Where the heart is

Barnet in north London is not a place you would ordinarily expect to find a former member of the Red Army, who worked for Xinhua news agency and once caught the eye of Chairman Mao Zedong. But as her memoir Black Country to Red China proves, little in Esther Cheo Ying's life has been ordinary or expected.

Now released in paperback, the book reads like a novel, but every part is true: from her birth in Shanghai to an unhappy childhood in England; from her extraordinary journey to the mainland in 1949 to her even more extraordinary return to England six years later.

Cheo, 77, is married to Lance Samson, a retired journalist whose own story is remarkable. A German Jew who escaped Hitler's Germany at 10, he met Cheo in East Berlin in the mid-1950s after she had fled the mainland with her two sons and then husband, Alan Winnington. But it was Samson who brought Cheo back to England. The couple moved to Devon where Cheo became a teacher.

Her story begins in London. Cheo's father, the wealthy son of a Chinese mandarin, was studying at the London School of Economics. Her mother was a chambermaid at the hotel where he lodged. They married in 1931, Cheo says, after her mother feigned a pregnancy, returning to Shanghai shortly thereafter. Cheo was born in January 1932; a sister followed the next year and a brother in 1936.

Her parents were unhappy long before the Sino-Japanese war forced Cheo's mother to flee to England. Evacuated from London to escape the blitz, Cheo was billeted in a succession of foster homes, ending up in Staffordshire where she spent a miserable childhood.

'I remember waiting to be placed with a family,' she says. 'I was the last one. I was dark, I didn't look English and I scowled. This woman arrived late. When she saw me she said, 'I can't take a blackie.''