Widow of a Nationalist diplomat, adviser to Shell in Shanghai
Nien Cheng (郑念), survivor of six and a half years of solitary confinement in Shanghai and author of Life and Death in Shanghai.
hirty or forty high school students came into her house. One of them knocked over a pot of jasmine.1
Her husband, a Nationalist diplomat, died of cancer in 1957. Shell kept her on in Shanghai as an adviser to management.
On 18 August 1966 she read that Mao had reviewed the first Red Guards in Beijing.
Then they came to her door. They were fifteen to twenty years old, led by three older people.
One held her Ming figure of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. He called it superstition and swung it in the air. She begged him to stop.
On 27 September 1966 they held a struggle meeting against her. That night she was taken to the Number One Detention House.
She was held there for exactly six and a half years.
When she came out, no one would tell her where her daughter Meiping was. Then she understood. Meiping was dead.
“I would like to know the circumstances of my daughter's death.”
Mao called it a revolution. In one house in Shanghai, it cost a mother her daughter.