Life and Death in Shanghai

During the opening months of China's Cultural Revolution, Red Guards ransacked the Shanghai home of Nien Cheng, a London-educated widow of an official in Chiang Kai-shek's government who worked for Shell. Accused of spying for the imperialists, she refused to make a false confession and spent more than six years in solitary confinement, enduring torture and deprivation. Her memoir recounts that imprisonment, her refusal to leave the detention house without an acknowledgment that she had been wronged, and her discovery that her daughter Meiping, whose death was officially called a suicide, had in fact been killed. Cheng wrote the account in exile in the United States, setting it aside many times because the memories were so painful.

Gunhee Park, co-founder of Populum, said it gave him a deeper perspective on life and made him more grateful for the present day.