'Fly, Wild Swans' is Jung Chang's painfully personal tribute to her mother

"As a student of Chinese history, I sit up a little straighter when historians turn the lens back on themselves examining how they came to be interested in the worlds they study, and how their lives shape how they understand those worlds. That 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 all senses a sequel to her 1991 bestselling memoirish book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China."

"The most important person in this book is Chang's nonagenarian mother, to whom the book is dedicated and whom Chang has been unable to visit in China since 2018. The reasons for this are slowly spooled out over the course of the book. In simple, straightforward prose, Chang describes in new detail the horrors her parents suffered through during China's Cultural Revolution."

Jung Chang, a London-based historian of modern China, presents a painfully personal account that links family experience to broader political developments. The narrative recounts parental suffering during the Cultural Revolution and a later period of intellectual openness followed by increasing state interference. State-assigned minders, declining interview participation, and surveillance of contacts constrained research access. Chang reports an inability to visit her nonagenarian mother since 2018 and expresses remorse for causing trouble to close associates. The material connects private memory, professional consequence, and evolving relations with China across decades.

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