Jung Chang
When “Wild Swans” was first published in 1991, author Jung Chang had already made history as the first person from the PRC to be awarded a Ph.D from a British university. Her landmark biographical work recounted three generations of women living through China’s tumultuous 20th century. Ten million copies and a mainland ban later, she was a veritable literary star. She followed her success with the controversial 2005 bestseller, “Mao: The Unknown Story”—a compulsively readable and impressively researched account of Mao Zedong’s life. In Hong Kong earlier this month on a book tour, she sat down with Sean Hebert to discuss her latest biography—“Empress Dowaer Cixi.”
HK Magazine: You books are widely read, and you make your subjects incredibly accessible. Do you ever feel that fellow academics are vengeful about your success?
Jung Chang: My books do get a wide audience, so it’s only fair that I get attacked. You always have to pay some price for success, but I don’t resent that. I also don’t engage the critics. I would if they pointed out a factual error, but I am very pleased to say that they haven’t—not one since the publication of “Mao” in 2005.
HK: How do you respond to the claims that your family’s clashes with the CCP during the Cultural Revolution have biased your portrayal of Mao?
JC: My answer is this: there is nothing wrong with someone wanting to take revenge on Mao. Even if I wrote a book in order to get even—which was not my goal—I think that’s completely legitimate. But I don’t want to live in an unhappy frame of mind. If I think of revenge, it hurts me more than Mao—he’s dead. I want to be happy and enjoy life, so that’s not my objective. What I love is being a historical detective. I want to get to the bottom of things. I got tremendous pleasure from getting into Mao’s head.
HK: The fluidity of your prose and the way you prioritize narrative distinguishes your work from more dense academic accounts. Is that a conscious choice you’ve made?
JC: Yes. I was an academic—I got my doctorate, I taught, and so on. But I hate dry, turgid text, and when authors make something unnecessarily incomprehensible. My goal is to not let language stand in the way of my meaning. I want my language to be as transparent as possible. But that’s not very easy to do. You have to have a total understanding of your subject to achieve that. It’s a challenge—it’s one step ahead of turgid text.
HK: Keeping your account readable but also accurate must be hard. It must be tempting to gloss over an inconvenient bit of truth for the sake of the narrative.
JC: I don’t take liberties in my work. All the facts are taken from original documents, and not a single comma or quote is imagined. A historian’s job is to seek facts from primary sources, and then to interpret these facts. But I do my interpretations in different ways. After I’ve surveyed a large number of documents, I feel confident in making my interpretations. That confidence is not based on blind faith in myself, but is thanks to me going through the many different interpretations and finding that the others don’t make sense.
HK: Is it a relief to be publishing a book now about Empress Dowager Cixi, who predates the Communist Party? Will that insulate you from some of the heat you’ve received for past work?
JC: I have no idea—Beijing might find Cixi sensitive. I am waiting to see. We’ve yet to see the attacks, although there have been a few rather negative reviews. There are people who wrote Chinese history in a certain way and portrayed Cixi in a certain way, who are subverted by my version. Prejudices are famously hard to correct, and the prejudice against Cixi is deep-rooted. Her achievements were not given credit—full stop—and the reason is largely because she was a semi-literate woman. How could she possibly legitimate reforms? Here is this woman who is clearly much smarter than her son and adopted son, and yet she had to retire once they grew up and had to see them make a mess of the country. She was not even able to defend herself simply because she was a woman, and she was not entitled to rule.
HK: Could your portrayal of Cixi be considered a feminist one?
JC: No one has called me a feminist. The term is so vague, but I do feel the injustice towards women—particularly in Cixi’s days. Foot binding alone shows us that. But I think Cixi was a feminist herself, because she espoused women’s liberation in China. Under her rule in 1903, people were declaring in Chinese magazines that the 20th century was the century of women’s rights. That’s something.