Bestselling author Jung Chang’s life since she landed in London in 1978 has been a series of successes. The first woman from Communist China to earn a British doctorate, she’s been friends with Bernardo Bertolucci and Martin Amis, and was recently awarded a CBE. Nevertheless, she remains haunted by a Cultural Revolution adolescence that saw her parents tortured and imprisoned in re-education camps. Her first book, Wild Swans, a chronicle of the three generations of the women in her family, was riveting because it was personal. Fly, Wild Swans, its sequel, has a more explicitly ambitious agenda.
Chang never moves back to China, but she visits, and her memories travel with her. On an early trip to her home city of Chengdu, she stays at the Jinjiang, the “smartest hotel in town”, where her father was once imprisoned. The ninth floor, from which several inmates jumped to their deaths, has been converted into a bar. “I stepped onto the terrace where years back detainees had leaped over the rail to end their lives… I looked down at the faraway ground where I had stood hysterically yelling out ‘Papa’."
Although the Cultural Revolution was the most viscerally violent example of national erasing, Chang observes that China continues to delete itself, with skyscrapers and fancy restaurants.
The most propulsive, but also flawed, chapters of Fly, Wild Swans are dedicated to the writing and reception of Mao, The Unknown Story, which Chang co-authored with her husband, historian Jon Halliday. (Halliday, who grew up in Dundalk and learned Russian from Tolstoy’s great-nephew, is himself no stranger to revolution.) It was a 12-year project, during which Chang also battled breast cancer. She evokes the espionage-level thrill of chasing a story, and conveys the wrenching materiality of China: a hotel bathtub filled with rubble, the Empress Dowager’s great grand-nephew rubbing the phlegm he has spat onto the hotel carpet with his shoe. Her prose has a workmanlike candour, occasionally clumsy. Her bluntness can be funny, such as when she describes Lin Biao’s plane crash as a potential “super-hot potato”, or that Taiwan’s intelligence agency was known for “bumping off people”.
READ MORE
There’s also gossip and name-dropping. Chang, whose father was ranked highly before the Cultural Revolution, grew up in the same compound as Deng Xiaoping’s half sister, whom she calls Auntie Deng. Combined with her Wild Swans celebrity, Chang had access that was denied to journalists, politicians and China scholars. She talks to Mao’s daughter and Liu Shaoqi’s widow, Henry Kissinger and Mobutu Sese Seko. She also interviews anonymous sources, including a 93-year-old woman who claims that the battle at Luding Bridge never occurred.
[ Jung Chang : ‘I’m very wary about the role of written history’Opens in new window ]
Published in 2005, Mao: The Unknown Story was exactly the kind of text that got talked about. Broken into brief, catchy chapters, it brimmed with Chang’s impassioned excitement of obliterating a myth that she once believed. Chang writes: “Reviewers used words like ‘magnificent’, ‘stupendous’ and ‘a triumph’.” Plus, in changing the “rose-tinted image of Mao”, Chang also shifted her own persona, becoming a figure of political and intellectual significance. But while the book enjoyed popular acclaim, certain prominent China historians wondered whether “Mao” had oversimplified its subject. Although acknowledging the unprecedented nature of much of its research, they asked whether some of its claims could have been undermined by inaccurate scholarship.
Chang’s command of history can be careless. In Fly, Wild Swans, she claims that Sun Yat-Sen’s democratic, parliamentary government is a fact “generally unknown” and in her first book states, “It was only since 1945 that women could contemplate getting into a university,” whereas women students were admitted to Peking University in 1920. Moreover, her assertion that “Mao apologists… largely dominated academia in the West” seems absurd to anyone familiar with that field. To be hazy about facts is an unfortunate reminder of the history the Chairman himself manufactured to bolster his regime. The irony is that Chang shares some of the lineage of the propaganda she deplores.
The Chinese Communist language can be blackly absurd; dissidents are “counter-revolutionary”, liberal thinkers are targets of “anti-rightist” campaigns, and the darkest historical moments retain their optimistic names – a Great Leap Forward that costs upwards of 30 million lives; a Cultural Revolution that exterminated thought. Perhaps it is impossible for Chang, who grew up in Mao’s China, to untangle herself from its mindset and rhetoric, even when she rallies against it.
When Chang goes to Britain, she is “liberated”. When she and Halliday begin research on “Mao”, she writes that it “heralded a most productive decade”. The China scholars are not critics but “accusers” and “apologists” who “only wanted to insist that Mao was good”. Ultimately, Fly, Wild Swans might be more persuasive if Chang was more nuanced about herself, understanding that not all introspection needs to equal brutal Communist self-critique.
Chang is ambitious, defensive, and filled with an almost bombastic belief in her importance. Originally called Er-Hong (Second Wild Swan) after her mother, Chang’s first name Jung was given to her by her father when she was 12, a classical Chinese word with military connotations. As she remarks, “Although I wish I could still call myself Second Wild Swan, I am Martial Affairs.”
Chang still listens to her mother though. Hong – whose beauty and grit was one of the outstanding depictions of Chinese womanhood in Wild Swans – is dying, and Chang cannot be with her. Once the fearless girl who smuggled detonators during a Kuomintang officers’ dance, Hong has survived imprisonment and kept alive five children. She still reads her daughter’s drafts; for many Chinese, it’s a comfort to know that a parent will still help you with your homework, even when you’re an international publishing star. Long ago, Chang’s mother advised her to “keep to personal stories”, afraid that her writing “might be marred by propaganda”.
Although Fly, Wild Swans doesn’t quite heed this advice, it’s still the work of a fascinating woman, one that reveals the forces that have shaped her, sometimes in ways of which she herself is unaware.
