I was a weird teenager. I brought Jung Chang’s seminal 1991 epic Wild Swans to a Year Nine reading lesson, having picked it up off my mum’s shelf and deciding it sounds interesting. It was a slightly unconventional choice for a thirteen year old. The book is sprawling, an account of Jung’s grandmother and mother’s lives before and during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, leading up to her own autobiography in the book’s final third. It has been translated into 37 languages and has sold 13 million copies since release. It has also been banned in her home country, China.
Over thirty years later, Jung is revisiting her family histories once again for a follow-up, titled Fly, Wild Swans. She describes it as a “behind-the-scenes” of all her books, including her biographies of Empress Dowager Cixi and Mao himself (written with husband Jon Halliday). She is an incredibly multifaceted writer, at once memoirist, historian, and biographer – and a natural speaker. In conversation with The Observer‘s Erica Wagner, it is Jung and her anecdotes that command the stage.
Dressed in a striking geometric shirt paired with a fabulous pink fluffy handbag, Jung takes us effortlessly through a lifetime of stories, beginning with her grandmother’s daring escape from her unloving husband’s compound. This is a story that forms the backbone of Wild Swans, her grandmother’s experiences as a concubine in 1920s Beijing is present throughout all 500 pages, and is clearly heavy on Jung’s heart even now.
“I didn’t want to think about the past. I wanted to forget about it,” she says, describing the reluctance she had for writing Wild Swans in the first place. She recounts how, when her mother came to visit her in London, she recorded over sixty hours of tapes detailing both her and her family’s history, leading to the initial idea for Wild Swans.
Writing was not a profession that was possible back in China. Jung recalls writing her first poem as a teenager, whilst her parents were in detention centres. Immediately after finishing the poem, a Red Guard raid on the house lead her to flush her poem down the toilet. “To be a writer in China was to engage in the most dangerous profession.” She describes a period of life in which she had a number of manual jobs in the rural countryside. “I was always writing with an invisible pen. It was my mother who helped me find that pen.”
Throughout the talk, Jung weaves a picture of a family history closely intertwined with her own. She hesitates before telling us about her father, a man who was initially high up in the Communist party but became disillusioned with Mao, leading to his torture and exile as punishment for protesting the regime. Her mother had to spend years clearing his name to allow Jung to leave for England on a scholarship.
She delights in describing her initial arrival to London in 1978, saying it was like “landing on Mars,” and that she was treated as such. She even began saying she was from South Korea to avoid the deluge of questions about her home nation. She describes how she had no clothes other than her school uniform when she first arrived, and the reliance she had on church jumble sales. She laughs as she tells us that one girl on her degree course told her that she always wore “such great vintage.”
She has been living in London ever since, which has at points meant an incredibly strained relationship with her native country and her relatives within it. After the publication of her Mao biography in 2005, China tried to ban her from entering the country entirely. Our government liaised with the Chinese to allow her in for a few weeks to see her elderly mother, with the Chinese forced to cooperate due to their intention to host the 2008 Olympics. Things have only gotten worse since.
Since Xi Jinping’s ascension to President of China in 2013, he has made it illegal to criticise revolutionary generals, making her return to China even more difficult. She cites the 2019 Hong Kong protests as the most scared she has felt since she was a child. It is clear she is uneasy about the state of her home country, and its relationship with the West.
Wagner asks her how she feels about Mao apologists, using American diplomat Henry Kissinger as an example. She tells a story about interviewing Kissinger for Mao, and how she delighted in making him squirm by pushing back against his official spiel. Research for Mao took herself and Halliday all across the world, recounting an accidental meeting with the President of Zaire (now Congo) Mobuto Sese Seko in a Hong Kong hotel. They had been trying to track him down for interview for months, and ended up arranging the interview by accident whilst Jung was getting her hair done.
She ends the talk with a return to Mao himself, concretely describing how the regime views the whole of the West as a threat now, especially since the assertion of hard-line communism post-2018. Her only hope is that Xi has only moderate support from within his own people.
These are all tales that make up Fly, Wild Swans, which in the words of the Guardian’s Isabel Hilton is “a reckoning with both her achievements and the cost of the path she chose.” She is translating the book into Chinese herself, but remarks that it will only be allowed to be sold in Taiwan. It feels only right that she bring the story up to date. China has developed a lot since 1991 and so have Jung’s feelings towards herself, her family, and the country that raised her.
Fly, Wild Swans is out now in hardback.
For more coverage of the 2025 Manchester Literature Festival, please see below:
Manchester Literature Festival: 8 must-see events
Sarah Hall & Daisy Johnson at Manchester Literature Festival: folklore and new voices
