As a student of Chinese history, I sit up a little straighter when historians turn the lens back on themselves — examining how they came to be interested in the worlds they study, and how their lives shape how they understand those worlds.
That is what Jung Chang, a London-based historian of modern China, does in her latest book, Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China — in all senses a sequel to her 1991 bestselling memoirish book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China.
Chang, often with her husband Jon Halliday, has written biographical profiles of Mao Zedong, the Qing Empire's Empress Dowager Cixi, and the fascinating Soong sisters, a trio of siblings at the center of 20th century Chinese politics from Beijing to Taipei.
But Chang's writing has been most popular when she probes her personal history, and Fly, Wild Swans is by far her most painfully personal yet — an unflinching assessment of her life and career and the role those dearest to her played in both.
"In fact, the past has never been far away in my subsequent life. It has shaped me, and molded present-day China, and what's more, it promises to herald the future," Chang writes at the start of her book.
The most important person in this book is Chang's nonagenarian mother, to whom the book is dedicated and whom Chang has been unable to visit in China since 2018. The reasons for this are slowly spooled out over the course of the book.
In simple, straightforward prose, Chang describes in new detail the horrors her parents suffered through during China's Cultural Revolution. Later — after a period of thrilling intellectual openness in China — Chang encounters more and more obstacles to her own work, including state-assigned minders who track those whom she meets. Interviewees begin declining her requests.
Often, she strikes a repentant tone, acknowledging the trouble she feels she has caused those close to her through her writing. This book is, then, the author's statement for the record as well — an advance apology to her friends in China, but most of all to her mother, who, in Chang's telling, has put her personal safety at risk to enable her daughter's career abroad.
The book is chock-full of historical Easter eggs, including the tantalizing revelation that many of the recordings of interviews she conducted for her Mao biography with Communist party insiders will go public when it is safe for those interviewed.
The book also contains scenes of intense pain. Chang, 73, writes about one memory where, as a teenager, she screamed her mother's name outside a temporary detention center during the Cultural Revolution, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. In another extraordinary anecdote, Chang describes hitchhiking her way across remote China to a labor camp her father was being held in, to lift his spirits.
The inmates at the labor camp, Chang writes, "said the echoes of the river in the dead of night sounded like the sobbing of ghosts. The stories made me very anxious about my father, especially as he had already suffered a mental breakdown and could end his own life if his mind suddenly snapped. I was determined to go and visit him as soon as possible, to make him feel that he was loved and life was worth living."
As a journalist based in China until 2022, I also saw many of the obstacles Chang describes in Fly, Wild Swans — the increasing in-person and digital surveillance of sources, and of course, the heavy fear among those who have invested in building personal ties and careers in China of being cut off forever from the country and from loved ones there. For Chang, a naturalized British citizen, each visa to travel back to China to see her mother becomes more and more arduous to obtain, until eventually, she is denied one.
Readers can see what they want in this book, as if it is a textual Rorschach test. It is equal parts memoir, journalist prose and history. It offers insights into elite Chinese politics, Communist history and the economic boom years of the 1980s and 1990s.
It is also a book of enduring filial love. Its pages are suffused with love for her mother and for the myriad anonymous Chinese sources and academics who help Chang in researching her historical projects — and suffered blowback as a result.
"When I gazed at her enfeebled but still strong face, a thousand memories surged in my head, of this extraordinary woman, my mother, and of how much I owed her in my life: my freedom, my happiness, my career as a writer, and being the person I was — and I am," Chang writes about one of her video calls with her aging mother.
Chang has a talent for tapping the history of the individual to speak to the broader societal forces at play around them. And in Chang's brave and patriotic mother, readers may also perceive a broader metaphor for China writ large, a country that has been smothered and surveilled by a resurgent party state under its top leader, Xi Jinping.
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