Fly, Wild Swans

A follow-up to Jung Chang's internationally acclaimed memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), this book picks up where that earlier work left off and brings the story of Chang's family, and of China itself, up to the present day. While Wild Swans ended in 1978 when Chang became one of the first Chinese citizens to leave Communist China for the West, this book traces the nearly half century since, during which Chang has lived in London while remaining deeply entwined with her native country through visits to her mother, research for her books, and an escalating confrontation with the Chinese state.

The book opens with Chang's early life in Mao Zedong's China. Born in 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan province, Chang's mother faced a high-risk delivery because Chang's father, Chang Shou-yu, the Communist governor of Yibin, refused to transfer her to a better-equipped hospital, citing the Party's prohibition on nepotism. Chang was born healthy, but her father's rigid idealism defined his life: He vetoed his own brother's promotion and refused even minor favors to relatives. Chang's mother, ten years younger and also a committed Communist, grew disillusioned earlier, particularly after being forced to walk while pregnant on the march from Manchuria to Sichuan because riding in her husband's jeep would constitute favoritism. She suffered a miscarriage and nearly died. Both parents' faith further eroded during the Great Famine of 1958 to 1961, when some forty million people starved.

When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, a decade-long campaign aimed at purging Party officials and destroying traditional culture, Chang's father wrote to Mao asking him to stop the violence. He was arrested, beaten, and tortured at denunciation meetings, public rituals in which victims were humiliated before crowds. Chang's mother twice traveled to Beijing to appeal for his release, the second time securing a directive from Premier Zhou Enlai affirming her husband's rights. Chang's grandmother hid this document inside one of her padded shoes for eleven years. The family was scattered to labor camps and remote villages. Chang's father, broken by years of persecution, died of heart failure in 1975 at fifty-four.

After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping rose to power and began reforms. Chang's mother campaigned relentlessly to rehabilitate her husband, eventually producing Zhou Enlai's hidden note. The new verdict declared Chang's father "a good Communist," clearing the way for Chang to accept a scholarship to Britain. She flew out of China in September 1978.

Arriving in London at twenty-six, having grown up in near-total isolation, Chang chafed against embassy rules forbidding students from going out alone or socializing freely. As Deng's reforms loosened control, she broke free and made what she calls her "biggest discovery," that foreigners are the same human beings as the Chinese. At the University of York, she began a master's in linguistics under Professor Bob Le Page, whose observation that she had reached her conclusions before examining evidence taught her to follow facts rather than ideology, a principle that became her compass as a writer.

A letter from her mother warning her never to become like Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a woman wholly dependent on her husband, steered Chang away from an infatuation that nearly derailed her studies. She completed her doctorate in 1982, becoming the first person from Communist China to obtain a PhD from a British university. Her decision to marry Yu Chun Yee, a Singaporean pianist, provoked a battle with Chinese authorities, who forbade citizens from marrying foreigners. Her mother shielded her from immense pressure, while her brother Xiaohei wrote, "You are out of the cage now. Fly away, fly to the sky!"

In 1983, Chang returned to Chengdu for an emotional reunion. The following year, the People's Communes were abolished, freeing 550 million peasants who had been quasi-serfs tied to their villages, and by 1985, Chang was bringing Western businessmen to Sichuan to meet entrepreneurs eager for foreign investment. Her mother, sensing that Chang's truthful writing would put her at odds with the regime, took early retirement to eliminate any pretext for accusing her of leaking state secrets, freeing her daughter to write without constraint.

During a 1988 visit to London, Chang's mother recorded sixty hours of family stories on tape. Inspired, Chang wrote Wild Swans with the help of Jon Halliday, an Anglo-Irish historian she had fallen in love with after separating from Yee. Her mother offered crucial advice: Stick to personal stories, since Chang's understanding of modern China had been shaped by indoctrination. After the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, Chang condemned the killings on British television, severing her relationship with the Chinese embassy. In spring 1990, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her mother told her not to worry about safety or the book's reception: "I have been through the worst, and nothing can be as bad as that." Published in 1991, Wild Swans sold tens of millions of copies worldwide but was immediately banned in China, where it remains prohibited.

From 1993, Chang and Jon spent a decade researching a biography of Mao. Chang traveled to China twice a year, interviewing hundreds of witnesses from Mao's inner circle, including his youngest daughter, Li Na, and Wang Guangmei, widow of President Liu Shaoqi. In the Russian archives, opened by President Boris Yeltsin, Jon uncovered documents about Moscow's involvement in founding the Chinese Communist Party. At the Luding Bridge, a celebrated site from the Long March, the Party's grueling 1934-35 military retreat, Chang discovered that the famous battle described in propaganda never happened.

Published in 2005, Mao: The Unknown Story documents that Mao was responsible for over seventy million deaths in peacetime, including close to thirty-eight million in the Great Famine, caused by deliberate food exports to pay for military industries. Chang faced threats over passages identifying a general in the Kuomintang, China's Nationalist Party, as a Communist sleeper agent. One morning she found all her balcony plants in London severed by a serrated knife, a professional job that police identified as a coded warning.

In October 2007, Beijing refused Chang a visa to see her ailing mother unless she stopped talking about Mao worldwide and issued a public apology for her book. With British diplomatic support, she prepared a public campaign, and Beijing relented at the last minute. From then on, she received annual visas of ten to fifteen days, each requiring direct dealings with China's State Security Ministry, whose officers accompanied her throughout the country.

The rise of Xi Jinping, who became leader of the Communist Party in 2012, brought a decisive shift. A devoted Maoist determined to perpetuate the Party's monopoly of power, Xi progressively tightened control. In 2018, he abolished presidential term limits and decreed that any insult to "heroes and martyrs" was punishable by imprisonment. As a biographer who documented Mao's misrule, Chang realized she faced incarceration if she returned. Her May 2018 trip was her last.

During China's Covid-19 lockdown, Chang's mother spent years hospitalized, unable to see even her children in Chengdu. Chang communicated through video calls. In late 2023, her ninety-two-year-old mother began kissing the phone screen and saying she missed Chang terribly. In March 2024, after another hemorrhage, a doctor told the family to prepare for death. Chang decided she could not go. Her mother said: "I am over ninety. Life will naturally move on to death. It's not a big thing, and don't think too much of it. Do your own things well and be happy, and I am happy." She added: "Don't come back for this." With these words, she removed the agony from the most unbearable decision of her daughter's life.

In a brief epilogue, Chang reflects that her fear of Xi's neo-Maoist ambitions has subsided. She traces her optimism to her mother, who "never abandons hope however despairing the situation."