id="u0255a9e6-9d5a-528a-8621-2636990f600e">
Life and Death in Shanghai
Nien Cheng
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 1995 an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1986
Copyright © Nien Cheng 1986
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Nien Cheng asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006548614
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375615 Version: 2018-11-07
To Meiping
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 2 Interval before the Storm
CHAPTER 5 Solitary Confinement
CHAPTER 7 The January Revolution and Military Control
CHAPTER 9 Persecution Continued
CHAPTER 10 My Brother’s Confession
PART III My Struggle for Justice
CHAPTER 14 The Search for the Truth
CHAPTER 15 A Student Who Was Different
CHAPTER 18 Farewell to Shanghai
THE PAST IS FOREVER with me and I remember it all. I now move back in time and space to a hot summer’s night in July 1966, to the study of my old home in Shanghai. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom, the servants had gone to their quarters, and I was alone in my study. I hear again the slow whirling of the ceiling fan overhead; I see the white carnations drooping in the heat in the white Chien Lung vase on my desk. In front of my eyes were the bookshelves lining the walls filled with English and Chinese tides. The shaded reading lamp left half the room in shadows, but the gleam of silk brocade of the red cushions on the white sofa stood out vividly.
An English friend, a frequent visitor to my home in Shanghai, once called it ‘an oasis of comfort and elegance in the midst of the city’s drabness’. Indeed, my house was not a mansion, and by western standards, it was modest. But I had spent time and thought to make it a home and a haven for my daughter and myself so that we could continue to enjoy good taste while the rest of the city was being taken over by proletarian realism.
Not many private people in Shanghai lived as we did, seventeen years after the Communist Party took over China. In the city of ten million, perhaps only a dozen or so families managed to preserve their old lifestyle: maintaining their original homes and employing a staff of servants. The Party did not decree how the people should live. In fact, in 1949, when the Communist Army entered Shanghai, we were forbidden to discharge our domestic staff to aggravate the unemployment problem. But the political campaigns that periodically convulsed