Jung Chang provided an illustration of the role of luck when discussing her biography of Mao at the Hay festival. The author of the best-selling family memoir Wild Swans, who spent over a decade researching the life of the Chinese dictator, was relaxing in her hotel room in Hong Kong when her husband and co-author Jon Halliday read in a local paper that the Zairean president, Mobuto Sese Seko, was also a guest there. We should try and get an interview, he suggested.
Exhausted by long days of research, Chang refused, announcing that she was going to get her hair styled instead. Once comfortably ensconced in the salon, who should she see come in but the African despot, dressed in his customary safari suit and leopard skin hat. Seizing her chance, Chang approached him and secured her interview. For once, she had cause to be grateful for the vanity of tyrants.
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