Jung Chang on Courage, Truth, and China’s Turbulent History — Fly, Wild Swans

Transcript of Writer's Voice Interview

Summary

Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans became a worldwide phenomenon when it appeared in 1991, telling the story of three generations of women navigating the upheavals of twentieth-century China.

Now Chang returns with Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself, and China, continuing the story after she became one of the first Chinese students allowed to leave Communist China and study in the West.

In this conversation on Writer’s Voice, she reflects on the courage of her parents during the Cultural Revolution — and how their refusal to betray their beliefs shaped her own commitment to truth.

She also describes arriving in Britain as a young scholar from a country that had been almost completely cut off from the outside world, and how a simple insight from her doctoral supervisor transformed her understanding of scholarship.

Finally, Chang shares her perspective on China under Xi Jinping and why she remains cautiously optimistic about the country’s future.

🎧 Listen to the full interview here.

Interview Transcript

FR:

“Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” was your first book, published in 1991, and it was banned in China. This memoir, “Fly Wild Swans”, picks up where the original left off after you became one of the first Chinese citizens allowed to leave for the West. But you reprise some of the history of the first book, Wild Swans, in this book to include your family’s place in the revolution growing up in China under Mao and their persecution during the Cultural Revolution.

I wanted to start with your parents. Both of them were committed communists and they were fairly high in the regime. Your father was a governor of a province, your mother was also important, but famine, violence, and betrayal ultimately shattered their faith.

Can you talk about how their disillusionment happened and how it shaped your own political sense?

JC:

Okay. By the way, my father was the governor of a region, not a province. But anyway, he was fairly high in the regime hierarchy.

Now, my parents joined the communists when they were teenagers. My father was 17 and he had lived through hunger, injustice, corruption, and he felt that society had to change. He was working in a bookshop as a shop assistant and he read lots of books and was very much influenced by the left-wing books.

He felt that communism was the answer to China’s problems. My mother joined the communist underground in her city on the other end of China. She joined the underground before she was 16.

For her, the reasons were mainly two. One was the promise of the communists to liberate women, especially to abolish the concubinage system. She hated this system, this concubinage system, when she was growing up.

The communists promised to get rid of the system. Plus, the regime before the communist regime in China was the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. It was incompetent, corrupt, and cruel.

My mother’s fellow students were sympathetic to the communists. One was arrested and died under torture. All this was enough to push her to the communists.

Then later, they were disillusioned, both of them. My mother’s disillusionment came sooner, almost as soon as the real communists, not her friends, the underground partisans, but the real party came in. The people in charge of women’s affairs was Women’s Association.

It turned out that they also despised my grandma and wouldn’t even sit with her at my mother’s wedding to my father. I think that must have been the beginning of her shattering. My father was, over the years, gradually disappointed because, again, the party was not what he had imagined.

The crunch came in 1958, when the Great Famine in China began. Between 1958 and 1961, in four years’ time, some 40 million people died of starvation. My father had joined the party to get rid of starvation.

In fact, I remember when I was a child, one day, my father all of a sudden said to me, her face and her voice were full of agitation. She said, why did we make revolution? We made revolution because people were starving.

We want to give people a full stomach. Then, what he saw was that his party had created the famine. He couldn’t accept that.

He wanted to speak up, but he was persuaded to withdraw his letter to Mao, because writing to Mao was the only way to influence policy. The governor reminded him of the consequences, and the letter would bring disasters, the letter would bring to his family. So, he withdrew it, and of course, a sense of guilt lay on him.

He finally spoke up in the Cultural Revolution.

FR:

He was imprisoned at one point. I mean, your parents’ courage, both of them, is really extraordinary. Your mother went to Beijing to appeal for your father’s release.

What did their courage teach you? And what does it teach the reader, or us, our listeners, about standing up to authoritarian rule?

JC:

I think I grew up experiencing my parents’ courage. I knew how much my father suffered for speaking up against the Cultural Revolution. He suffered more than most because he had taken the stand, and he was ferociously beaten.

One of his eyes was temporarily lost sight, and his ribs were broken. And once, you know, my brothers and I had to pull him on a cart, which was used to transport coal, and pulled him to a hospital to have his broken ribs and other bones looked at. I saw all this, and I saw my father absolutely refused to repent.

And then I saw my mother standing up for my father, because she suffered because of my father. She actually had a lot of bitterness in her against my father. But when she was under pressure to denounce him, she refused.

As a result, my mother was put through scores of those ghastly denunciation meetings, which were everyday sight in China in those years. Basically, the victims were stood on the stage, and their arms were ferociously twisted to the back, and their heads were pushed down, and they were kicked and beaten. And my mother was made to kneel on broken glass.

I mean, I remember as a child, I helped my grandma and pick out the fragments of the glass from my mother’s knees. And my grandmother made these knee pads and the waistbands to protect my mother for the next ghastly denunciation meetings. But she still refused to denounce my father.

So their act, their behavior was like a role model for me. And what I learned was, we never kowtow, we should never do something dishonest. And we should always stick to what we believe to be true.

When I was writing the biography of Mao, which I wrote after Wild Swans was published, in the middle of the research, which lasted 12 years for me and my husband, John Halliday, an Anglo-Irish historian, I realized that our book was very dangerous. I mean, Mao’s portrait is still on Tiananmen Gate, and his face is on every Chinese banknote. And he is still was and is the Holy Cow of China.

And our book documented Mao’s misrule of China, including how he created the famine, which was basically to export the food he knew his people were dependent on for survival to Russia and the Soviet bloc, in exchange for military industries, so he could build a first class superpower and dominate the world one day. And of course, he didn’t make it, but his successor is confident they will make it. But when I discovered these facts, I mean, I was so, so shocked.

I realized that we were dealing with a big evil. But I never thought I should pull punches, or hide something or avoid something. I mean, it went without saying, I just, I just pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind, and thought come what may.

FR:

And it has cost you, you were not allowed to visit China, or you were actually concerned about, also about visiting China, because you thought you weren’t going to be left out, when your was dying. So you did not get to say goodbye to her. You know, I think for a lot of us here in the United States right now, we are confronting the need to stand up with courage for our neighbors, no matter what the risks may be.

And I think it’s the first time a lot of us are confronting this. So talk a little bit about how you managed to keep up your courage. What did you use to do that?

How do you balance the way the costs against the gains of being able to maintain your integrity?

JC:

I think people will find that when the time of a test comes, I mean, you would see courage inside you, the courage that you never consciously thought was there. Well, I think the thing is, we just have to stick to truth, to regard the integrity as the most important thing of being a human being.

FR:

If you’ve just joined Writer’s Voice, we’re talking with Yong Chang. Her original memoir was Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China. It was a breakout bestseller.

And now she has published Fly, Wild Swans, My Mother, Myself, and China as a sequel. So let’s talk about you’re going to England to study. You were one of the first Chinese students to be allowed to go.

Talk a little bit about the culture shock that you experienced, how you both felt free, but also unfree because you were being watched and you had your own internal restrictions in your own mind. So how did you struggle through those and transcend them?

JC:

Wild Swans ends in 1978. That was a watershed moment in China. The era of Mao ended and the era of Deng Xiaoping’s opening up to the West and more freedom, etc.

Deng visited the United States in 1979, the next year, and the countries established diplomatic relations. And so at that watershed moment, I was extremely lucky to be able to become one of the very first Chinese to get out of communist China and study in the West. In fact, as far as I know, I came from Sichuan province, a province of 90 million people.

I was the very first one, as far as I know, to come out of that province to study in the West. When I came, aged 26, I had no idea what the West was like because during Mao’s time, China was completely isolated from the outside world. The only foreigners, a few foreigners I met, were some sailors in a port in South China where my fellow students and I were sent to practice our English.

And we sat in this international sailors club, eagerly awaiting our sailors. We were so keen, we grabbed them as soon as they came on shore. Of course, we had no idea what must be on their minds and how different this must be from the expectation of port life.

And they, of course, had no idea what we were talking about because our textbooks had been written by teachers who had never met foreigners themselves. So our texts were direct translations of Chinese texts. I remember extremely well the lesson of greetings because the Chinese, when we bumped into each other in those days, we said, which means, where are you going?

Have you eaten? So those were the English greetings we learned. And so when I first came to Britain with a group of 14 people, we asked people where they were going and whether they had eaten.

And among this group of 14 people, one was a political supervisor and we were not allowed to go out on our own. We had to move in a group or the minimum, we had to go out with somebody else, with a chaperone. And if this chaperone was related, there had to be a third person.

So in the first year, I was torn with curiosity. I wanted to go out on my own. I wanted to see this world.

We were in the middle of this exciting world, London, and yet it was as if we lived in a bubble and we had no contact with them or little contact with them. So I was obsessed with finding reasons, finding excuses to go out on my own. And indeed, I did many things first among communist Chinese.

And one thing I did, I remember very well, was to go into an English pub because the Chinese translation for pub, jiu ba, suggested in those days, suggested somewhere indecent with nude women gyrating. So I was, of course, I was torn with curiosity. And one day I sneaked out of the college.

I darted across the road. I pushed the door of a pub open. And of course, I saw nothing of the kind, only some old men sitting there drinking beer.

I was rather disappointed.

FR:

You had a very interesting meeting with your advisor. This was in the University of York. There’s a really a pivotal moment in your book.

You spoke with him about your thesis. Tell us what he said to you and what you learned from what he told you.

JC:

Well, yes, I was very lucky to have got a scholarship from the University of York in England. And, you know, I was so lucky. I was the first person to, one of the first, to be allowed to accept a foreign scholarship.

And when I got my doctorate in linguistics, three years later, from 1979 to 1982, and I became the first person from communist China to get a doctorate from a British university. I had this wonderful supervisor. And I remember this day when I went to his office to discuss my proposed thesis on my subject was linguistics.

I sort of babbled on about the linguistic theories I had, you know, surveyed, looked at. And I said, I don’t like this. I think that theory is good.

And he listened. And at the end, he said, now show me your thesis. And I said, what are you talking about?

I haven’t written it yet. And he said, but you have all the conclusions. I mean, that single sentence, untied a deadly knot that had fastened my brain by a totalitarian education.

And in China, we were taught not to really seek truth from facts, but to make assertions on the basis of thought or party line. I mean, even today, I mean, the regime publicly said, publicly condemned my husband and me for sort of blindly seeking truth without guidance. But my professor’s words in 1979 had opened my mind.

And it was as if a window had been thrown open and fresh air and daylight had come in. And I realized, of course, keep an open mind. And that is such an important thing, especially in research.

So since then, I’ve become a historian, a biographer, I wrote about history. And this line is my guidance, is what I, I constantly say to myself, you know, I must only follow the evidence and arrive at conclusions from the evidence gathered.

FR:

That’s such a beautiful and powerful story. Now, you mentioned before, with Deng Xiaoping, there was an opening and a relaxation of totalitarianism. But then with Xi Jinping, there’s been a kind of restoration of Maoism, although Maoism with a capitalist face, I think we’d say.

Talk about that. Could you actually call China a communist country? Or is it something else?

What is the totalitarianism that Xi Jinping has reestablished there? How is it the same? How is it different?

JC:

I think Xi definitely wanted to make China less capitalist, and more like Mao’s time. And totalitarian control is essential. And the cut down on liberty, on freedom of expression, on any act of dissent, absolutely not allowed.

I mean, all this, he announced publicly, as if they were the most natural thing in the world. He worshipped Mao. And also he grew up as a Red Guard, and as somebody who was devoted to Mao, and whose mission was to make sure that the communist rule, absolute communist rule, was going to go on forever.

And this is how we are contemporaries. And how when I was growing up, the indoctrination, we were all subjected to. Our mission was supposed to make sure that the communist party will rule forever.

Now, Xi has been trying to do that since 2012, when he came to power. But he has had only limited success. And there is a general resistance across the society.

The door that has been opened in the previous decades of reforms cannot be closed again. And I think over the years, you could see that Xi has been making concessions, and has been retreating from what he had started with doing. And so I think he then adapted to the reality of China having many capitalist characteristics.

And the most important thing is making money. If he completely followed Mao’s road, people would be dirt poor. China would not have any power, would not have become rich and powerful, and a superpower, and even in the position to challenge America’s number one position in the world, which is what he wanted, which was Mao’s dream.

Mao died a sad man, because he said China was too poor, and he couldn’t realize his dream. But Xi is fairly confident he is going to make it, because China has become relatively rich and powerful. And he doesn’t want to lose that, because without money, China has nothing.

It’s a country that is, there is no god except money. I mean, Xi may believe in communism, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don’t. And they believe in one thing, and also they’re encouraged to believe this thing, money.

I mean, it is a country that is not only all this rich and poor. I mean, you can easily find what the Chinese prime minister, last prime minister, who then died after his term ended, he said about the poverty of the Chinese population. And so, it has taken over the worst of capitalism.

And grafted it onto the essence of communism, which is tyranny, tyrannic control of society

FR:

So you, however, are optimistic that these, you know, Xi Jinping’s ambitions will ultimately fail. You are optimistic that China can free itself from tyranny. What makes you optimistic about that?

And what kinds of lessons do you have for us here in America, where we are facing the threat of tyranny more and more every day?

JC:

Well, I’m an optimistic person. Optimism had come with me in my nature when I was born. Also, my mother is a person of tremendous optimism.

But her optimism, which I hope mine would also be like, is not based on denial. But based on rational analysis, I feel optimistic, mainly because there is a tremendous resistance of what Xi is doing. Judging by what’s happening in the last past years, since he took power in 2012, a lot of the things he has been trying to do has been thwarted.

And of course, people are unable to go onto the street. But there is just a passive resistance. And also, Xi’s enforcers in Mao’s time, the Communist Party was Mao’s enforcer.

But today, the enforcers are largely in disagreement with their boss, because nobody wants to live a life under Mao. I mean, even for the young generation who did not live under Mao, and they have parents, grandparents, who, if they ask, can tell them their stories. And I dare say, every family has a tragic story.

So people don’t want to, including Xi’s enforcers, don’t want to go back to Mao’s time. And you can also see this by the incessant purges that Xi has been carrying out. I mean, just the other day, he’s purged his right-hand man in the army.

And so out of the seven members of the military commission of China, five have been purged. And only he and somebody who’d never been to a battlefield were there. I mean, all these are signs, not of his strength, but of his frustration, which led to his suspicion, his paranoia.

I mean, all this is a sign that he can’t get his way with the people around him. So that’s, I think, the main thing from China. And outside China, I think a lot of people have realized that A, Xi has this ambition to dominate the world.

Do we want to live like the Chinese? I mean, you know, look at all these immigrants. I mean, they desperately risk their lives to come and stay in the United States, in Europe, in Britain.

And I don’t see anyone going to China, even though they’re welcome there and have all sorts of perks to stay there. And so, I mean, all these show that fundamentally, you know, people know, people outside China also know it’s a tyranny that we don’t want to live under. And so many people have been acting to thwart this ambition.

FR:

Well, I think there are powerful lessons there. And the one that I take most is that sense that people want to be free, and they will resist tyranny under any circumstance. And that is a very, very hopeful sign for us in this country, where for the first time in 250 years, we are confronting this issue.

Thank you so much, Yongchang, your book, and it’s a wonderful book, Fly Wild Swans, My Mother, Myself, and China. It’s just been great to talk with you about this. Thank you very much.