist spy lives here."" Indeed, she would soon be arrested on charges of being a British agent. Yet before this, Cheng suffered through ""frequent nightmares in which I saw my daughter brutally beaten, tortured, and killed in a blood-splattered room."" Almost as bad were visits from strangers bearing gifts who claimed to be friends of her daughter. Cheng later witnessed her daughter's murderer being freed as part of a general reprieve. In length and grimness, this tale achieves something of the effect of one of Solzhenitsyn's works, though it is less pretentiously written than anything by the Russian. Cheng even offers a bit of anticlimactic wit: on the plane leaving China in 1980, she was taken aback when a stewardess offered her a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: she associated these drinks with instruments of torture. An ennobling and vivid accounting of an indomitable spirit.

Pub Date: June 1, 1987

ISBN: 0802145167

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION