“Once outside [of prison] she learned that her only child, Meiping, an actress with the Shanghai Film Studio, was dead. The official explanation was suicide, but Mrs. Cheng learned that her daughter had been murdered by the Red Guards for refusing to denounce her mother as a class enemy.
“In 1987, after emigrating to Canada and then the United States, Mrs. Cheng published her memoir, which began, memorably, with the sentence, ‘The past is forever with me, and I remember it all.’ ”
—William Grimes, “Nien Cheng, Memoirist, Is Dead at 94,” New York Times, November 6, 2009
