Life and Death in Shanghai (1986)

Life and Death in Shanghai is a very interesting memoir, capturing a critical time in China's history. Cheng's intimate participation in the Cultural Revolution comes with its own limitations, of course, but also gives a unique perspective.

It's 1966, and the Cultural Revolution is intensifying across China. The wealthy widow of a Kuomintang official, former worker for Shell Oil in Shanghai and frequent overseas traveler, Nien Cheng stands out for all the wrong reasons, and it isn't long until the Red Guards are knocking at her door.

What follows is an incredible story of deprivation and injustice - all the more incredible for being so common at the time. Cheng shares with us her incarceration, and much else, over the many years of Cultural Revolution.

As a Westerner looking back some forty-odd years into the past, I can't help but marvel at the collective insanity of the Revolution. Cheng captures its meaningless banality, empty slogans and hopeless denunciations, but also how the Revolution, and communism in general warped the mindset of Chinese at the time.

Her retrospective analysis, and the crude Sinology she is forced to engage in - a stumbling attempt to ascertain what is going on in the CCP at the time - mirrors what so many were doing.

There's nothing especially clever about Life and Death in Shanghai - it's not that kind of book. Rather it is a no-holds-barred testament. A powerful, strident voice shouting out the truth.

And yet, Cheng's decades of having to guard her thoughts is not so easily shaken it seems. Fiercely anti-Communist, there is nonetheless a feeling of careful construction to the memoir. She recalls so much, so perfectly, and her thoughts are always so... right. As a character she is faultless.

But I was left with a feeling that part of Cheng's survival came at the expensive of a certain type of self-reflection or even self-knowledge. This manifests most obviously in her (seeming) complete unawareness of either her incipient danger, or - for a woman with tens of thousands of dollars in domestic and overseas bank accounts; three servants; a house to herself filled with precious art and ceramic - curious inability to see herself as the Party (rightly, in this one case) saw her: a bourgeois member of the elite.

In some ways, this second layer - not Cheng as rebel, but Cheng as Chinese, and Cheng as representative of former elite - deepens the book considerably, adding a far more allusive and ambiguous set of questions the reader can ask. The answers, of course, are not supplied - at least not on the surface - but I wouldn't be surprised if the book ignites a hunger for more 20th Century Chinese history in anyone who reads it. Just this one voice is so compelling, and there are millions more. ( )

When I first went to teach English in China, I brought with me lots of books written in English. I was down to my last one and it was Frankenstein. I kept it. While there, I read it three times (because I had nothing else to read). I found this book at a garage sale and have read it twice, even though I have many books on my shelves. Teaching English in China changed my life. This book changed me as well. Reading it I felt as if I knew Cheng Tai Tai. I recently Googled her and found that she was living here in the US and would accept visitors who just showed up on her doorstep. I also read that she had passed away only recently. I have such regret that I didn't search her out sooner. I would have loved to sit and have a cup of tea and her her speak of China prior to the Cultural Revolution. I often tell my American students (I am American) that they are "tai pang, tai lan" (too fat and too lazy) and that they should read to understand how easy they have life here. This book is but one of the reasons I will retire in my "adopted" homeland of China.

Dr. Michael Cubbin
www.speakenglishwithme.org

What a fantastic book of true stories! This book is a summary of NPR's National Story Project, which brought together books from all over the nation. Something to read from every part of life's full range of emotion and drama!Available at Teton County Library on CDBook, call number CD Book 973.921 I ( )

hard to read because her time in jail was so demoralizing. inspiring because her old age was so traumatic- death of her only child, emigration. very good story of china at that time. ( )

I thought the late 60s in the US were a time of radical change, but they're nothing compared to how Mao's Red Guards turned China upside down. I live in Shanghai where this memoir took place. Surprisinly, there's very little local history preserved. No walking tours, nothing much in the Shanghai Museum. While reading I wanted to run out and find her former house and the prison where she spent six years. No luck yet finding them. The author does a great job of blending her personal narrative with enough background history lessons that when you're done reading her story you come away with a much deeper understanding of why and how thousands of Chinese were persected. But for me, I have more questions about Communism than ever before. What Mao preached as class struggle and a new revolution was just the usual dictatorship diatribe. Maybe after reading up on it and comparing the Chinese revolution with the Cuban revolution I'll understand Communism better.Read this book. ( )