London-based Chinese-born writer Jung Chang is best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans that sold over 10 million copies worldwide. As she looks forward to participating in the upcoming Jaipur Literature Festival from January 23 to January 27, she talks about writing about the Soong sisters from Shanghai in her latest book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, and her struggle to be a writer whose books are banned in China, where she is restricted to visit her family for 15 days every year.
Tell us about the Soong sisters and your latest book.
After I wrote Mao: The Unknown Story with my husband Jon Halliday, and then Empress Dowager Cixi, I initially wanted to write about Sun Yat-sen, the ‘Father of Republican China’. He was a programme-setter like Mao and Cixi, and was the man most responsible for China’s transition from Cixi to Mao. But when I was piecing together Sun’s life, the personalities of his wife (Soong Ching-ling) and her sisters (Ei-ling and May-ling) emerged and captured my imagination. I was moved by their strength, courage, and passionate love, as well as despair, fear and heartbreak. I decided to make them the subjects of my new book instead.
Tell our readers a little about the research process that went behind the book.
In writing about the sisters—and along with them China’s colossi Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek (husband of May-ling)—I have been blessed with abundant material. Copious correspondence, writings and memoirs, including many kept in China, have been published or made available. In Taiwan, now a democracy, archives have opened their doors. London, where Sun initiated his own kidnapping that launched his career, offers many insights. Above all, in America, to which the extended family was closely connected, institutions and libraries house numerous collections of documents that are simply treasure troves. A most valuable and fairly recent addition is Chiang Kai-shek’s diary, which he wrote every day for 57 years, and which is unusually personal, with many revelations about his marriage with May-ling.In the past decades when I was writing my previous biographies, especially Mao: The Unknown Story, I conducted hundreds of interviews, and many of those remain highly relevant to this book. Indeed some historical figures, now deceased, were close to the Soong sisters and offered unique and invaluable recollections and insights. I was able to use the records of those interviews.
You have said earlier that when you were young, it was the most dangerous profession for one to be a writer. How did you decide to be one? Was there struggle?
I wrote my first poem on my 16th birthday in 1968. It was in the Cultural Revolution when books were burnt across China. I was lying in bed polishing my poem when I heard the door banging. The Red Guards—Mao’s task force in the Cultural Revolution—had come to raid our flat. If they saw my poem, my family and I would have been in trouble. I had to rush to the bathroom quickly to tear up the poem and flush it down the toilet. That was the end of my first venture in writing. But the desire to write never left me. In the following years, I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas and worked as a peasant; then I worked as a steelworker and an electrician. When I would spread manure in the paddy fields and when I was checking electricity supplies on top of the electricity poles, I was always writing in my head with an imaginary pen. In 1976, Mao died, and China began to change. In 1978, I came to Britain. In 1988, my mother visited me in London. For the first time in our lives, she told me the story of her life and that of my grandmother. My mother stayed with me for six months and she talked every day. By the time she left London, she had left me 60 hours of tape recording. That’s how I started writing Wild Swans. Thanks to that book, I became a writer. So, it was my mother who inspired me to write.
You face censore and whose books are banned in her own country. You are also restricted to 15 days every year to visit your family in China. How does that feel since you have grown up there?
I miss my mother. She is 88 and frail. Whenever she falls dangerously ill, I feel extremely anxious and sad that I am not there with her. I live in dread that my ‘privilege’ to visit my mother for two weeks a year may be revoked someday, and I may never see my mother again. But I realise this is the price I pay for writing honestly.
You have earlier said that history is one of the biggest taboos in China today. According to you, is it still dangerous for writers to write about China?
Yes, it is still dangerous for people in China to write against the Party line. I sympathise with their tremendous sense of frustration.
What are you working on next?
I am translating my new book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, into Chinese, for publication in Taiwan. Unfortunately (or maybe, fortunately!), I have to write my books twice, once in English, and once in Chinese. I love working on the translations. After all, Chinese is my mother tongue. I just feel very sad that all my books are banned in Mainland China.