‘Fly, Wild Swans’ is Jung Chang’s painfully personal tribute to her mother : NPR

As a student of Chinese history, I perk up a little when historians turn their gaze inward—examining how they came to be interested in the worlds they study and how their lives shape the way they understand those worlds.

This 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 every sense, a sequel to his best-selling 1991 memoir, Wild swans: three girls from China.

Chang, often with her husband Jon Halliday, has written biographical profiles of Mao Zedong, Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing empire, and the fascinating Soong sisters, a trio of siblings at the center of 20th-century Chinese politics, from Beijing to Taipei.

But Chang’s writings were most popular when she delved into her personal history, and Fly, wild swans is by far his most painfully personal to date – an unflinching assessment of his life and career and the role those most dear to him played in both.

“In fact, the past has never been very far in my later life. It shaped me and today’s China, and what’s more, it promises to herald the future,” Chang writes at the beginning of his book.

The most important person in this book is Chang’s nonagenarian mother, to whom the book is dedicated and to whom Chang has not been able to visit in China since 2018. The reasons for this slowly reveal themselves over the course of the book.

In simple, direct prose, Chang describes in new detail the horrors his parents endured during China’s Cultural Revolution. Later – after a period of exciting intellectual openness in China – Chang encountered more and more obstacles in her own work, including state-appointed monitors who followed those she encountered. The people interviewed begin to decline his requests.

Often, she adopts a repentant tone, acknowledging the trouble she feels she has caused those close to her through her writing. This book is therefore also the author’s statement for the record – a pre-apology to her friends in China, but especially to her mother, who, according to Chang, put her personal safety at risk to allow her daughter to pursue a career abroad.

The book is full of historical Easter eggs, including the tantalizing revelation that many recordings of interviews she conducted for her biography of Mao with Communist Party insiders will be made public when it is safe to do so for the interviewees.

The book also contains scenes of intense pain. Chang, 73, recounts a memory when, as a teenager, she shouted 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 through remote China to a labor camp where his father was being held, to cheer him up.

Labor camp inmates, Chang writes, “said that the echoes of the river in the dead of night sounded like ghosts sobbing. The stories made me very worried about my father, especially since he had previously suffered a nervous breakdown and could end his life if he suddenly lost his mind. I was determined to go visit him as soon as possible, to make him feel loved and that life was worth living.

As a journalist based in China until 2022, I have also seen many of the obstacles Chang describes in Fly, wild swans – the increasing physical and digital surveillance of sources and, of course, the strong fear among those who have invested in establishing personal connections and careers in China of being cut off forever from the country and their loved ones. For Chang, a naturalized British citizen, each visa to return to China to see his mother becomes more and more difficult to obtain, until he is finally refused one.

Readers can see whatever they want in this book, as if it were a textual Rorschach test. It is equal parts memoir, journalistic prose, and history. It offers insight into China’s political elite, communist history and the economic boom years of the 1980s and 1990s.

It is also a book of lasting filial love. Its pages are infused with love for his mother and for the myriad anonymous Chinese sources and scholars who assist Chang in researching his historical projects – and have suffered backlash as a result.

“When I looked at her weakened but still strong face, a thousand memories popped into my head, of this extraordinary woman, my mother, and everything I owed her in my life: my freedom, my happiness, my writing career and being the person I was – and am,” Chang writes of one of his video calls with his aging mother.

Chang has a talent for leveraging the individual’s story to speak to the larger societal forces at play around them. And in Chang’s courageous, patriotic mother, readers can also see a larger metaphor for China writ large, a country that has been stifled and policed ​​by a resurgent party state led by its top leader, Xi Jinping.