Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng
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Book Reviews of Life and Death in Shanghai
Book Review: An amazing read!
Summary: 5 Stars
Nien Cheng's "Life and Death in Shanghai" is a personal account of a woman's life during the cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong in china. In 1966, a group of Red Guards breaks into her house and takes Nien Cheng captive, under the notion that she is a "spy" for the imperialists. For siz years, she remains in prison. The story focuses on those years and how she dealt with herself and her captors.The most amazing part of this book is that, even under the pressure of countless interrogations and relentless accusations, Cheng does not confess and does not lie. "The more logical and intelligent course was to face persecution no matter what I might have to endure," says Cheng. Even after six years of torture, Mrs. Cheng still stays strong, and it is only because of her strength and determination (and maybe even stubbornness) that she is able to survive.
One might read this book not only for historical analysis of the time period, but for some sort of insight as to what it was actually like to be in this woman's shoes, or just to be living in such a paranoid society. "Determined to find fault, the Revolutionaries refused to see virtue." It didn't matter whether or not one actually committed a crime--it merely mattered whether one was thought to have committed a crime.
Nien Cheng pulls the reader into her story through her vivid descriptions and heart-wrenching discourses. One cannot help to sympathize with this woman and after reading her story, it almost feels like one could know what it was like to be in her position. It's a frightening thought, but that is what makes the story so absorbing.
Book Review: Outstanding
Summary: 5 Stars
Nien Chang's account of her encounter with the Cultural Revolution is the best book of this kind that I recall. Many others have written about their experiences, some in memoir form, others in fictionalized form. NC's is the most accessible to the Western reader, she can relate to our expectations better than some of the others, and she writes more specifically for a Western audience. Her personal background made that easier for her than for many others, she had this working history with a large foreign corporation (no product placements in my reviews!).
The sad fact is that the subject interests non-Chinese or 'Overseas Chinese' substantially more than the population of the People's Republic. Books like NC's are often talked down because they are successfull in the West. That fact seems to be a negative mark. This applies also to Jun Chang's Wild Swans, while her later bio of the great helmsman is taboo.
The desire to forget about the past is so overwhelming, that many shut their eyes and minds to the recent past. (Actually not that recent any more.) With this strong wish to close the chapter, and in a situation of overwhelming success and progress for the country as a whole, the ruling elites find it very easy to put the Cultural Revolution into a kind of frozen state of taboo: it is not denied, but it is not visited with the purpose of understanding and digesting it. The man who provoked it is sacrosanct, he can not be touched by criticism. The negative things are assigned to others, like the Gang of Four.
(Who was it who wrote here recently that history does not change?)
Book Review: Thank you, Nien Cheng
Summary: 5 Stars
After I arrived in the US in 1994, a friend lent me a copy of "Life and Death in Shanghai". I cried many times while reading it. It brought back my miserable childhood and the humiliation and suffering I and my family had experienced in China. It was then that the idea was born to share my story about how a little class enemy became a world citizen and my book "Flying High out of a Tibetan Valley" came into being. Thank you, Nien Cheng.I grew up in an isolated Tibetan town in western Sichuan Province. At the age of 12, I witnessed a "struggle meeting" in which my parents were denounced as enemies of the state and repeatedly beaten. Soon both my parents were jailed and I had to live on my own. During high school and in the countryside as an Educated Youth, I was often chastised and shunned, not only for my family background, but also for my unusual ambition to become a writer and translator and to fly high out of a Tibetan valley as a world citizen.
Nien Cheng suffered unthinkable persecution as an adult during the ten years of madness, while I suffered oppression as a child. So I wrote of the Cultural Revolution from a child's point of view. Nien Cheng came from Shanghai, the biggest city in China, while I came from an isolated Tibetan valley. As you read such personnal stories you will get a better understanding of what Chinese children and adults went through during Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Thanks to Nien Cheng, Americans can know what Life and Death under a dictatorship is like.
Book Review: Very Interesting Read
Summary: 5 Stars
"As I stood in the room looking at it for the last time, I felt again the cold metal of the handcuffs on my wrists and remembered the physical suffering and mental anguish I had endured while fighting with all the willpower and intellect God had given me for that rare and elusive thing in a Communist country called justice." (351) That dispirited note, expressed by the author and narrator of Life and Death in Shanghai, dominates a book which pulls the reader through a journey of anguished sorrows and undeserved tragedies. Nien Cheng recounts her life as a citizen in a politically transforming nation headed by Mao Zedong, a zealous proponent of communism. Upon the death of her husband, the author becomes the general manger within the Shell Oil Corporation. Government officials believe she became associated with certain enemies and was a foreign spy. She is consequently imprisoned for six and a half years and is forced to undergo many tortuous interrogations. Cheng incorporates vivid imagery and personal emotions as she tells her story, delivering a powerful and moving account. She successfully allows the reader to understand and begin to feel how life must have been while living throughout the Cultural Revolution with Red Guards violently ruling the streets and raiding homes. Although parts of the autobiography may seem repetitious such as the constant interrogation scenes, they only emphasize the tediousness and arduousness of the processes Cheng was forced to endure while being accused of crimes she did not even commit.Book Review: Very Interesting Read
Summary: 5 Stars
"As I stood in the room looking at it for the last time, I felt again the cold metal of the handcuffs on my wrists and remembered the physical suffering and mental anguish I had endured while fighting with all the willpower and intellect God had given me for that rare and elusive thing in a Communist country called justice." (351) That dispirited note, expressed by the author and narrator of Life and Death in Shanghai, dominates a book which pulls the reader through a journey of anguished sorrows and undeserved tragedies. Nien Cheng recounts her life as a citizen in a politically transforming nation headed by Mao Zedong, a zealous proponent of communism. Upon the death of her husband, the author becomes the general manger within the Shell Oil Corporation. Government officials believe she became associated with certain enemies and was a foreign spy. She is consequently imprisoned for six and a half years and is forced to undergo many tortuous interrogations. Cheng incorporates vivid imagery and personal emotions as she tells her story, delivering a powerful and moving account. She successfully allows the reader to understand and begin to feel how life must have been while living throughout the Cultural Revolution with Red Guards violently ruling the streets and raiding homes. Although parts of the autobiography may seem repetitious such as the constant interrogation scenes, they only emphasize the tediousness and arduousness of the processes Cheng was forced to endure while being accused of crimes she did not even commit.