CityReads│Regarding Nien Cheng
Regarding Nien Cheng
In her memoir, Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng revealed her life in China in the early Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her own imprisonment and torture during the Cultural Revolution.
Nien Cheng,1987.Life and death in Shanghai, New York: Grove Press.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/10/nien-cheng-obituary
I first learned about Nien Cheng from James Fallows’s piece at Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/11/nien-cheng/29708/) . Nien Cheng died Nov. 2, 2009 at her home in Washington. Life and Death in Shanghai, her memoir of her life in China in the pre-Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her own imprisonment and torture by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was one of the first notable accounts of those years and remains a powerful work of modern non-fiction.
James Fallows wrote: “Several times while walking my wife or I had the amazing-each-time experience of passing on the sidewalk a tiny, increasingly frail, but elegant Chinese woman whom we knew to be her. I never dared to say hello or thank her for writing the book, which I now regret all the more. None of her family is left, but her book will endure”.
Regarding Nien Cheng
Nien Cheng was born Yao Nien Yuan into a rich landowning family in Beijing in 1915 and was studying at the London School of Economics in 1935 when she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng. On the couple's return to wartorn China in the 1948, he joined the ministry of foreign affairs, and they lived in Australia for 7 years, setting up an embassy there. The foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 meant that Kang-chi's political affiliations were potentially a problem. But he was to die, of cancer, in 1957, while serving as a general manager for Shell, one of the few foreign companies that maintained a presence in Mao's China.
After his death, Nien took up the position of political adviser to Shell and lived with their daughter, Meiping, an aspiring actor, in a large house in Shanghai, with antique furniture, servants and a good standard of living.
But as Nien was to explain vividly in Life and Death in Shanghai, all that was brutally ended one day in 1966 when a visit by one of the newly created Red Guard rebellion groups heralded her own initiation into the terrifying world of the Cultural Revolution.
Her memoir documents her house arrest and the many hours of interrogations, in which she used Mao's words and slogans back at her own captors, and showed a proud, unbreakable spirit. She was placed in solitary confinement for more than six years. She was told March 27, 1973, that she was being released because of an "improvement in her way of thinking and an attitude of repentance." 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.
Nien was forced out of the prison and learned about the death of her daughter. She was informed that Meiping had committed suicide in 1967. Nien did not believe this and was to find subsequently that she had been murdered by Red Guards. This shattering revelation, and further attacks from leftist activists, meant that, in 1980, she applied to leave China, and went to Ottawa, Canada, and then, in 1983, to Washington. She was to be based there for the rest of her long life.
How to Cope With Pains, Persucution & Loneliness
To cope with problems and changes with determination and optimism was the way I had lived. When my husband died in 1957, I was shattered by my loss and, for a time, felt half dead with grief myself. But I found that taking positive action to cope with problems one by one was therapeutic and good for the renewal of courage.
I must not only keep alive but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken.
I thought that if I was going to survive the Cultural Revolution, I must discipline myself with physical and mental exercise.
I devised a series of exercises that moved every part of my body from my head to my toes and did them twice a day. I had always found physical work soothing for frayed nerves.
For mental exercise, I first tried to memorize some of Mao's essays which I thought would enable me better to understand his mentality and to use his quotations more fluently when I had to face an interrogator again.
I turned to the T'ang dynasty poetry I had learned as a schoolgirl. It really amazed me that I was able to dig out verses from the deep recesses of my brain that had lain dormant for decades. Trying to remember poems I thought I had forgotten was a joyful occupation. Whenever I managed to piece together a whole poem, I felt a sense of happy accomplishment. The immortal words of the great Tang poets not only helped to improve my memory but also transported me from the grim reality of the prison cell to a world of beauty and freedom.
There were still moments when I was so burdened with hunger and misery that I was tempted to let go my tenuous grip on the lifeline of survival. At those times, I had to depend on conflict with the guards to stimulate my fighting spirit.
Whenever deep depression overwhelmed me to the extent that I could no longer sleep or swallow food, I would intentionally seek an encounter with the guards.
I believed that what I needed was human contact; even encounters with the guards were better than complete isolations. Besides, fighting was a positive action much more encouraging to the human spirit than merely enduring hardship with patience, known as a virtue of the Chinese race. Many of my friends and acquaintances survived their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution by this virtue. But for me, only the positive stimulant of fighting buoyed up my spirits.
The best way for me to snap out of fear was always to take the initiative in doing something positive. Even the simple act of just moving my body around made me feel better immediately. If I had just sat there feeling dejected and let my imagination run wild, I could easily have become terribly confused and unable to cope with the guards.
Many people, including seasoned party members, made ritual confession with the party or to lessen their immediate suffering by submission. Many others became mentally confused under pressure and made false confessions because they have lost control. When a political campaign ended, some of them were rehabilitated. Many were not. Many innocent men and women were serving harsh sentences simply because they had made false confession of guilt. It seemed to me that making a false confession of guilt when I was innocent was a foolish thing to do. The more logical and intelligent course was to face persecution no matter what I might have to endure.
It came to an end as everything in life must do, no matter how wonderful or unpleasant.
Sharp Analyses
The emotion my first experience of a "struggle meeting" generated in me was one of disgust and shame that such an act of barbarism against a fellow human being could have taken place in my beloved native land, with a history of five thousand years of civilization. As a Chinese, I felt degraded.
The classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society, where a man could move from the lower to the upper class by his own effort.
One of the advantages enjoyed by a democratic government which allows freedom of speech is that the government knows exactly who supports it and who is against it, while a totalitarian government knows nothing of what the people really think.
Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal that is in each of us. If I were young and had belonged to a working-class background; if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infallible, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?
I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate.
Those who seized power would invariably become the ruling class. They would have the power to control the people's lives and bend the people's will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the State, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew the Party leaders lived in a spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers.
"A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is bornof a phoenix and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the floor." I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be coined based entirely on the importance of genetics.
The Chinese had long ago learned that the only way to read the newspaper was to read between the lines and pay attention to the omissions as well as the printed items. In fact, the real source of news for the Chinese people was not the newspaper at all, but political gossip passed from one person to another in low wispers, often in the language of symbols and sighs with no name mentioned. This was called "footpath news", meaning that the news did not come openly through the main road.
Although Mao was a hateful dictator who had killed millions of Chinese people and imprisoned more with his political campaigns and had several times brought the nation's economy to the brink of ruin with his disastrous economic policy, I had to concede that he was a brilliant strategist in guerrilla warfare. While his essays on Marxist principles were often half-baked, his essay on guerrilla warfare was, I thought, a masterpiece of clear thinking based on the experience of communist army.
Personal relations always were important to the Chinese in a tradition that dated back thousands of years. The communists were no exception. When a communist leader fell from grace, all those who had ever worked with him would be disgraced, no matter how remote the connection.
The Maoist confused the concept of nation, which means "people having common descent", with State, which means "an organized political community under one government".
One of the ugliest aspects of life in communist China during the Mao Tze-tung era was the demand by the Party that people inform against each other in peace time and denounce each other during political campaign. This practice had a profoundly destructive effect on human relationships. Husbands and wives became guarded with each other and parents were alienated from their children. This practice inhibited all forms of human contact, so that people no longer wanted to have friends. It also encouraged secretiveness and hypocrisy.
The Communist government controls goods, services and opportunities and dispenses them to the people in unequal proportions. The term "internal" was used for goods and services available to officials of certain rank and a few outsiders on whom for one reason or another government wished to bestow favor. I have heard the term "internal" used to describe goods and services reserved for the very senior officials, especially in the military who seemed to get the first choice and a lion's share of everything. Though the salary of a member of the Politburo was no more than eight or ten times that of an industrial worker, the goods and services available to him and his family without charge was comparable to those enjoyed by kings and presidents of other lands. And the privileges were extended to their families, including their grandchildren even after their death.
"Socialism in Chinese style" is in fact a phrase coined to save the face of the Chinese Communist leaders who do not have the courage to acknowledge openly that socialism has failed in China.
Constant change is an integral part of the Communist philosophy. The Chinese leaders expect people to rush headlong into whatever experiment they wish to carry out, whether it be liberation or collectivization. For the whole thirty-six years of Communist rule, the Party’s policy has swung like a pendulum from left to right and back again without stop. However, Communist China today is different in one important aspect. She is no longer isolated and ostracized from civilized international society.
China is now much more conscious of her image in the eyes of the world and is anxious to project a good one.
Epilogue
In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote: “There are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself”. Nien Cheng did it. Her story exalts the triumph of the human spirit over mindless inhumanity.