Red Guards raid Nien Cheng’s house on Taiyuan Road. Her Ming and Qing porcelain collection is smashed; her books, letters, and personal papers are seized. She is placed under house arrest in her own home as the Cultural Revolution’s first wave of domestic terror closes around her.

In September 1966, Cheng is moved to the Number One Detention House, a converted Ming temple in Shanghai. The interrogations begin. The regime demands that she confess to being a British spy operating under cover of Shell. She refuses. The refusal becomes the shape of her life.

Cheng spends years in near-total solitary confinement. She describes the discipline of mind she constructs to survive: rationed memory, recited poetry, the careful management of hope. The chapter is a sustained meditation on what the Chinese state was trying to do to her interior life — and what she did to prevent it.

In 1972, through a smuggled note, Cheng learns that her daughter Meiping has been dead for five years — beaten to death during a struggle session at the Shanghai Film Studio in June 1967. Her grief and her continuing refusal to confess now exist in the same body. The chapter is the memoir’s emotional center.

In March 1973 Cheng is released from the Number One Detention House. She refuses the regime’s inadequate acknowledgment of its “errors.” She begins the long investigation into Meiping’s death, conducted under continuing surveillance. Her post-release years in Shanghai are their own form of captivity.

In 1980 Cheng is finally permitted to leave China. She travels through Hong Kong to Ottawa and then to Washington, D.C. She becomes a United States citizen in 1988. The memoir closes with her reflections on exile, language, writing in English, and what the Cultural Revolution was, historically and morally.