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."
But soon after returning to China in 2000 as a financial analyst, Lei became an intern for the English-language arm of the Chinese state broadcaster, CGTN. Three months later, she was hosting her own show.
In Beijing, she attended glamorous embassy parties, hosted top-level business forums and blasted out Cyndi Lauper's True Colours on karaoke nights.
Then, on August 13, 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, her boss called her into work.
She thought he wanted to discuss her proposal for a new show.
Instead, the room was filled with people, one of them a man with a badge who stood up and said, "We are now investigating you for supplying state secrets to overseas entities."
Lei assumed it was a terrible mistake. She thought she'd be out very soon.
'It's hell': Torture pushes Lei to the edge
Try to sit still in silence for 14 hours. Now imagine doing that while two guards are positioned 30 centimetres from your face, staring.
You need permission to go to the toilet or walk a few metres for exercise. You can't close your eyes until bedtime. The lights stay on.
This torture, which China calls Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, or RSDL, is what Lei endured for the first six months.
"It drives you to want to die," Lei says.
"I felt I was sitting in a sea of pain. I felt that I was an eating, shitting vegetable. I felt I wasn't a human anymore.
It's designed to break you, says Lei. To admit guilt. But for a long time she didn't know what crime the Chinese government believed she'd committed.
She's still not certain why she came to the attention of Chinese officials.
However, she learned at trial that surveillance of her started a few days after Australia's then-foreign minister, senator Marise Payne, called for an international inquiry into the origins and handling of the initial COVID outbreak in China's Wuhan.
Lei accused after sending eight-word text
Lei knew none of this when she was being interrogated in RSDL. Most of those interrogations occurred within the first month, combing over almost every element of her life.
One recurring subject was her work as a journalist at the opening of the National People's Congress earlier that year, and a document from that high-level event that was found on Lei's home office desk.
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It was the Premier's Work Report, which reviews China's past economic performance and sets targets for the year ahead.
Lei had texted eight words — "No growth target. GDP. 9 Min [million] jobs target" — to a friend who worked for the US-owned media company, Bloomberg.
The Chinese accused Lei of breaking an embargo by seven minutes, gifting Bloomberg a scoop. Lei says she was unaware of an embargo and that evidence to support that claim was manufactured afterwards.
But she saw no point protesting her innocence or protecting her reputation.
"I would do whatever it takes to get out of there as soon as I could," she says.
"Because," she says, crying, "if I could see my kids one day earlier, then it's worth it."
Just how Ava and Alex were faring tormented Lei. Earlier in the year, when life was normal, Lei had sent her children from a previous marriage to Melbourne for a short visit with her mother, Hua Lui, now divorced from Lei's father.
But COVID struck. Borders were closed and the children could not return to China, despite Lei's desperate attempts.
Then she was arrested.
When she was finally allowed a visit from Australian embassy officials, Lei told them: "My kids cannot live with my mum."
Lei loves her mother but Hua has a hoarding disorder.
Lei suggested the children go to Perth to live with her father, Dr Chu-yong Cheng. He declined, a decision which he now regrets.
Her former partner, Nick Coyle, who gave interviews advocating for Lei's release during her incarceration, suggested they go to boarding school in Brisbane where his family lives, but that was also rejected by Lei's father.
And so, Lei lived with the torment of wondering how her children were coping in a cluttered, messy house with their 75-year-old grandmother during COVID lockdowns.
Secret joys, small defiance
The early days of captivity were so distressing, Lei fantasised about banging her head on the floor tiles. It might not kill her, she reasoned, but she would "at least hurt myself to shut the voices of anguish in my head".
Following her confession, Lei was moved to detention, sharing a tiny cell with three other women. "It felt very warm," she says. "I really enjoyed having people to talk to."
Her cellmates could be catatonic and grumpy, with Lei dubbing one of them "psycho bitch", but at least she had company.
In secret, she made roses out of toilet paper, cider out of apples, a birthday cake out of steamed rolls. "Having something that was giving us secret joy and lifted us out of that dreadful place, all of that helped me," Lei says.
Her greatest secret joy was to give herself pleasure, even in RSDL where her hands had to be outside of the bed covers. She would concoct erotic scenarios and discreetly slip her doona between her legs.
"I masturbated in RSDL and in detention and it felt like a very quiet, very human form of defiance," she says. "[My captors] tried to inflict all this pain on me but I can still bring myself pleasure just using my mind."
Books were her lifeline, whether dictionaries, dry academic texts or poetry. A favourite genre was the prison memoir and one that she found especially relatable was The Uncaged Sky, sent to her by the author, Kylie Moore-Gilbert.
Kylie was a Melbourne academic who had been wrongfully imprisoned in Iran on allegations of espionage from 2018 to 2020.
Lei read Kylie's book to her cellmates, and, in the process, they learned the Farsi word for freedom — "azadi". It became their catchcry.
"[Kylie's] spirit, her ability to remain strong and defiant in that brutal system empowered me and my cellmates so much," Lei says.
Lei had steeled herself for a sentence of at least five years but efforts by the Australian government were not in vain. She was released after three years and two months.
In all that time, she had just one phone call with her children.
On October 11, 2023, Lei arrived at Melbourne Airport, and into the arms of Ava, Alex and her mother.
She was free.
Out of isolation and on to the stage
As Emma Valente, the director of Lei's play, 1,154 Days, puts it, the movie version of Lei's saga would end at that airport scene: a hug, some tears, and catharsis.
But reality is different. "After that hug, there are the three years that were missed," Emma says. "There are the kids that were … without their mum for heaps of important moments. And the grief and the trauma of that is going to last a long time."
Being free was a euphoric feeling, says Lei, but eventually, euphoria wears off and regular life takes hold.
Ava and Alex love having their mum back but now they're teenagers who are "sick of my prison stories" and don't always want to hang out with her. And their relationship with their grandmother, who has moved into a rented house with Lei and the kids, is "forever altered".
"I'm very saddened and angry about the fact that my kids are never going to be the same, had I not been taken," Lei says.
"I'm trying to do double, triple time making up for that lost time. And no matter how much I give, I feel like it's not enough."
Lei has found great support in Kylie. Along with Sean Turnell, an economist who was wrongly detained in Myanmar, they formed the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance and spearheaded a Senate inquiry.
Lei told the inquiry that while she was "extremely grateful" for Australia's efforts to get her released, her children suffered because her mother was unable to care for them properly without any support.
She urged better co-ordination between federal and state authorities to bridge such gaps.
Lei's friendships within the Chinese-Australian community have also been damaged. China painted her as a "greedy spy" and, Lei says, her Chinese friends in Melbourne are now too scared to be associated with her.
In 2024, when China's Premier Li Qiang visited Canberra, Lei was sent by her new employer, Sky News Australia, to cover the event.
Chinese diplomats caused a stir by standing in front of Lei, blocking her from the television cameras.
"That went all around the world," Lei says. "But China didn't really care because it's all about keeping the truth from their citizens."
Lei urges 'dig deeper' on China
Being Chinese-Australian is complicated, Lei says, and "I don't think there's anyone more conflicted than I am about what that means".
She had a front-row seat as China emerged as a global power, when it "seemed like the world and China were coming together".
But her first-hand knowledge of China's human rights abuses has cruelled that perspective.
"Now I know that China sees all of its citizens and all of its diaspora as potential enemies," Lei says. "And that the turn could be swift.
"What I try to do now in all of my talks, writings and social media is to let people understand … why they shouldn't take its projections of being a benign, benevolent state at face value, but to dig deeper."
Next month, Lei will be in China's spotlight again when her 2025 book, A Memoir of Freedom, is published in Mandarin.
"There is nothing the Chinese government fears more than its own people, even when they're overseas," Lei says. "I expect pushback. In what form, I don't know."
Almost three years on from her release, Lei is now more fearless than she's ever been.
There are struggles but "I don't want to give up on anything". She's tried scuba diving, skydiving, soccer, stand-up comedy and reliving her horrendous years in captivity on stage.
"I like to believe that as a result of what happened, I'm a better, fuller, more empathetic person whose passion for life has gone up even more," Lei says. "And my appreciation of freedom has expanded in so many ways, and that's something to be thankful for."
Watch the Australian Story "Time After Time" Monday 8pm (AEST) on ABCTV and ABC iview.
