Life and Death in Shanghai
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While the United States may be one of the youngest nations and cultures in the world and sometimes derided for its political pendulum swings, China is definitely one of the oldest. In its long, arduous history, it has had many political and cultural upheavals that surpass what the US has gone through in its brief 200 years. Because China has so often been a closed society, however, it is rare when one of her citizens has had a chance to document and discuss living through one of these periods in history. The Cultural Revolution that took place in China in the late 1960s and early 1970s is arguably the most tumultuous time in China's recent history, yet in Life and Death in Shanghai (1986), Nien Cheng documents not only her survival, but eventual triumph. This paper will briefly review and discuss the account she gives of her life in her autobiography, Life and Death in Shanghai.As the book opens, Nien Cheng discusses her life in Communist China before the Cultural Revolution. While she and her husband had been part of the "enemy class" (middle and upper classes, capitalists and landowners) and her husband had even been part of the Kuomintang government, they both wanted to live in an egalitarian society where all citizens would be clothed and fed. They, along with other intellectuals in Chinese society, believed that a communist society would help accomplish this momentous task, so they chose to remain behind
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nly be able to hold her own if she could "learn to speak Mao's language" (142). Further, Cheng found that when she was getting low in spirits, if she could goad the interrogators or guards into a good yelling argument, it seemed to dispel some her feelings of depression and gloom (205).
Over the six and a half years that Nien Cheng was imprisoned at No. 1 Detention House, she learned much about the methods of the interrogators. In order to catch her off guard, the interrogators would frequently call for her during or before meal times, the monthly laundry, exercise times, or other times during the day that would cause a hardship to her. Sometimes, they didn't even take her to the interrogators, and the guards would just ask her over and over again why she hadn't yet confessed her crimes (182-3). Other times they would randomly search through her cell for no other reason than to damage her meager goods and disrupt her life (188). It was also during this time that she stumbled upon two facts. One was that she was a victim of "dialectic materialism," where a major "class enemy" is declared unacceptable by the lesser factions and weeded out, only to be replaced by the next major "class enemy." The other was that Jiang Qing an
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1882
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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