Nien Cheng

By now, dozens of memoirs about the horrors inflicted during China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution line the bookcase of human evil, next to diaries from the Soviet Gulag and Holocaust concentration camps. But when Nien Cheng's harrowing Life and Death in Shanghai was published in 1986, the bamboo curtain was just lifting on the decade of madness that had seized the People's Republic beginning in the mid-1960s. Cheng was an improbable survivor of Chairman Mao's brutal campaign, a porcelain-boned diplomat's wife who spent the precommunist years swathed in silk. Yet as she recalled in her best-selling account, she would learn to "fight, whatever the price."

Arrested in 1966, Cheng spent more than six years in solitary confinement for refusing to confess to spying for British "running-dog imperialists." Among the evidence gathered for the false charge: her London education, collection of classical-music records and taste for marmalade. Stripped of her name, Prisoner 1806 lost her daughter--killed by Red Guards while Cheng was in jail--but never her resolve. Released in 1973, she eventually settled in Washington, where she died Nov. 2 at 94. Even after China embraced economic reforms and shed much of its communist rigor, Cheng never returned home. The country she loved had disappeared long ago.