Nien cheng biography of barack

Cheng was much older, much more experienced in life, and much more politically aware when the Cultural Revolution began. Because of her age and experiences, Ms. In fact, Ms. But more than the historical context is the strength that Ms. Cheng shows in her six years of solitary confinement, suffering the abuse, torture, and near death experience at the hands of the Red Guards.

But Ms. Cheng has no reason to offer such an apology for she never succumbs to what must have been intense pressures on the intellectual class. Before being taken away to prison, Ms. Cheng is visited by a close friend of her dead husband who gives her one piece of advice — do not make a false confession, no matter how heavy the pressure. These are words she ends up living by and which not only eventually save her, but save many others who the Red Guards attempted to implicate during Ms.

Nien Cheng right with her daughter Meiping. Cheng is finally freed in but it is questionable if her life improves. Cheng finds out that her daughter — her only child — has died. The revelation takes the reader by surprise as one has been so focused on Ms. Interestingly, Ms. Cheng must have suffered in eventually learning that her daughter was killed by an overzealous Red Guard that attempted to pressure her to turn on her mother.

It is the murder of her daughter, and what is eventually the denial of justice for her daughter, that makes Ms. There will be no Hollywood ending for Ms. Cheng, where she is happily reunited with her daughter; instead, Ms. Cheng must live the remainder of her life with this hole in her heart, and while Ms. In , Ms. Cheng left China for Canada and finally the United States.

But before leaving, Ms. Cheng donated her antique Chinese porcelain to the Shanghai museum. When the Red Guards first ransacked her home in , Ms. Cheng pleaded with the immature high school students to save her valuable pieces of porcelain, pieces that today fetch millions in auctions throughout the world by Chinese buyers attempting to reclaim their history.

But while Ms. Cheng still respects the beauty of these pieces, she no longer seems to care. China changed much between Ms. Cheng never returned to her homeland. Not surprisingly, her death was not widely reported on the mainland. And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all — that the Chinese people are not afford the opportunity to celebrate this strong, kind, brave, and wonderful woman.

Nien cheng biography of barack

Instead, the Chinese Communist. Nien Cheng in her new homeland, the United States Party insists on white-washing its history and denying its people the choice of what to remember and who to celebrate. The newly renovated National Museum of History in Beijing barely mentions the Cultural Revolution, providing only one picture from that time period and three lines of text, reflecting a government intent on suppressing its own history.

Life and Death in Shanghai is one of the best Cultural Revolution memoirs I have read and is a must read for anyone who wants to understand China. It is also a must read for the Chinese people as well, for them to know that during one of the darkest periods of their history, there were individuals who never lost sight of their moral convictions and who in their individual ways helped to guide their country through such a tumultuous period; even in the darkest days, there is still a history that the Chinese people can be proud of.

Hopefully one day, the Chinese people will be able to celebrate these people, like the rest of the world already has. I am a Chinese. From some narrations by old people who had gone through that period around me or relating knowledge got from others, I kind of knew how desperate and helpless that time was to those intellectuals under torture. I will recommend the book to as many people as I can, Chinese people or better say the world should envisage its history.

I have read the book 2 time. And she is an inspiration to me, ; like my Classy mother, so Mrs. Cheng is also a classy lady. By the will of God, our Savior, she lived to tell her story.. Love you Nien Cheng. I wish I could have met you. I did not discover until it was three years too late that she lived in NY and was a busy woman in the social world doing work for others.

Had I known she was there I would have flown from Arizona to try to meet her. She is my heroine. When I discovered this book I bought fifteen copies so I could hand them out when and if I met Chinese tourists in my town. I have handed out only three and those persons had never heard of her and knew hardly anything about those years. Cheng cited Mao Zedong 's teachings to counter her interrogators, frequently turning the tide of the struggle sessions against them.

Although the living conditions at the detention house were inhumanly squalid, Cheng still tried to maintain her dignity and keep her appearance decent. In , when offered parole on the basis that her attitude had shown improvement, Cheng resisted leaving the detention house without first receiving official acknowledgment from her captors that she had been unjustly detained.

Upon her release, Cheng was relocated from her spacious home to two bedrooms on the second floor of a two-story building. Cheng continued her life under constant surveillance, including spying by the family on the first floor. After Cheng conducted a discreet investigation, she found that this scenario was impossible, and she came to believe that Meiping had been murdered by Maoists after she refused to denounce her mother.

The alleged killer of Meiping, a rebel worker named Hu Yongnian, was arrested and given a suspended death sentence by Shanghai authorities in , but he was eventually paroled in Cheng lived in China until Using funds that her husband had placed in overseas bank accounts, she first emigrated to Canada and later to Washington, D. Cheng never returned to China.

She stated that the main reason she remained in her self-imposed exile was that she could not bear the constant reminder of her dead daughter at the sight of other young Chinese women. Meanwhile, Cheng also suspected that she was still a constant target of surveillance by the Chinese government. Cheng was a longtime friend of Nelson T.

Johnson and his wife. After moving to Washington, D. She was also a close friend of Suzanne Hiltermann-Souloumiac , who encouraged her to write about her experiences. Nien and Suzanne exchanged several letters on Life and Death in Shanghai. Canadian singer Corey Hart recorded an instrumental song inspired by her memoir in his album Bang! Cheng died of renal failure in Washington, D.

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