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The young woman waiting to greet Nien Cheng outside the prison was not Meiping, as she still kept hoping, but her goddaughter Hean, the daughter of an old friend. Hean took Cheng to a small house where the released prisoner had been assigned two rooms on the second floor. But what had become of Meiping? Hean did not answer. Only when Cheng insisted did Hean tell her that Meiping had committed suicide on June 16, 1967, during Cheng's first year in prison. At least that was the official story -- that she had jumped from the ninth floor of the Shanghai Athletic Association building while being interrogated. Cheng refused to believe it. She went to the Athletic Association building and learned that it had been covered with scaffolding at the time of Meiping's interrogation; it would have been almost impossible for her to jump to her death. Cheng was determined to learn more, though friends warned her that she was under surveillance and in great danger. Police agents claiming to be Meiping's friends came to visit Cheng at odd hours and urged her to seek revenge. Suspecting a trap, she refused. Groups of schoolchildren suddenly began harassing her in the street, shouting, ''Spy! Imperialist spy!'' She narrowly escaped death when a mysterious bicyclist deliberately knocked her down in the path of an oncoming bus. Her health slowly improved, however. She did not have cancer but merely a hormonal disturbance. And she began to benefit from the changes in China's overall political situation. When Chou En-lai died in January 1976 the radicals were still in control, but on the night of April 5, during a festival when the Chinese traditionally visit their ancestors' graves to pay respects, a climactic event occurred. As huge crowds thronged Peking's Tiananmen Square to honor Chou with flowers, wreaths and poems, supporters of Jiang Qing sent in police and militia to disperse the mourners. ''Thousands were killed,'' writes Cheng, ''and tens of thousands wounded. Those found with poems were condemned as counterrevolutionaries and shot without trial. It took the cleaners of Peking two days to hose away the blood and remove everything including the corpses.'' In September 1976, Mao Tse-tung died and the ferocious Jiang Qing was arrested for conspiracy, along with the rest of the infamous ''Gang of Four,'' whose members had played such a pivotal role in prolonging the Cultural Revolution. Then began the glacial process of ''rehabilitation.'' Cheng petitioned the police to investigate the death of Meiping. But not until October 1978 did a committee of officials finally come to her house ''to apologize to you for the wrongful arrest and imprisonment you suffered.'' The police also unfroze her bank accounts and promised her retroactive interest, and when she declined to accept the interest, they said, ''You will have to accept. It's government policy.'' Her main goals now were to punish the murderers of her daughter and to get to the U.S., where two of her sisters had lived since the 1940s. At a key point in Chinese-U.S. trade talks, when China wanted to appear liberal-minded, Cheng seized the opportunity to apply for a passport -- and got it. She also received unofficial word that her daughter had been abducted and beaten to death by the Red Guards, who presumably were trying to force her to denounce her mother, and that the government had arrested the man considered guilty. Only after she left China did Cheng learn that the killer had been given a