Nien Cheng is 72 years old, and she likes to drive.

When she left mainland China in 1980, she had one suitcase and US$20. When she moved from Canada to the U.S. in 1983, she had six suitcases and drove the 600 miles to her new home herself.

When she was young, the wife of a diplomat in Australia, she used to drive around giving speeches in support of the war against Japan. Her friends tell her not to drive any more now because of her age, but she insists, because "being without a car in the U.S. is like being without legs."

She lives in an elegant apartment in Washington, D.C., takes classes at a nearby university, regularly buys a season ticket to concerts at the Kennedy Center, and has what she calls "a bunch of old-lady friends." Eyes bright, radiating health and vigor, with adequate savings in the bank, Nien Cheng would seem enviably well-off in her old age. But also very alone.

She wasn't before. At least, she should still have her lovely, precious Meiping.

Meiping was her only daughter and her companion since she was widowed at 42. During the Cultural Revolution, because she had studied in England and had worked at a British firm, Nien Cheng was accused of being an "imperialist spy" and thrown into prison. The next year her daughter, for refusing to denounce her mother, was beaten to death and pushed off the ninth floor of a building to make her death look like suicide.

When Nien Cheng left prison after resolutely refusing to confess for six years, she could not believe that the survivor of this catastrophe was her sickly self and that it was her lively, cheerful daughter who had guiltlessly lost her young life.

This experience eventually became the recent American best-seller Life and Death in Shanghai. After the book was excerpted in two issues of Time magazine this June and widely reported in major American newspapers, Nien Cheng's regulated life changed. She began to accept numerous interviews and rushed from coast to coast to meet with readers. Her desk is piled with letters from readers around the world, including political prisoners in Yugoslavia and Iran who have gone through similar experiences.

There have been many books about the Cultural Revolution over the years, some of them even more tragic than hers; Nien Cheng ascribes the attention that Life and Death in Shanghai has received from Westerners as due to several reasons:

First, in Westerners' experience, the objects of political persecution are typically men, so some people have looked on her as the model of a woman who has been persecuted and relied on her own fortitude to survive. "They think I was very brave," she says.

Second, Nien Cheng has received letters from readers who wrote that her book "reads like a detective novel," that they couldn't put it down, and that they couldn't relax until they had seen her safely leave Shanghai. On this point, Nien Cheng thinks that—except that she doesn't like to preach—there is really no trick; the experience in itself was dramatic enough.

Besides this, her fluent, colloquial English must be another reason for the book's success. Nien Cheng says that she can't remember everything that was said at the time, but only the gist. When writing in English, she strove to translate freely into Western speech habits and thinking patterns to make the book more accessible. Furthermore, she rewrote the book five times in two years: the first three times to get her thoughts down and put them in order, the fourth time to revise the grammar, and the fifth time to abridge. She cut the book from 1,200 to 760 pages to make it read more tightly.

The success of Life and Death in Shanghai on The New York Times bestseller list indicates the degree to which Westerners were moved by it, but judging from the curiosity displayed by Western reporters toward her sufferings from torture, their experience of the book would seem somewhat different from the Chinese reader's. Nien Cheng would patiently answer their questions and show them her scars, but she also felt that these young Westerners who had grown up in a just, rational, and well-to-do society could not fully comprehend that it was not just a question of physical suffering.

"Rather than brave, it would be better to say I was angry." Nien Cheng says that she saw many, many women in prison who were tortured worse than she: "What did my little wounds mean? I was just angry that they wouldn't talk sense, and I had to argue it out." When she was released from prison in 1972, she refused to leave, insisting that her case be cleared.

"Only The Wall Street Journal specially mentioned the political analysis in my book," she says. In fact, she had always been interested in politics. When the Communists arrived in 1949, she studied Marxist theory, noting, "It's too bad they don't talk sense." Nien Cheng recalls that when her interrogator in prison asked her, "Why won't you come clean like the others?" she would answer, "I've done nothing wrong; why should I?" "If you aren't wrong," he said, "why are you, out of the ten million people in Shanghai, the one in jail?" Nien Cheng immediately countered, "If you put a cat in a dog kennel and blame it for not barking, is it the cat that's wrong or you?"

She left that anecdote out of her book. "Westerners would find it hard to appreciate the desperation behind the exchange," she explains.

People have said that her book is free of rage and rebuke. "I don't hate the Red Guards," she says. "They were only children. They were used and are to be pitied. As for myself, although I was imprisoned and scarred, there was no great damage to speak of. To be this healthy at 72 isn't too bad."

After two hours of conversation, Nien Cheng leans back in her sofa and shows a bit of fatigue. "The money and the property were just worldly burdens anyway, so what's the big deal? And my mind is much sharper than before. After that experience, my self-confidence and my knowledge of Communism are much deeper. But killing my daughter is something I can never forgive. If I ever tell anyone my feelings have subsided, it's an absolute lie!"

On the table next to her sofa is a photograph of Meiping standing in front of a painting and smiling brightly. In her brief, young life she had believed in Communism and followed it. Those who killed her must have been crazy!

When China went mad—this was Time magazine's cover headline. Why? Wasn't socialism full of ideals? And Chinese are so bright? What caused hundreds of millions of Chinese to go mad?

[Picture Caption]

Nien Cheng, at 72, radiates vigor and health.

Life and Death in Shanghai was reported on by Time magazine and has moved many readers to write letters.

Nien Cheng left Shanghai with only US$20 and a suitcase. These two jade cups were the only souvenirs she managed to save.

Nien Cheng was touched by this faded old photograph from her college days which we brought her from a classmate of hers we happened to meet in Houston.

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Chu's family.