Customer Reviews

Life and Death in Shanghai

5 star:		(103)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I never thought that I could love a true account of tragedy, suffering, and grave injustice, but I have to admit that I love "Life and Death in Shanghai". I don't mean that I read this book for entertainment or recommend it to everybody. Like some of the works of Solzhenitsyn or Elie Weisel, the subject of Nien Cheng's book is real, painful, and sometimes very difficult to read. Yet I find myself constantly rereading "Life and Death in Shanghai" and it is one of the few books I refuse to part with. How can this be?

Nien Cheng writes of personal loss, suffering, and injustice with unusually lucid and mature prose. She is impressive as story teller, an historian, but most of all as a writer. One of the most effective qualities of Nien Cheng's writing is the remarkable restraint she employs when describing unfair and frankly inhumane actions perpetrated against her and her family. She describes her arrest, captivity, and daily efforts to challenge her tormentors with cool objectivity.

One of the most impressive parts of the book is the account of how Nien Cheng studied Chairman Mao's collected works in prison. Despite the fact that Mao's policies had personally harmed her and were tearing China apart, she studied his works in earnest and evaluated them objectively. She concluded that Mao was a brilliant guerrilla warfare strategist but that he was only capable of destruction, not creativity.

Nien Cheng enhances her personal narrative by describing relevant Chinese historical events. As a result, the reader acquires a sense of context and is better able to understand why certain things happen to her. For example, Nien Cheng is repeatedly persecuted for her alleged support of Liu Xiaoqi. During one of her interrogations she is bold enough to declare that his policies, as elucidated by her jailers, sound perfectly sensible. Then after years in captivity, she is suddenly treated with more kindness and praised for her positive remarks about Liu Xiaoqi. Nien Cheng explains to the reader that during this time, political tidings had turned against the radical Gang of Four and that moderate factions in the Chinese Communist Party had rehabilitated Liu Xiaoqi.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in modern Chinese history, in survival and triumph, or to anyone who enjoys encountering the English language at its best. My deep respect and appreciation go out to Nien Cheng.

There is now an almost overwhelming amount of personal accounts of life during Mao's Cultural Revolution. The tales of atrocities and abuses are many, but this is a particularly extraordinary memoir, in my opinion the best of the lot.

Nien Cheng suffered enormously, and her book recounts her persecution in amazing detail. She had more than 6 years to recall every degrading and unjust incident, and it is remarkably all here. Yet it is never for a moment boring or tedious. She writes beautifully and appreciatively of the tasty snack her cook gave her the day she went to be screamed at by an auditorium full of Red Guards. It is this extraordinary attention to simple goodness and the author's triumphant but humble survival that sets this book apart.

Someone said to me, "oh, I could never buy that book. I couldn't stand the pain." My friend was mistaken. Nien Cheng's book is about pain, but not defeat. To be sure, it is about the hellish consequences of a society gone mad, but her own clear conscience reigns supreme.

It is a quite beautiful story of the triumph of the human spirit. Outstanding.

In 1986, when I first read this novel, I was 16. I was mesmerized by it. TIME Magazine had printed an excerpt of the novel and after reading the excerpt, I bought the book. Today, in 2000, it's been almost 14 years later and I can still remember the content of this powerful novel. I think it is amazingly well written, very detailed, historically correct and extremely moving. The insights you gain about life during the Cultural Revolution give you a light into that dark age of chaos and pain. Today, when I watch movies, read books or hear about other people's stories, I still find myself reflecting back to Nien Cheng's novel. Nien Cheng is extremely courageous and is built of the fiber of the "old" Chinese ways. There is a lot of sadness on her tale as well about how a nation tried to denounce itself and forget about its past. This book is a MUST READ if you have any ounce of interest in Chinese people, their history or their culture. It's also a MUST READ if you are a Chinese for it'd allow you an insight into yourself and your land of origin, China. Be prepared to realize that after you've read this book, you're going to be a different person.

After I arrived in the US in 1994, a friend lent me a copy of "Life and Death in Shanghai". I cried many times while reading it. It brought back my miserable childhood and the humiliation and suffering I and my family had experienced in China. It was then that the idea was born to share my story about how a little class enemy became a world citizen and my book "Flying High out of a Tibetan Valley" came into being. Thank you, Nien Cheng.

I grew up in an isolated Tibetan town in western Sichuan Province. At the age of 12, I witnessed a "struggle meeting" in which my parents were denounced as enemies of the state and repeatedly beaten. Soon both my parents were jailed and I had to live on my own. During high school and in the countryside as an Educated Youth, I was often chastised and shunned, not only for my family background, but also for my unusual ambition to become a writer and translator and to fly high out of a Tibetan valley as a world citizen.

Nien Cheng suffered unthinkable persecution as an adult during the ten years of madness, while I suffered oppression as a child. So I wrote of the Cultural Revolution from a child's point of view. Nien Cheng came from Shanghai, the biggest city in China, while I came from an isolated Tibetan valley. As you read such personnal stories you will get a better understanding of what Chinese children and adults went through during Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Thanks to Nien Cheng, Americans can know what Life and Death under a dictatorship is like.

Recommended by the local librarian because I was studying the history of Mao's China, this book was a detailed (ok,maybe too detailed!) story of one person who survived the "Cultural Revolution". It does get a little weary in discussion of Nien's time in prison, but it also gives a fantastic description of times in China under Mao. It is also acknowledgement of the tremendous spirit and stamina of some people when placed in horrendous conditions.
A true story, I thought it brought a lot to the table.
Recommended.

I had to read this book for a college history class, but I ended up loving it! I got so engrossed in it. Cheng gives such a powerful account of how life was under Mao Zedong and how so many innocent people suffered. I had no idea that all of that had gone on in China. Her novel was so interesting because she gave so many details that could only have come from a person who lived through it.

When I read this book, I was amazed at what Communism did to China. I am originally from Ukraine. I left a year after the USSR fell appart. I was too young to really know what the effects of Communism had on my family. After reading this Life And Death, I started to understand so much better why my parents hated it so much. Communism really seems to ruin a lot of peoples lives and even after the communist party falls, instead of everything getting better, it becomes even more chaotic. I commend Nien Cheng for surviving her ordeal and not giving up with her life even after she knew that her daughter died. She is an example to all man kind.

Life and death in Shanghai is a terrific and very well written true story.Nien Cheng is truely one of the most courageous individuals I have ever read about.During China's cultural revolution when Mao Tze-tung was slowly losing his contral over the people his wife silently formed the red guards(made mostly of peasants and students)to prosecute Mao's enemies.Thousands of innocent people were imprisoned,tortured and murdered.As I read this book I found it hard to believe that so many people could be so violent and crazy.They were so brainwashed by the "cult of Mao"they couldn't think for themselves.Life and death in Shanghai starts with Nien Cheng being accused of being a British spy simply because she worked for Shell and her "background" was not in line with the Maoist.She was locked in solitary confinement for six and a half years.In jail she was beaten,humiliated,not given enough food and subject to a kind of torture that almost made her lose complete feeling in her hands.What makes this book stand out from other stories about the cultural revolution is that Nien Cheng never "confessed" her crime.When thousands of people of people were making false confessions under torure she refused.Even when it meant more suffering and jail time.The saddest thing about this book is when Nien is finally released from prison she learns her only daughter was beatened to death by red guards,because she would not denounce her mother.I felt like her struggle for justice was in vain,but as I read on I realized what a brave and extraordinary women she was. I recommend this book for to people who are interested in reading what it was like in prison during the cultural revolution.I also think readers who like books about ordinary women in terrible situations(like Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter)should read this book. I also recommend Jung Chang's Wild Swans which is more of an extended story of the cultural revolution and China.

One reviewer was disappointed that this book was depressing. But I don't know how you would expect it not to sometimes be depressing. After all, it documents the survival of a woman who was targeted by the government that killed more people than any government in the history of the world.

However, it is also a remarkable story of survival and an interesting study of the behavior of people during a time of terrifying political upheaval. The author was remarkably clever and resilient in her responses to abysmal situations. I am not particularly confident that I would have made it under similar circumstances.

Nien Chang's account of her encounter with the Cultural Revolution is the best book of this kind that I recall. Many others have written about their experiences, some in memoir form, others in fictionalized form. NC's is the most accessible to the Western reader, she can relate to our expectations better than some of the others, and she writes more specifically for a Western audience. Her personal background made that easier for her than for many others, she had this working history with a large foreign corporation (no product placements in my reviews!).
The sad fact is that the subject interests non-Chinese or 'Overseas Chinese' substantially more than the population of the People's Republic. Books like NC's are often talked down because they are successfull in the West. That fact seems to be a negative mark. This applies also to Jun Chang's Wild Swans, while her later bio of the great helmsman is taboo.
The desire to forget about the past is so overwhelming, that many shut their eyes and minds to the recent past. (Actually not that recent any more.) With this strong wish to close the chapter, and in a situation of overwhelming success and progress for the country as a whole, the ruling elites find it very easy to put the Cultural Revolution into a kind of frozen state of taboo: it is not denied, but it is not visited with the purpose of understanding and digesting it. The man who provoked it is sacrosanct, he can not be touched by criticism. The negative things are assigned to others, like the Gang of Four.
(Who was it who wrote here recently that history does not change?)