Jung Chang talks Empress Dowager Cixi, flirting with a military dictator and advice from Imelda Marcos
Wild Swans author, who appeared at the 2017 Hong Kong International Literary Festival, still has mixed feelings about China. She admitted good things have happened there, but notes ‘my books are still banned’
If Empress Dowager Cixi had been at last month’s 19th National People’s Congress of the Communist Party, she would have been frustrated to see so few women on stage with President Xi Jinping, says the biographer of one of the most important women in Chinese history.
“[Empress Dowager Cixi] was the first feminist in China – she banned foot binding, she released women from their homes and encouraged them to have an education,” author Jung Chang told an audience at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.
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It was only when Chang was writing her first book, Wild Swans, a memoir about her family’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, that she realised it was Empress Dowager Cixi who had banned foot binding.
“My grandmother had bound feet. She was my height, but her feet were like this,” said Chang, holding up a tiny embroidered shoe. “Only the big toe was allowed to grow and the other four toes and the arch were crushed under a stone. From the age of two, my grandmother grew up in excruciating pain.”
It was a packed house upstairs at the Fringe Club in Central and collectively the audience leaned forward to get a closer look at the shoe. This is why people come to literary festivals – to get closer to the authors, to hear the stories outside their books – and Chang was in full flow. Dressed in a full-length forest green Issey Miyake gown, she looked every bit an empress herself.
