Australia – ABC News, Sept. 05, 2026
Cheng Lei no longer needs to make roses out of toilet paper to add a hint of beauty to the repressive darkness of the Chinese prison system.
She’s free and finding beauty everywhere: dangling from a parachute above Victoria’s Yarra Valley, playing soccer or starring in her own play about the 1,154 days she was wrongfully imprisoned for supplying state secrets overseas.
But as Lei embraces her credo to “live urgently” after the horror of detention, the television journalist understands that she will never fully escape the impact of those lost three years.
“Life after freedom is not all roses,” Lei, who was released in October 2023, tells Australian Story. “In some cases, it feels like the sentence continues after release.”
How those years affected her relationship with her children, Ava and Alex, just 11 and nine when she was arrested, hurts the most.
“I’m full of anguish about the time that was taken away when they needed me or wanted me to be there and I couldn’t,” Lei, 51, says.
“But,” she adds, choking back tears, “I see feeling grief and heartbreak as something lucky as well because the alternative is the tomb, is prison, is feeling nothing.”
Meeting room bombshell
For almost 20 years, Lei chronicled the economic rise and “opening up” of China, her country of birth, which she left aged 10 to settle in Melbourne with her parents.
Any thoughts of studying journalism were quashed by her father, who said, “You’re not blonde, you’re not pretty … and commerce will be much more employable.”
