Odyssey of love and her bond with China

By Jiang Wanjuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-06 15:02

The last time Russian-born Elizaveta Kishkina was with her Chinese husband Li Lisan was on June 21, 1967, at a gathering of Red Guards, where the couple were denounced as capitalist-roaders, counter-revolutionaries and foreign spies.

"Do take care of yourself," Kishkina still remembers the parting words of her husband, as they were led in different directions.

Elizaveta Kishkina at her home in Beijing. [China Daily]

Kishkina was locked up at Qincheng Prison, a place for holding high-ranking officials.

It was not until 1976 that she got confirmation from her daughter of what she had long feared: Li Lisan, the man she had married in Moscow and followed to Beijing, had died years earlier in the persecution of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

Today, after 62 years in China, people still ask why she didn't take her children back to the former Soviet Union immediately after she was set free in 1975.

She always offers the same response.

"It was history," she says. "We shouldn't lay the blame on history. It didn't change my affection for this land and its people."

Today, at 95, Kishkina is able to provide first-hand accounts of her life in Chinese society that stretches back to before the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949, her experience of learning Chinese in prison, and how she fell in love with a Chinese official while he was exiled in Moscow over allegations that were later recanted by officials in Beijing.

This and dozens of other unique stories are detailed in the recently published My Fateful Bond With China (Wode Zhongguo Yuanfen), a 411-page Chinese-language autobiography which is part tribute to her late husband and part tribute to China.

They got married and she moved with him to Beijing in 1946, three years before the founding of New China.

Kishkina, who now only uses her Chinese name Li Sha, still speaks about her husband like a smitten schoolgirl. She says she wrote the book to let every Chinese know about his life, his struggles and most importantly, his role in the creation of New China and his association with Mao Zedong.

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