Still flying

34 years after Wild Swans took the world by storm, Jung Chang resumes her story, detailing the backlash from Beijing.

- SARAH LANG

When Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China landed in the world in 1991, it was an immediate bestseller. Jung Chang's story of modern Chinese history as the background to the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself sold 13 million copies in 37 languages, but none in mainland China, where it is still banned.

Now, more than 30 years later, she has returned to her family story in Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China.

Fearful of arrest should she enter China due to her highly critical biography of Mao Zedong, London-based Chang keeps in touch with her mother, Bao Qin, now 94 and living in Chengdu, via video calls. One such call was the genus for Fly, Wild Swans.

“She pressed her face to the screen to kiss me,” Chang says. “I was very moved because my mother, much as she loved me, I don't think kissed me when I was an adult. We hugged a lot. I think her suddenly becoming emotionally demonstrative was because she'd always been so strong and was finally letting down a guard.

“She said, ‘I miss you terribly, I want to see you. I said, ‘You're seeing me here [on a screen]’, and she said, ‘It’s not the same, I want to put my arms around you.”

The next day, Bao Qin rang back to tell her daughter not to pay any attention to what she had said. “She was clearly afraid her words might put pressure on me and I might take dangerous risks.”

Looking at her mother’s face, Chang contemplated something. “People often asked if I'd write a sequel to Wild Swans,” she says.

She didn’t think she had enough material. “But looking at my mother, I thought, ‘Maybe there's enough for a sequel.”

A PROBLEM FOR BEIJING

Fly, Wild Swans begins with Chang's childhood in Mao's China, and ends in the present day, in Xi Jinping’s China and in London.