Nien Cheng
1 book analyzed
Biography
Nien Cheng was born Yao Nien-yuan on January 28, 1915, in Beijing, to a Qing-dynasty gentry family that had adapted to the Republican era. She was educated at Yenching University (later absorbed into Peking University) and then at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master’s degree in economics — unusual for a Chinese woman of her generation. In London she met Kang-chi Cheng, a Chinese diplomat at the Republican embassy who would later join the Shell Oil Company. They married and returned to China in the late 1930s. Kang-chi Cheng became Shell’s general manager for China, based in Shanghai. The couple had one daughter, Meiping, born in 1942 or 1943. Kang-chi Cheng died of cancer in 1957. Nien Cheng continued as an adviser to Shell in Shanghai until all foreign firms were expelled in 1966. She was arrested in September 1966 at the age of 51 and held at the Number One Detention House until March 1973 — six and a half years, most of them in solitary confinement. Her daughter Meiping had been beaten to death by Red Guards at the Shanghai Film Studio in June 1967; Cheng learned of this in 1972. She was permitted to emigrate in 1980, traveled through Hong Kong to Ottawa to Washington, D.C., and became a US citizen in 1988. She wrote Life and Death in Shanghai between 1983 and 1986; Grove Press published it in 1987. She died in Washington on November 2, 2009, aged 94.