I meet Jung Chang between lockdowns – our lunch is the first time she has eaten out since the spring. “I feel liberated!” she says, a phrase that means more to her than most.
We are at e&o, a pan-Asian restaurant in Notting Hill, around the corner from where she lives with her husband, historian Jon Halliday. Like anyone who has read Chang’s book Wild Swans – 13 million copies sold – I feel as though I know her before she sits down, so unforgettable and harrowing is her account of growing up in Mao’s China. There are many ways of telling that story. As we order – she directs me toward the dim sum, her husband’s favourite – I ask if any particular food is evocative for her of that coming of age, and she talks me through some of that history.
As a child, meals were a mark of privilege for her family – in the 1950s her father was a middle-ranking official in the communist hierarchy and on the compound in which they lived they were granted special rations. “That was a time of life and death,” she says. “Most people in my generation experienced starvation. Once on the way to school, I was eating a bun and a child rushed out from nowhere, and snatched the bun from my hand and ate it. You could feel the starvation around you.”
During the Cultural Revolution, after her father was denounced and tortured for criticising Mao and her mother sent to a detention camp, Chang was exiled to a village in the Himalayan foothills. “I learned cooking for the first time, but I’m afraid I was no good,” she says. “I could never keep the stove burning. I used to go before breakfast to collect firewood. But the trees had all been burned, you know, in the Great Leap Forward, in the ridiculous effort to make steel in villages. We had to walk for a long time in the hills to find leaves and twigs. But there was never enough to keep a fire burning. And so I was not a good cook.”
It’s an odd sensation, sitting just off the Portobello Road, sharing little bowls of dumplings, hearing that story and trying to reconcile it with the precise and stylish woman who tells it. Can she still recognise that teenager in herself or does that past seem like it happened to someone else?
“When I talk about collecting firewood I can feel it very clearly,” she says. “I think as a person I may not have changed very much at all. Before Jon and I wrote our biography of Mao in 2005 I could go quite freely to China, and I saw friends and there was little gap between then and now.”
She is feeling that gap much more keenly this year. Until two years ago she was allowed to go to China for two weeks a year, primarily to see her mother who, having survived show trials and Red Army prisons, having seen her husband driven insane and to his death, is now struggling through the pandemic. “My mother is 90,” says Chang. “Her mind is still all there but she’s very frail. She was in intensive care when the virus started. And so she was locked in hospital for months.”
She smiles. “My mother is still quite something. She is very organised in her thinking. I Skyped her the other day and she said: ‘I want to give you three pieces of good news.’ And she went through them, one, two and three…”
It was the methodical thinking of her mother that first set Chang on her path as a writer. When she had settled in London, having won a scholarship to study in England, her mother came to stay for six months, when China was opening up a little, in 1988. They had never really talked before – even private conversations had to follow the party line when Chang was a child. After the Cultural Revolution began, when she was 14, the family was scattered far and wide. In London her mother was in a relaxed political environment for the first time, and once she started talking she could hardly stop. While Chang was out teaching, her mother talked into a tape recorder, telling the story of her life.
She must, I say, be very gratified to have some of that story so insistently present in the world, in Wild Swans?
“She was not overwhelmed by it,” says Chang. “But then I don’t remember her being overwhelmed by anything. I think what mattered more to her was that her five children became closer to her through reading the book. We all learned to love her a little bit more.”
One of the radical departures of that book, for a Chinese audience, was that it was history told by women. Chang’s latest book – the occasion for our lunch – is an extension of that principle. It tells the story of a very different family to her own: Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister charts the history of the Soong family, three American-educated women at the centre of power and politics in China. “Big Sister” Ei-ling, married the finance minister of China, H H Kung. “Little Sister” May-ling became the wife of the nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, and first lady of Taiwan. And “Red Sister” Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China, before becoming Mao’s vice-chair.
In their constant intrigues and feuding they were “a bit like the Mitfords, but more so”, says Chang. The book tells the story of China’s geopolitics through “their relationships with their heartless husbands”.
To begin with, the sisters’ lives read like a fairy story to Chang, and she does not trust fairy stories. “They seemed so unemotional to start with,” she says. “But when I discovered that Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Little Sister, had a nervous breakdown, that came as a huge relief.” Their lives, like hers, are full of incredible survival. “Red Sister lived to be 105,” she notes, “she died after 9/11.”
Reading the book, it seems to me almost every chapter demands a Hollywood script. Are any planned?
“There is a TV project going on,” she says. “But judging from the experience of Wild Swans I’m not sure how much chance it will have.” The many attempts to film that book have never happened because international film companies are so worried about repercussions from Chinese partners. Does she feel those repercussions herself?
“When I go back I am treated as a virtual prisoner. I have to go straight to see my mother, usually in May for her birthday. Each visa application is a process of agony.”
Her books are banned in China, though some still circulate. She writes each book twice, she says, in English and then in Mandarin. Her “sisters” book is a sensation in Taiwan but she holds out little hope that it will ever be published in the regime of President Xi.
“It is very sad. Even after Tiananmen in the 1990s,” she says, “it was, relatively speaking, a paradise of freedom for doing research, compared to now.”
Her golden time in that respect was researching the book on Mao with Halliday – she dug out records and interviewed survivors in China, he went through newly opened archives in Russia. When they were writing in their separate studies they came together at lunchtime and shared revelations.
Lockdown has returned them a little to that cocooned coexistence. Halliday is older than her, 81, so has been wary of socialising. “I’ve been cooking every day,” she says, “very simple things. A lot of vegetables. My husband particularly likes my shredded carrots with just a little ginger and some salt.”
Her life in London, she says, has never lost the magic that she felt when she first seized the luck of her scholarship. Before she masks up and heads out into the street, we talk a little bit about what freedom means to her. She dates her understanding of it to a teacher who supervised her at York University for her PhD (she was the first Chinese woman to gain a doctorate in England). At their first meeting she set out exactly what she was going to write. He listened and said: “So, give me your thesis.” Surprised, she explained of course she had not written it yet, and he said: “Well, you must have done, you already know the conclusion.”
At that moment, she says, she understood exactly what an open mind might be. How knowledge was something to be discovered, not received. And once she had that idea, she says, she never let it go.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is out now in paperback (Vintage, £9.99). To order a copu, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
