Chinese-American · 1915–2009
Yao Nienyuan was born in Beijing to a prosperous family, studied at the London School of Economics, married a diplomat, and after her husband's death worked as an adviser to Shell in Shanghai. In 1966 Red Guards ransacked her house and she was arrested as a British spy and held in the No. 1 Detention House in Shanghai for six and a half years, most of it in solitary confinement, refusing throughout to sign a confession. Her daughter Meiping, an actress, was killed by Revolutionary Rebels in 1967, a death Nien Cheng was told was suicide and spent years disproving. She was released in 1973, left China in 1980, and settled in Washington. Life and Death in Shanghai, published in 1987 when she was seventy-two, became an international bestseller and the best known first-hand account of the Cultural Revolution in English. She wrote nothing else and died in Washington at ninety-four.