FLY, WILD SWANS: My Mother, Myself and China, by Jung Chang
In February 1988, when Jung Chang was 35 years old, her mother made a visit to London from Chengdu, China, after months spent wrangling the permissions for a travel visa. Chang had been living outside China for nearly a decade, working as a linguist, and left her mother alone during the day with a tape recorder set up at the dining table next to a bouquet of early daffodils.
The older woman spent weeks recounting family stories that spanned nearly a century: invasions, wars, famine. By the end of that summer, she had produced 60 hours of tape covering seven decades of political and social upheaval. It seemed to Chang at the time that her mother “knew writing was where my talent, and my heart, lay, and was encouraging me to fulfill myself by supplying me with material.”
Over the following decades, Chang went on to become one of the world’s most influential and popular chroniclers of China’s modern history. Her memoir debut, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” was published in 1991 to international acclaim, eventually selling over 15 million copies in more than 40 languages.
“Wild Swans” began with Chang’s grandmother — once a concubine to a Northern Chinese warlord — and recounted her mother’s work as a communist spy, her parents’ life as party officials during the famine of the Great Leap Forward and her own days as a student and Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.
Chang’s mother, De-hong, was the linchpin of that book, daring, savvy and warm. “My father’s devotion to communism was absolute,” Chang wrote. De-hong, however, was different. “Her commitment was tempered by both reason and emotion. She gave a space to the private; my father did not.”
Now, Chang has written an epilogue of sorts to “Wild Swans” and to her life’s work. “Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China” operates as several things: an account of her journey as a writer, a chance to correct the record and a paean to her mother. There is little revelation to be found here in Chang’s reflections on modern China, but for those versed in her family history, this updated account is illuminating even as it retreads familiar ground.
After a brief prologue, the book opens with a swift recap of the events covered in “Wild Swans” and then pivots to Chang’s arrival in London in 1978 at age 26 as a university student — an experience she compares to “landing on Mars.” Despite being heavily chaperoned, Chang tests the boundaries of her freedom there — with the encouragement of her mother, who always seems to know when to push her daughter and when to let her make her own decisions. (She does step in when an early romance threatens to derail Chang’s studies.)
Chang continued to research and write after the success of “Wild Swans,” and in this new account she revisits some of the controversy that followed — her assertion, for example, in 2005’s “Mao: The Unknown Story,” which she co-wrote with her Anglo-Irish husband, Jon Halliday, that a particularly famous episode in the Long March, the Battle of Luding Bridge, was not much of a battle at all.
Meetings and interviews with former Red Guards and party officials stand alongside the events of Chang’s expatriate life: love affairs, struggles with cancer, visits to her mother. Chang is not an overtly introspective memoirist, but she returns frequently to the shifting standards of personal freedom in her own world and the one she left behind. While Chang researched the biography of Mao, she writes, “the regime was of course watching me, but the surveillance was discreet.”
Chang published two more books after “Mao: The Unknown Story,” but these take up only a small part of “Fly, Wild Swans.” The account of her writing life shifts, toward the end of the book, to focus on the increasingly controlling leadership in Beijing. In 2018, President Xi Jinping announced that “slander” of any national heroes could result in imprisonment. Chang began to suspect she was being monitored even outside China.
In “Wild Swans,” Chang recounted a delusion her grandmother suffered shortly before her death in 1969, imagining a denunciation meeting in which she recalled being forced to stand on a small table facing an angry crowd. “It was as though,” she writes, “she felt in her own body and soul every bit of the pain that my mother suffered.”
Decades later, facing her own death, Chang’s mother must also consider political realities. In a moment of weakness, De-hong begs her daughter to return to her in China. And then she remembers herself. “Do your own things well and be happy, and I’m happy,” she tells Chang. “Don’t come back for this.”
FLY, WILD SWANS: My Mother, Myself and China | By Jung Chang | Harper | 336 pp. | $35
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