As a result of her father's job, Cheng moved frequently with her family during her youth to places around China, including Guilin, Chongqing, and Beiping.
Due to her engagements with politics and student movements, she became the first permanent director of the university's Asian American Studies Center since it was founded in 1969.
[1] Under Cheng, the center was run under socialist principles, with students and teachers rejecting hierarchical structures considered typical in capitalist America.
[2] Cheng took over her father's Taiwan-based paper, the Li pao (Chinese: 立報; pinyin: lì bào), in 1991 and continued to support leftist causes.
[2] In 2006, she founded Sifang pao (Chinese: 四方報; pinyin: sìfāng bào), a paper aimed at Vietnamese and Thai immigrants and migrant workers.