Who is nien cheng

Three years later she moved to Washington, using money her husband had left her in overseas bank accounts. In , she was a guest at a White House state dinner, where she chatted with President Reagan. Her book was excerpted at length in Time magazine. She became a U.

Cheng was born Jan. In she went to study at the London School of Economics, where she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng. The couple returned to China before , and her husband joined the ministry of foreign affairs for the Kuomintang, the ruling party at the time. The couple were sent to Australia to establish an embassy and then were transferred to the ministry in Shanghai until Communists came to power in He died of cancer in , and she joined the oil company as an advisor.

Her daughter, Meiping, was an aspiring actress. The Communist regime left professionals like her alone until , when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution.

They ransacked her home, insulted her and derided her defense of ancient Chinese porcelain cups they were smashing. A month later, she was taken to a meeting at which she was denounced and held in a detention center for political prisoners. She refused to accept that statement and vowed to remain in detention until prison officials officially declared her innocent and published an apology in Shanghai and Beijing.

You must be out of your mind. With the publication of her memoir she received acclaim. The book was reviewed warmly, partly because it told the inhuman and incomprehensible story of the Cultural Revolution in a human, comprehensible voice. But the trauma that the events in the late s had left on Nien were not so easily erased. She told Time magazine in "In Washington, I live a full and busy life.

Only sometimes I feel a haunting sadness. At dusk, when the day is fading away and my physical energy is at a low ebb, I may find myself depressed and nostalgic. But next morning I invariably wake up with renewed optimism to welcome the day as another God-given opportunity for enlightenment and experience. My only regret is that Meiping is not here with me. None of her family is left, but her book will endure. Update : she had a MySpace page, which is here.

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