Confessions of a Chinese Heroine: The Labor Camp Memoirs of Sr. Ying Mulan

Confessions of a Chinese Heroine presents the candid autobiography of Ying Mulan (born 1933), member of a famous Catholic family in Beijing, and uniquely mirrors the turbulent changes of Chinese society in the second half of the 20th century. At the age of 17 Ying Mulan was imprisoned for one year during her university studies in Shanghai because of an imprudent statement concerning the Korean War. Being blacklisted, she served as forced laborer in four different work units and labor camps from 1958 to 1980, until she finally managed to return to Beijing, where she began to work for a government organization which controls and directs the activities of the Catholic Church in China. In the labor camp in Shanxi Province she married Wang Jikun and gave birth to a daughter in 1972. Her husband died in 1990, and her daughter was independent by then. Thus at the age of 60 Ying Mulan decided to become a nun and joined the Josephine Sisters of Beijing Diocese. Sr. Ying actively participated in the many-layered revival of religious life in China since the 1980s. Her memoirs, written in 2019, look back at the sorrows and joys of a faithful and ambitious woman. Sister Ying frankly reveals many hidden details of life in China, including cruel incidents during the Cultural Revolution and insider information on the struggles of the Catholic Church within an atheist regime.