Author: Nien Cheng

Cheng and her husband worked for Shell in Shanghai, and after he died she stayed on as an adviser to the company, which in 1966 was enough for the Cultural Revolution to take her. She spent six and a half years in solitary confinement in the Number One Detention House, was beaten, and refused throughout to confess to spying for the British. Her daughter Meiping was killed by Red Guards while she was inside; she was told one account of how it happened and established years later that it was false. She left China in 1980, moved to Washington, and wrote Life and Death in Shanghai in English in her seventies. It is one of the few accounts of that decade written by somebody who never signed anything. She died in 2009.