MEMOIR
Cheng Lei: A memoir of freedom
Harper Collins, $35.99
Not that it’s anyone’s Plan A, but if you had to be locked up in Beijing you could do worse than having Cheng Lei as a cellmate. She’d be good company, if her memoir recounting her three years at the mercy of China’s justice system is anything to go by. And she can fashion a birthday cake out of buns and some leftover snacks.
Her creativity and resilience in the face of adversity are admirable, but the tragedy of Cheng’s three years in detention is that she should never have endured them.
The Chinese-Australian TV presenter’s crime, as she describes it, was texting the government’s economic growth targets to a friend at another news organisation seven minutes before an embargo she was oblivious to. That the premier did not set a growth target was the news, an understandable choice given the COVID-19 pandemic but a break from decades of precedent. Eight words were sent at 7.23am, from the host of a business program on the state-run CGTN network to a reporter for the Bloomberg newswire. It hardly seems a sackable offence, let alone a capital one.
In the hands of the Ministry of State Security, it was twisted into an espionage case; any and all of Cheng’s contacts with business figures, diplomats and politicians were trawled through to find anything remotely incriminating. It was all a pretext: the ministry had her and others under surveillance shortly after the Australian government demanded an independent inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the outside, we knew more was going on; trade restrictions on Australian exports, journalists expelled from the country. Now we have Cheng’s view from the inside.
Sky News presenter Cheng Lei in Melbourne.Credit: Elke Meitzel
“This is not hostage diplomacy,” one of Cheng’s interrogators tells her early on with a smirk, confirmation served in the form of a denial. Only later did Cheng come to realise her part in a game of “human chess” where people are locked up for diplomatic gain.
Cheng’s memoir peels away like an onion of oblivion, as each chapter explores how she was so wronged for so long. She was kept in the dark about her case, coerced into accepting a prison term and mistreated in myriad ways from blunt to subtle.
Through it all, Cheng managed to keep her humanity and strength intact, found unlikely friends and allies, and thought desperately of her children, partner, parents and the diplomats who worked to free her.
The memoir’s strength lies in its detail and the unflinching exploration of her detention and its effect on her and her family. Cheng comes across as honest about everything from interrogation sessions to bathroom rituals, and while she is at times graphic, it never feels gratuitous.
The small morsels of creativity made the fleeting freedom she was able to find within her confines so much sweeter; defying the rules against singing, knocking coded messages through the walls and receiving poetry from other detainees, surreptitiously masturbating despite the guards’ watchful eyes.
While enduring what Cheng called The Truman Show meets Groundhog Day meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, her captors could not stop her from imagining she was deep undercover on a long investigative assignment. “What an exclusive. What a price to pay for it.”
Just as Cheng never flinches, she is too good a storyteller to ramble or descend into a diatribe. Any seething feelings simmer on the page without boiling into rage, and she leans on her optimism and determination to deliver a cathartic conclusion.
If anything is wanting, it is perhaps a deeper exploration of the context surrounding her arrest and its consequences. The bigger picture takes a back seat to the day-to-day survival and the more immediate concerns of returning to the safety of family.
This is a quibble: you could fill several bookcases with tomes exploring China’s place in the 21st century. Cheng tells a story few can, and one that should never be repeated.
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