Jung Chang hasn’t been able to fully grasp the instant celebrity thrust upon her by “Wild Swans”, her electrifying debut novel. The memoir published in 1991 was, and remains, an unprecedented success — the biggest grossing nonfiction paperback in publishing history, translated into 37 languages and selling more than 13 million copies, and counting.
The novel found not just popularity but also acclaim from literary heavyweights. It was fantastical and had a head-trippy plot line but, equally, told a truthful story.
“My mother inspired me to write it ... it’s the story of my grandmother, my mother and myself through the turbulence of 20th century China,” says the Chinese-born British writer, who arrived in Britain from Communist China in 1978 to study linguistics at the University of York. She was among the first students allowed to leave China. And it’s not surprising, she has put her English studies to exceptional use in her thoroughly engrossing first book.
“Ten years after I came to Britain, my mother came to London to stay with me. One day she declined a shopping trip and told me that what she most wanted to do was to talk to me. For the first time in our lives, she told me about herself and about my grandmother.”
Chang learnt that her grandmother had been the concubine of a warlord general and her mother had joined the Communist underground at the age of 15.
“Both of them had eventful lives in China,” she says, “tossed about by wars, foreign invasions, revolutions, and then a totalitarian tyranny. In the general maelstrom, they were involved in poignant romances. I learnt about my mother’s ordeals, her close shaves with death, her love for my father and her emotional conflicts with him. I also came to know the agonising details of my grandmother’s foot-binding: how her feet had been crushed under a big stone, when she was 2, to satisfy the standards of beauty of the day.”
Her mother talked every day for months, and when Chang had to go out for work, she would speak into a tape recorder. By the time her mother left Britain, she had done 60 hours of recordings.
“Listening to my mother, I kept saying to myself, ‘I’ve got to write all this down.’ And then I realised how much I wanted to be a writer, and how much I had always wanted to be a writer.”
That is how “Wild Swans” — a book that changed her life — came about. And touchingly, not as a reward but rather out of gratitude and love, Chang used the money she earned from the bestselling memoir to provide her ailing 84-year-old mother with a comfortable old age in Chengdu, western China.
After “Wild Swans”, Chang wrote her subsequent two books at her own pace. In 2005, after spending 12 years researching and writing, Chang, with her historian husband Jon Halliday, published the 900-page biography “Mao: The Unknown Story”, which was described by Time magazine as “an atom bomb of a book”.
Chang,who once contemplated suicide when her pilgrimage to Beijing as a teenager did not result in a sighting of Mao Zedong, unmasked the Chinese communist leader as a man who disdained the peasants and used terror to enforce his will on the party and on the people who came under his rule.
To shed new light on every episode of Mao’s life and his “reign of terror”, the husband-wife duo interviewed people who were close to the communist leader.
“It’s unjust that Mao, who was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million people, is still revered, has his portrait hung at Tiananmen Square and gazes out of every Chinese bank note,” says Chang, who experienced the Cultural Revolution first hand when Mao unleashed it in 1966, including her parents’ torture and her time as a member of the Red Guard.
Evidently, she is under the Chinese government’s surveillance for ruffling feathers of policy makers and the Communist party. Her books are banned in her homeland.
“Social media is under tight control and China has a vast army of censors deleting everything they don’t want people to see. I feel very sad that my books are banned. I would like the Chinese society to become more fair and just and the ban on my books to be lifted. I fully sympathise with the desire of the people to preserve liberty and privacy. I hope this situation will change.”
Following the Hong Kong’s protests,which marked one of the most difficult tests of Chinese rule since Tiananmen, does she foresee similar mass political protests,challenging their government openly? Chang,sufficiently guarded to avoid generating any further controversy, says, “I cannot predict the future. I write about the past.”
Recalling her time as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker and an electrician during the revolution, Chang, born in Sichuan, China, three years after Mao took power, says all these episodes of her life helped to envision herself becoming a writer.
“When I was doing all those jobs, I dreamt of being a writer. In those days, the idea of writing for publication was out of the question because the country was under Mao’s tyranny and nearly all writers were condemned. But I had an urge to write, and kept on writing with an imaginary pen, while spreading manure in the paddy fields or checking power distribution at the top of electricity poles. I would polish long passages in my mind or commit short poems to memory.”
Happy in her private life, with zero desire to be a regular on the book-world circuit,Chang wrote her absorbing third book, shedding light on another aspect of Chinese history that is little-known, after eight years of research.
With a self-confidence so unshakable, it wouldn’t occur to her that her novels, all three of them, came out every decade or so. “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China”, was published in 2013.
Chang finds the 19th-century dowager empress, who according to the conventional opinion was a brutal despot and condescendingly referred to in the West as “the Old Buddha” and the “She Dragon”, a remarkable leader and reformer. Interestingly, although she was semi-educated and unconventional, Cixi ruled China from behind the scenes from 1861 until her death in 1908, ushering in electricity, modern mining, the railways, telegrams and new business methods.
Reversing the negative verdicts and explaining the reasons why she was drawn to Cixi,who poisoned her own stepson, Chang says, “She opened the door of China and brought a medieval empire into the modern age. As a woman, I particularly admire her as she championed women’s liberation and put an end to foot-binding, which had tortured Chinese women for centuries.”
Cixi’s story is both important and evocative for modern China, the second largest global economic power, and Chang is very aware of what it can learn from its history. “Great changes have taken place and the lives of so many people have become better. But it’s also frustrating that,in the core area, the communist party’s monopoly is getting tighter.”
But Chang, who lives in west London with her husband, considers it an honour to inform Western readers about Chinese history.
While “waiting for inspiration” for her next book, the 62-year-old author is coming back for the week-long Emirates LitFest to talk about her books. “I was at the very first Emirates LitFest a few years ago, and I enjoyed it very much. I was very impressed by how well the organisers looked after the authors.”
Her brilliant books has earned her many awards, including the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993), but, she says, she never sets out to write novels for awards.
“I love writing and am extremely happy just to be a writer. The ultimate satisfaction for me is to discover truth and to know that my writing makes a difference.”
It has been 37 years since she moved to the UK; does she still feel connected to her homeland?
“I feel both Chinese and international,” she says. “Although, I would like to be able to go to China as often as possible as my mother still lives there, I am allowed to go and see her for up to two weeks a year. I really wish I had the freedom to see her. She gives me courage.”
Suparna Dutt-D’Cunha is a writer based in Pune, India.
Jung Chang will take part in the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature to be held at InterContinental Hotel, Dubai Festival City, from March 3 to 7.
