‘My books mean I can’t visit my dying mother in China’

Jung Chang’s memoir ‘Wild Swans’ won acclaim and a huge readership in the Nineties – but the author paid a high price for writing truthfully about Beijing’s brutal regime. She tells Julia Llewellyn Smith about penning a long-awaited sequel

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“I don’t really feel fear, I’m slightly immune to it now,” says Jung Chang. The author of Wild Swans, the bestselling chronicle of her life, and the lives of her mother and grandmother, in 20th-century China, is referring specifically to the morning in 2006 when she entered her study to find the large plants that had adorned her balcony had vanished. Someone had meticulously untangled and cut them away from the trellis and removed them, while she and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, had been sleeping in the room just above.

“It was a warning shot from Beijing,” she says. “It reminded me of the scene in The Godfather in which the mafia sent a message by putting a horse’s head in a man’s bed while he slept. The intrusion was a coded message saying, ‘We can get you.’ But I’ve made up my mind: I’ll say what’s true and say exactly what I want to say.”

It's impossible to understate the impact of Wild Swans, which was published in 1991 and became one of the bestselling nonfiction works of all time, selling more than 15 million copies and translated into around 40 languages. Beginning with the unforgettable line, “At the age of 15 my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general,” it documented Chang’s family’s harrowing experiences during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution - when her father was tortured, paraded in the street and sent to a labour camp where he went insane.

Her mother was made to kneel on broken glass while a mob berated her, while the teenage Chang was banished from her home to be “reformed” by working as a peasant on the edge of the Himalayas.