Jung Chang escaped China — now she can’t return to see her elderly mother

It’s raining in Notting Hill and I am worried Jung Chang will get wet, sitting under a flimsy pavement cafe umbrella. “I’m fine,” she says with a laugh. Someone who has survived Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution — during which her father was tortured, her mother made to kneel on broken glass and she was forced into hard labour — is unlikely to be troubled by English drizzle.
“Do you remember we met before?” she asks. I was hoping she hadn’t. In 2015 we took part in an event where we had to stand on stage and tell a ten-minute story from memory. I was petrified, but she rocked the place and was mobbed, Taylor Swift-style, by fans.
Chang is a rock-star author — her first book,Wild Swans, sold more than 15 million copies and was translated into 40 languages. As a young woman when it came out in 1991, I remember passing it between friends, my mum, my cousins, all devouring the intimate saga spanning three generations of women — Chang, her mother and grandmother — under communist China. Now she tells me the exciting news that she has been at work on a sequel. It will include her coming to London in 1978, when she says she was the first person from the People’s Republic of China to get a doctorate from a British university (York) and the first to go to a pub.
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At 72 she is incredibly stylish in a crisp white cotton shirt and coloured scarf, black trousers, hair pinned up, and with a furry lilac handbag. The reason we are meeting is because Wild Swans is the eighth most popular book in the past 50 years of the Sunday Times bestseller list. “I was thrilled to see it on the list that first time,” she recalls, smiling. “I checked every week. I think the most important thing to me about being on that list was that I became a writer. I knew I could write.”
She had always loved writing, she says, but thought it impossible. “When I was 14 the Cultural Revolution started and books were burnt all over China. People couldn’t even dream of becoming a writer because all writers were condemned, sent to the gulag, driven to suicide. Some were even executed.
“Even writing for oneself was dangerous. I wrote my first poem on my 16th birthday in 1968. When I was lying in bed polishing it, Red Guards came to raid our flat. If they saw my poem I would get into trouble, my family would get into trouble. So I had to rush to the bathroom to tear it up and flush it down the toilet.”
In the following years she was exiled from her home in Sichuan province to the countryside on the edge of the Himalayas and worked “as a peasant”. Later she became an electrician. “When I was spreading manure in the paddy fields or checking electricity supplies on top of the poles, I was always writing with an imaginary pen,” she says. “But I couldn’t put pen to paper.”
Can you still fix the electrics at home? I ask. “It was my job. It is my job,” she says with a laugh. “But I was no good. When I was in the factory I had five electric shocks in the first month. It was very dangerous. I had an electrician master who taught me. And there was one manual. But there was no proper professional training.
“Because Mao had said the more books you read, the more stupid you become. Imagine, there were no books in the whole of China for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.”
Chang managed to read because her 13-year-old brother, who had been an avid stamp collector until it was banned, traded in Mao badges, which came in thousands of variations. With his earnings he bought books on the black market — the Complete Works of Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw plays, Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant — which people had sold as scrap paper, knowing they would be burnt if found. He hid them under the water tower in their compound and brought a few inside at a time. “We would tear off the cover and instead put Selected Works of Mao [one of the only books allowed]. And hid them under the mattress.”
Both parents were communist officials in Sichuan province, and Chang and her three brothers had enjoyed a privileged life with cooks and drivers. The Cultural Revolution changed everything, imposing a climate of violence and fear during which her father was taken away and her fellow pupils transformed into monsters. “Mao was encouraging violence, and with violence you need something to feed to the mob,” she recalls. “So he made teachers victims. I saw one of my teachers being beaten up by boys in her class purely because she had been dismissive about one and denunciation meetings in the playing field where teachers were lined up on the platform and their arms twisted back and heads pushed down and they were kicked and beaten.”
Her school was the oldest public school in China, founded in 141BC, with a huge temple to Confucius as well as tablets in classical Chinese recording his teachings. “Anything old was destined to be smashed,” she said. “The boys went around campus using iron bars and hammers to knock off the heads of the statues, and a crowd was organised to pull down those great stone slabs.” Her father wrote to Mao saying he opposed the Cultural Revolution. “He said there was nothing cultural in it, only violence. And so he was beaten, arrested, tortured and driven insane.
“My mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce him. But she refused. She was subject to a hundred denunciation meetings where people spat at her and she was made to kneel on broken glass. I remember my grandmother using tweezers to pick out the fragments from my mother’s knees.
“Violence, atrocities, it was just awful,” she adds. “I think my whole generation was brutalised in the Cultural Revolution.”
When she came to London on a scholarship in 1978, two years after Mao’s death, she said it was “like landing on Mars — completely incredible. We were 14 students all wearing Mao suits and told we must go everywhere in a group. We were quite a sight in the London streets.”
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As for their English, she says, “the old professors had been condemned as ‘bourgeois revolutionary academics’ and the textbooks discarded for being ‘poisonous weeds’. So we had young teachers who had never spoken to a foreigner. Our first lesson was ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’. The second was ‘Greetings’, where we learnt the equivalent of Chinese greetings, which in those years were, ‘Where are you going? Have you eaten?’ So that’s what I said to English people I met. They would fall about laughing.”
She stayed in London and worked as a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and as a consultant on the Channel 4 series Heart of the Dragon about modern China. It was there in the 1980s that she met her husband, the Anglo-Irish academic Jon Halliday, who had come to seek advice for a programme he was making on the Korean War. It was not love at first sight, she says. “We started as friends. But I very quickly saw and loved his special qualities.”
He helped her to come to terms with what she had experienced. “I was still having nightmares of the horrible scenes I had witnessed,” she said. “But it was writing Wild Swans which really helped. The process was tremendously cathartic. It converted trauma to memory.”
It was, she says, her mother who inspired her to write the book. In 1988 she came to stay for six months and started to tell Chang stories of her grandmother who was from the last generation of having her feet crushed and bound. “I knew my grandmother had bound feet because when I was a child and we went out, the first thing she did back home was put her feet in a bowl of hot water. Her feet were terrifying. Only the big toes were normal — the other four were lifeless and bent under the arch.”
Once her mum started talking she did not stop. When Chang went to work her mother spoke into a tape recorder. By the end of her visit she had left 60 hours of tapes. Transcribing them all, Chang knew she had to write. “But when I started talking to potential publishers, I couldn’t finish a sentence. I immediately started weeping.”
That’s not all. Chang, who was then in her thirties, discovered she had breast cancer and had surgery, but it came back and in 1991 she underwent a second operation — a mastectomy and reconstruction. “It was a nine-hour operation and really knocked me … it made me permanently exhausted for about ten years.”
For this reason, she says, she never had children. “I know some of my friends crave for children but I don’t have that craving,” she adds. “I guess it’s been replaced by constant writing — it occupies so much of my mind and my heart, plus my husband, that it doesn’t have room to have another craving.” She is close to her own mother. “My mother is extraordinary,” she says. “She really helped me by taking away the anxiety about how the book would do — she said it may not do well but it had made her happy.” Chang has gone on to write three more books on China, including a hard-hitting biography of Mao, with her husband.
What was it like spending so much time together? “Those were the happiest 12 years, travelling the world together. We were lucky we caught a window in the 1990s when both the Chinese and Russian archives were relatively open.”
Success came at a price. All her books are banned in China, as is Chang. In 2007 the foreign secretary David Miliband negotiated for her to go for 15 days a year to see her family. But since Xi Jinping took over China has again become more repressive and Chang has not returned since 2018. She fears she will never again see her beloved mum, now 93.
“We talk by video phone, which is very nice, but one day recently she suddenly said, this is not the same, I want to be able to feel you, to touch you. And she kissed me through the screen. I think she thought she was dying and wanted her children at her bedside. But I can’t go. It’s heartbreaking.”
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Her mother’s life in today’s China will be a large part of the new book. Chang has been horrified to see Mao being resurrected by Xi. “He is not just excusing the Cultural Revolution but glorifying it. Young people are fed propaganda that Mao was a great leader. Mao’s house is a pilgrimage centre, crowds going there to worship him every day.”
Some see what Xi is doing as a second Cultural Revolution, but Chang is less convinced. “He wants China to be more like Mao’s time, more closed. But this is incompatible with his wish to make more money from the outside world and that money is his power. So he’s unable to close off China.
“He also wants a Mao-style personality cult. But to do this he needs to isolate China completely from other information sources from the outside world and to whip up such terror that people close off their minds and do what they are told. He can’t do this because China has changed. The door that has been opened can’t be closed again. But he has succeeded a lot in winding the clock backwards and putting China to the bad old days and that’s very sad.”
It seems a long way from Notting Hill where Chang lives now and writes every day after walks in Hyde Park. She proudly shows me her pink Ecco trainers. In the evening she and Halliday like watching TV dramas. They are enjoying The Americans. By her bed is a pile of books. She is reading Inside Story, the last book by her friend Martin Amis.
So embedded in British society is she that she was recently appointed CBE. Photos of her receiving it at Windsor Castle from Princess Anne show the princess smiling broadly. “I have nothing but gratitude to this country, its generosity and kindness,” she says, “that’s why I don’t write about it, it would be full of gush.” And, she assures me, she did not ask the princess: ‘Where are you going? Have you eaten?”