It’s been a week since Australian journalist Cheng Lei returned home to Melbourne after being detained in China for almost three years, and the 48-year old mother of two is trying to make up for “absent mummy” time.
In an interview with Sky News, Lei said she’s been adjusting back to her normal life, doing the school run and cooking new recipes.
Speaking with Sky News’ Washington Correspondent Annelise Nielsen, Lei recounted her emotional reunion with her children, 12 and 14, partner, and mother.
“My kids running at me, and my mum, who’s aged a lot in the last three years,” Lei said.
“And we all just screamed and my mum like wept and I just held onto her.”
“I could feel, I could see that she’d lost a lot of weight because of diabetes and having broken her ribs and just having to shoulder the burden mentally and physically, and just be strong for me all that time.”
Lei said that her family went to a Vietnamese restaurant for a celebratory meal before heading to the Queen Victoria Market.
Upon her arrival in Melbourne last week, Lei took to X to express her immediate relief at being released:
“Tight hugs, teary screams, holding my kids in the spring sunshine. Trees shimmy from the breeze. I can see the entirety of the sky now! Thank you Aussies.”
She admits that because of her ordeal in China, she still has fears.
“I keep expecting you know people to dropout of the sky and arrest me and maybe it’s something I need to get over.”
“Every time I look at the sky, I can’t believe… it’s 360 degrees, as opposed to just a little slip up the top of the cell.”
Lei praised the efforts of DFAT and particularly, Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
“I just can’t begin to thank them DFAT and the PM and the media and just ordinary people with heart,” she said.
“I was euphoric when I spoke to the embassy guys and just thanking them and wanting to sing because words really fail the amount of gratitude I feel for everyone who has believed me and supported me.”
“Penny Wong is amazing. I’d met her in 2014 at a dinner and she was really impressive so I passed on a message to her because I heard about the tweets that she was sending and all the heartfelt messages.”
“[She contacted] my family and reassured them and she actually wrote me a personal message back and it wasn’t just poly speak or you know standard stock phrases. I really felt that she was a friend who was trying to help me trying to look out for my best interests.”
Cheng revealed that she was detained in China and charged with “illegally providing China’s state security secrets abroad,” for breaking a story embargo by a few minutes.
“In China, that is a big sin,” Cheng said. “You have hurt the motherland. And the state authority has been eroded because of you.
“What seems innocuous to us here, and it’s not limited to embargos but many other things, are not in China.”
In August 2020, Cheng was working as a business reporter for China’s state-run English-language TV station, CGTN when she was called into a meeting by a senior official who told her she was wanted for “a very important meeting.”
“I went in thinking about work, and I get to this big meeting room, and about twenty people are there, and then someone stands up shows his badge and says you’re wanted for and immediately they take my belongings away.
Lei explained how she was escorted to her apartment.
“They’d already arranged with the security at my compound to go through the garage up to my apartment where they looked for evidence all day.”
“They tried to give me hints at the apartment as we were leaving, they said ‘turn off the power and water. Take some clothes. Take some toiletries.’ They said you sure you don’t want something to eat? So I made myself a homemade bread toasted sandwich with cheese and avocado. And those three things I ended up not having for over three years.”
Lei was taken to a Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) — a building that she said is meant to “make you feel isolated, and bored and pained and desperate.”
“They say that they gave me 15 minutes of fresh air, but all they meant was, there’s a window up the top that a guard would open for 15 minutes,” she said.
“But the curtains are still drawn while the windows are open. You never saw anything except the blue curtains, the … carpet and the beige padded walls. It was just silence.”
She was transferred to another prison, where she had a cellmate. There, she taught herself Italian, Spanish and Japanese and read the books her partner sent her.
“I built up a stash of over 200 books. And I used to think ‘wow, this is a book that Nick has lovingly chosen for me’ and has held in his hand,” she said.
“I would just caress the book and keep it close to me. And when there were wise words or encouraging words, I would feel that he had written them.”
For now, Lei is content in trying to ease her way back to being a mother to her children.
“Just this whole idea that I am now here for them and meeting my daughter’s teachers who were so sweet.”
“They had been praying for me and I even met one of the teacher’s dogs who my daughter had written about in her letters. Family letters are like medication and when you get them it’s a huge boost to the immune system.”