When Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China landed in the world in 1991, it was an immediate bestseller. Jung Chang’s story of modern Chinese history as the background to the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself sold 13 million copies in 37 languages, but none in mainland China, where it is still banned.
Now, more than 30 years later, she has returned to her family story in Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China.
Fearful of arrest should she enter China due to her highly critical biography of Mao Zedong, London-based Chang keeps in touch with her mother, Bao Qin, now 94 and living in Chengdu, via video calls. One such call was the genus for Fly, Wild Swans.
“She pressed her face to the screen to kiss me,” Chang says. “I was very moved because my mother, much as she loved me, I don’t think kissed me when I was an adult. We hugged a lot. I think her suddenly becoming emotionally demonstrative was because she’d always been so strong and was finally letting down a guard.
“She said, ‘I miss you terribly, I want to see you.’ I said, ‘You’re seeing me here [on a screen]’, and she said, ‘It’s not the same, I want to put my arms around you.’”
The next day, Bao Qin rang back to tell her daughter not to pay any attention to what she had said. “She was clearly afraid her words might put pressure on me and I might take dangerous risks.”
Looking at her mother’s face, Chang contemplated something. “People often asked if I’d write a sequel to Wild Swans,” she says. She didn’t think she had enough material. “But looking at my mother, I thought, ‘Maybe there’s enough for a sequel.’”
A problem for Beijing
Fly, Wild Swans begins with Chang’s childhood in Mao’s China, and ends in the present day, in Xi Jinping’s China and in London. It documents her experiences as an author considered a problem by Beijing. Like Wild Swans, this book focuses on her own and her family’s story set again a tumultuous political backdrop. And it’s a moving tribute to Bao Qin.
“My mother seemed to know that me sticking to the truth would one day get me on the wrong side of the regime,” she says. “She said nothing to dissuade me. Instead, she resigned from her Party job, because otherwise the regime could accuse her and me of having access to state secrets. She ended her career just like that, only in her 50s and full of energy. She made that sacrifice so I could write without that worry.”
Wild Swans began with the birth of Chang’s grandmother Yu-fang in 1909, in the short reign of child emperor Puyi, before revolution created the Republic of China. As readers learned – and rarely forgot – Yu-fang’s toes were broken and her feet bound at the age of 2 in the centuries-old tradition. The resulting tottering was seen to make girls more attractive and marriageable.
Aged 15, Yu-fang was given to a general as a concubine. She escaped the general’s compound with her daughter Bao Qin. At 15, Bao Qin joined the communist underground, through which she met husband Wang Yu. Chang was the second-born of their five children.
Loyal supporters of the communist cause, Bao Qin and Wang Yu nonetheless underwent horrific ordeals during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when it’s estimated more than a million people died, and tens of millions were persecuted by the regime. Mao was responsible for the Great Famine (1959-62), when at least 30 million people starved to death. Chang’s parents were shattered by Mao’s betrayal of their cause. Her father’s health deteriorated and he died at 54 in 1975. Yu-fang, who lived with the constant pain of her bound feet, died in 1969.
Wild Swans’ narrative ends in 1978, when President Deng Xiaoping began reforms that started opening up China’s economy to the world. At 26, Chang won a scholarship to study in England, where she became the first person from communist China to graduate with a doctorate from a British university (she has a PhD in linguistics). She’s lived in the UK ever since, making visits back to see her mother, likely always under the surveillance of the regime.
Today, Chang is not entirely sure whether her mother has read Wild Swans. “We haven’t really discussed it,” she says. “I think perhaps she hasn’t read it.
“When it was published, she said she wouldn’t read it because at that time I’d had breast cancer and two operations. She didn’t want me to worry about anything, and what worried me most was that she might not like some things I wrote. But she trusted me to tell her stories, saying, ‘Write what you want and own it.’”
Her mother took a similar approach with her journalist brother Xiao-hei, who was also banned from entering China but who, unlike his sister, did not have fame to at least partly protect him. Xiao-hei now lives in London but Chang still has three siblings in China, two of them in Chengdu.
In Fly, Wild Swans, readers learn of her “powerfully physical” love for a relaxed Englishman named Frank, and her first marriage to pianist Yu Chun-Yee (they separated after having “more arguments than laughter”).
In 1991, she married Irish historian Jon Halliday and it has proved an enduring relationship both personally and professionally.
“We love each other and, also, we’re like detectives solving mysteries. At lunchtime, we met in our kitchen and exchanged our discoveries,” she says about their work together. Halliday helped with her first book, 1986’s Mme Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling), the biography of the influential wife of Republic of China founder Sun Yat-Sen.
After Wild Swans, the pair spent 12 years researching and writing their co-authored biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, published in 2005.
The Chinese regime may not have liked Wild Swans, but they absolutely hated Mao. “An atom bomb of a book,” according to Time magazine.
Chang expected repercussions: “Beijing would view me as a kind of enemy, and I had to be prepared for the worst.”
Visitors in the night
A warning shot wasn’t long in coming. It started with an incursion into her London home where plants disappeared overnight from the balcony. Light sleepers, neither Chang nor Halliday heard a thing.
“All my plants were gone, including a mature Japanese acer shaped like an umbrella and a large jasmine bush whose massive shoots had twined the trellises.”
The police “concluded that the criminal damage done to our house was not the work of vandals, but highly skilled professionals. It was a coded message saying, ‘we can get you’.”
Did she think she might even be murdered? “Well, living my life is a professional hazard, and if you speak the truth, you must prepare for the worst. But to eliminate me would bring more publicity to my books and cause more damage to the regime. Perhaps I inherited my parents’ fearless genes.”
The repercussions continued. In 2007, her mother had a stroke, and Chang was told she couldn’t visit her unless she publicly apologised for the Mao biography. Bao Qin, who had withstood blackmail during the Cultural Revolution, encouraged her daughter not to give in.
Beijing eventually relented. “When I arrived in Chengdu, she greeted me with a joyous ‘we won!’”
For the next decade, Chang was permitted to visit China for around a fortnight a year after promising she would not talk about Mao or politics in China. But covert surveillance during her trips became overt. In 2008, she took a call in her hotel room from someone who claimed to be from the Ministry of State Security and was heading to her room.
“For a minute, I imagined someone coming and putting a pillow over my head, but I didn’t think they’d bump me off; if they wanted to, there were other secret ways.”
Quickly saying she would meet them in the lobby, she met the man she would call Young Leader in her book. “So began my experience of dealing with the officers of the Chinese state security, the guo-an, for a decade,” she writes in Fly, Wild Swans.
When applying for visas, she had to detail every movement she’d make while in China, where she was accompanied by minders allocated by the guo-an. There would be demands on her to, for example, write articles that would “sing Beijing’s praises”. Chang refused.
Young Leader had the power to influence the success of her visas. At one point, she spoke frankly when she told him she wished to return the following year for her mother’s 80th birthday. She pointed out she’d kept her word by not talking politics or Mao.
“My mother is all I come here for,” she told him privately. “You have cut me off from all my friends. I feel like a prisoner in China. But if you stop me from seeing my mother, you will be making a sworn enemy out of me – maybe there is not a great deal I can do – but I will at least give you headaches; perhaps your bosses can weigh the pros and cons.’ They said nothing, and the next year, they gave me an extra five days on my visa.”
Was saying that freeing? “If I’d been in the position to say it publicly, I would’ve. Having grown up in China, I always had to watch what I said, and that made me thoroughly determined to reject that way of life.”
Under Xi rules
In 2012, Xi Jinping became president and Chang’s visa application for her next annual visit was rejected, although her mother had been hospitalised. The following year, she was allowed back, a diplomatic detente that lasted until 2018 when Xi became president for life.
“Xi Jinping dictated a law that people who insulted revolutionary heroes would go to prison.” Her Mao book certainly put her at risk of jail time, a risk she has been tempted to take, but so far has not. It is now seven years since she has seen her mother.
Xi’s stated aim, for China to be an economic powerhouse greater than the United States, initially filled Chang with dread. But today she is less concerned.
“I now don’t believe China will one day dominate the world. The regime has tried to make China more like Maoist China, but its success has been limited. I don’t think democracy will be beaten by Maoism.”
She is, she says as a historian, “optimistic about humanity”. In her book, she notes Chinese people have a deep-rooted sense of duty to history, which feeds into her work.
She tells the Listener, “I grew up feeling a duty to preserve the truth. In Chinese history, there were historians who had been persecuted by having their hands and feet chopped off, for telling the truth. People went through extreme hardship, danger and even death. There was also a tradition of people running great risks to have historical records preserved.
“The many people who gave me interviews, particularly in the 1990s, told me the truth of what they knew, rather than the party line. And they were inspired by this sense of duty and I regard it as a great thing.”
She adds, “I’ve been thrown into a rather eventful life. My parents and my grandmother were extraordinary people and they swam against the tide.”
Bao Qin encouraged all her children to be brave, says Chang. “Instead of saying ‘stop doing dangerous things’, my mother encouraged me to be brave, but not rash.”
The new book gives us more of her mother’s story. Bao Qin is also known by the name De-hong: in Chinese script, the character for “wild swan” is hong. Chang herself was initially named Er-hong: second wild swan.
“I have called this book Fly, Wild Swans as a tribute to my mother. She has given me wings so I can take to the sky and be free. It is so much thanks to her that today I live freely and write freely.”
Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China, by Jung Chang (HarperCollins, $39.99) is on sale now.