JUNG CHANG’s art of expressing the deepest meaning in the fewest words is illustrated to perfection in the dedication to this sequel to Wild Swans, her memoir of growing up in Mao’s China: “To my mother, whose deathbed I am unable to visit.”
It is more than a style preference. The physical torture, the denunciations, and the humiliations that her mother suffered are almost too much to voice. They are told squarely but sparely, in snapshots, like Chang’s memory of helping to pick from her mother’s knees the fragments of glass on which she had been forced to kneel; and in understated glimpses: “I caught sight of a vague figure falling out of an upstairs window.”
The author got British citizenship in 1989. This memoir covers the writing and publication of Wild Swans, still banned in China, and of the seminal biography of Mao, co-written with her husband, Jon Halliday. The book took ten years to research and two to write. She had to agree to not talk about it in public in China, and her refusal to renounce it put her under increasing surveillance. Ever fearful that on her visits home (her visa hard-won), Chang “might be walking back into a cage and the door might be shut”, her dying mother forbade her to come.
The book covers the burst of entrepreneurial dynamism which followed the freeing of “50 million quasi-serfs” after the Revolution ended. She observes detail: pots of chrysanthemums on stages once platforms for horrific denunciations — but, conversely, the ugly blocks of flats that replaced historic buildings in obedience to Mao’s call for the “smashing up of the old culture”. She covers, too, the rise and ambition of Chairman Xi Jinping to create a neo-Maoist state.
Chang is a fine historian as well as memoir-writer. The book is pertinent, illuminating in its scope, and heart-breaking in its anguish. Remaining optimistic in spite of it all, she concludes: “I want my optimism to be like my mother’s.”
Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwrite
Fly, Wild Swans: My mother, myself and China
Jung Chang
HarperCollins £25
(978-0-00-866106-9)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50