During her confinement, she was pressured to make a false confession that she was a spy for "the imperialists" because for many years after her husband's death she had continued to work as a senior partner for Shell in Shanghai.

When released from jail in 1973, Cheng found that her daughter Meiping, who had been studying to become a film actress, had been murdered by the Red Guards, although the official position was that she had committed suicide.

The alleged killer of Meiping, a rebel worker named Hu Yongnian, was arrested and given a suspended death sentence by Shanghai authorities in 1980, but was eventually paroled in 1995.

Coetzee said the memoir provided "fascinating insights into thought reform in Mao's China" and that it tells "an absorbing story of resourcefulness and courage, spoiled only by a touch of self-righteousness: Mrs. Cheng is always right, her persecutors always wrong.

Even in English, the keenness of her thought and expression is such that it constitutes some form of martial art, enabling her time and again to absorb the force of her interrogators’ logic and turn it to her own advantage.”[9] In a 1987 review for The Washington Post, Stanley Karnow wrote: "It is, on one level, a gripping, poignant chronicle of her courage, fortitude and, above all, stubborn integrity during more than six years of cold, hunger, disease, terror and humiliation in a Shanghai jail.