Opera Singer. A mezzo soprano who performed in a number of the world's leading venues, she shall be remembered for her tenure with the San Francisco Opera. Raised within the closed society of Communist China, she learned to sing by imitating songs she heard on the radio and initially had ambitions of becoming a pop artist. Zheng trained at the Shanghai Conservatory then in 1988 made her way to Washington, DC, where she spent a year at American University. Moving on to Philadelphia, she earned a degree at the Curtis Institute, then following her relocation to San Francisco studied as an Adler Fellow and in 1995 made her operatic bow as Siebel from Gounod's "Faust". Over the next 13 years she was kept busy, her signature pieces probably being "Cherubino" from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" and Cio Cio San's maid Suzuki in Puccini's "Madame Butterfly". Though making her home in San Francisco where she assumed 16 different roles, Zheng was also heard at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Washington National Opera, and elsewhere, her characters including, in addition to Suzuki and Cherubino, Idamante from Mozart's "Idomeneo", Rosina of Rossini's "The Barber of Saville", Baba the Turk in Igor Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress", Sesto in Handel's "Giulio Cesare", and Zerlina from Mozart's "Don Giovanni". A busy recitalist, she performed with symphonic ensembles in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and Warsaw, and also toured China and Japan. For a number of years Zheng maintained a romance with Troy Donahue whom she had met while entertaining on a cruise ship, a relationship that continued until the onetime teen idol's 2001 death; in 2008 she was Ruth Young Kamen in the San Francisco world premiere of Stewart Wallace's "The Bonesetter's Daughter", a work based on a novel by Zheng's friend Amy Tan. The performances were to be her last on the operatic stage as she was shortly thereafter diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, though aggressive treatment resulted in a temporary remission and enabled her to marry Dr. David Larson in 2010 and to make a few concert appearances. Shortly prior to her death from advanced malignancy the Merola Opera Program established a scholarship in her name; at her demise she could be heard on a recording of Gustav Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" cut with the China Philharmonic and on a complete preservation of Jake Heggie's song cycle "Deepest Desire on Flesh and Stone".