Nien Cheng was born into a well-to-do Chinese family in 1915. Her family was able to give her a college education, including post-graduate work at the London School of economics. That’s where she met her future husband.
But the time she spent in Great Britain may have been a time bomb of sorts.
In 1966, at the age of 51, Nien Cheng, by then a widow, was arrested and accused by the Chinese Communist government of being a Britiah spy.
For nearly seven years Nien Cheng was imprisoned and sometimes tortured.
After her eventual release, she came to the United States.
In the late 1980s, she wrote a gripping Memoir of her experiences, called Life and Death in Shanghai.
And that’s when I first met her.
So here now, from 1987, Nien Cheng.
Nien Cheng died in 2009. She was 94.
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