Nien Cheng first caught our attention last summer. Time featured excerpts from her book, Life and Death in Shanghai, as its cover story on the twentieth anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution, a time the entire nation “went mad.” In reading those excerpts, and later the book, we were moved not only by the resilience of this courageous woman, but by the quiet spirituality that sustained her through six years of solitary confinement, the death of her daughter, and expatriation to America.
Not surprisingly, the spiritual motif of Cheng’s life was largely ignored in all the “press talk” surrounding her best seller. But we felt it was a story that needed to be told.
So did Ellen Vaughn of Prison Fellowship. Impressed by the character who would not be broken by the fanatical Red Guard, Ellen contacted Cheng late last year, and followed that with the interview that begins on page 16.
“She was as I had imagined her,” Ellen recounted. “Very precise. Very warm. Very welcoming.”
Over almond shortbread cookies and tea, Cheng not only reviewed China’s past, but addressed China’s present and its impact on the future of the church there.
“She’s not content to coast,” Ellen said, referring to Cheng’s interest in current events. “She wants to understand what’s going on today.
“In that she is very young—always asking, always thinking.”
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