Remarkable success notoriously brings its own problems. Wild Swans, first published in 1991 and written by Jung Chang with the help of her husband, Irish-born historian and writer Jon Halliday, had a global impact few authors dare to dream of. It told the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China – Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself – and became one of the most popular nonfiction books in history, selling more than 13m copies in 37 languages and collecting a fistful of awards and commendations. For any author, following that would be a challenge. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang’s own departure from China in 1978, and revisiting episodes from the earlier work with added detail.
Wild Swans was Chang’s second book: her first was a biography of Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the early 20th-century revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which, she volunteers, had deservedly little impact. Wild Swans was different: animated by a powerful family story, set against the dramatic political background of war and revolution and enlivened by Halliday’s formidable narrative talent, it was an instant hit.
Chang and Halliday’s next book, a biography of Mao Zedong, suffered fierce criticism in the academy for a perceived lack of historical rigour. She subsequently produced a biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi and a book about the three Soong sisters, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister. While these displayed her signature approach of presenting China’s recent history through the lives of prominent women, her own story was placed on the back burner – until now.
To orient new readers, Fly, Wild Swans first returns to Chang’s grandmother’s birth in 1900, the binding of her feet and her marriage at 17 to a warlord from whose household she escaped with her infant daughter in her arms. That infant grew up to join the communist struggle against the ruling Kuomintang party and married a fellow revolutionary who became a senior official after the communist victory in the civil war. All might have been well, but both Chang’s parents lost their faith in communism during the mass starvation of the early 1960s that was a direct result of Mao’s earlier policies.
They began a retreat from political life, but this did not save the family from persecution in the Cultural Revolution, when, in order to reassert his dominance, Mao launched his Red Guards against party rivals and society at large. Chang was 14. Her father, Shou-yu, died in his early 50s as an indirect result of persecution, having wrestled, unsuccessfully, to reconcile his youthful idealism with the often dreadful brutality of Mao’s China.
Shou-yu was a puritan communist who had refused to get his wife, De-hong, into a good hospital during a potentially dangerous pregnancy and had gone out of his way to deny any appearance of helping a young relative who needed his endorsement for a job. De-hong complained to him that he might be a good communist, but he was “a rotten husband”. In Fly, Wild Swans, we learn not only of the extraordinary efforts De-hong, who had also come under attack in the Cultural Revolution, made to secure her husband’s release from detention, but also that, in his final years, Shou-yu came to regret his dogmatic behaviour.
Since 1991 China has gone from poverty to relative prosperity, becoming the world’s second largest economy; Chang herself went from being the daughter of a disgraced official to enjoying personal wealth and fame in the west. Although Wild Swans was banned in China, she was still able to conduct research there for several years, and in Fly, Wild Swans she recounts at some length the Chinese sources, interviews and archives on which the Mao biography was built. These included contacts of her own family in Sichuan, the province where Mao’s ultimate successor, Deng Xiaoping, was born. (The criticism of her work on Mao clearly rankled, and here Chang dismisses it as having been driven by western “apologists”.) She returned to China to visit her mother every year until the country’s change of political direction under Xi Jinping made it impossible.
By her own account, Chang comes from a family whose members repeatedly, and at great personal risk, took moral stands, first enlisting in the Communist party to fight oppression and injustice, and later standing up to the injustices and abuses perpetrated by the party itself. De-hong, in a final act of love, asks Chang’s brother not to take the risk of returning to China, fearing it would be unsafe for him. Chang herself notes that Xi Jinping had decreed that any “insult or slander” of the honour and reputation of “heroes and martyrs” is a crime punishable by imprisonment. “As Mao was regarded as the primary hero of the nation,” she writes, “it began to sink in that … I faced incarceration when I was in China.” She realises that she will never see her ailing mother again.
Few can match Chang’s ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped western understanding of China as broadly. Nearly 35 years on from the book that made her name, this story of suffering and success has the air of a closing chapter, a reckoning with both her achievements and the cost of the path she chose.
• Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
