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- [00:02]
Jung Chang
China does not have a religion, did not have a religion that urges people to be kind, to be universally kind. So people depend or have depended on their own nature, either to be kind or to be unkind. I mean, there is not a general education to teach people to be kind universally, to think for the other people and to be kind to other people. I think there is that. I mean, what I think was more awful was the communist regime, particularly under Mao, used this deep rooted unkindness and cruelty for political means.
- [00:57]
Yasha Monk
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is Jung Chang. She is one of China's best selling authors. She has written the book Wild Swans which follows three generations of her family, her grandmother, her mother and herself, through the turbulent history of the country in the 20th century. She has written a number of history books about fascinating Chinese figures, from Sun Yat Sen to the Emperor Dowager Sisi. And she has just published a follow up work called Fly Wild. My Mother, Myself and China. We talk today about how to make sense of Chinese history, how the country has changed over the last hundred years, how the lives of individual Chinese people, and particularly women, have been determined by large political events over which they had very limited agency. About why it is that when you read Chinese literature, whether famous short story writers like Lu sun or indeed the works of Jungchang herself, you often get a sense of a real social cruelty, of family members and neighbors treating each other in very cutthroat, very hostile ways. We talk about the Cultural Revolution, what it was like to be young teenager in the Cultural Revolution, why Jungchang found it intoxicating, but also why she clearly came to understand how horrible its cruelty was. And finally, in the part reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about China today. How does Jung see China's current state? Does she have any hopes for the country liberalizing in the coming decades? And does she understand why some Chinese people might say that given the cruelties of Chinese history for the last 200 years, from the foreign domination of parts of the 19th century to the warlords period, to the rule of the Kuomintang, cruel, violent in its own ways, to the famines of the Great Leap and the Castle Revolution, it might be better living today than in any other period of recent Chinese history. Spoiler alert. She does not agree with that and she gives us an answer as to which period she might want to live in instead. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support this podcast, to stop hitting this annoying paywall, to just show that you appreciate the work we do and make our day go to yashamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamunk.subtech.com. Yong Chung, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:12]
Jung Chang
Thank you for having me.
- [04:14]
Yasha Monk
Well, I really look forward to this conversation. You have a very personal way to describe a very broad swath of Chinese history. What do you think that we miss when we look at the history of a country that's been written through revolutions, through political intrigue, through defenestrations at the level of high politics? Why is it that we need to look at the lives of individual Chinese people to illuminate the history of this country?
- [04:46]
Jung Chang
Well, I actually did write some history books that are not looking at the history through my own perspective, but I would like to write about my family, about my mother, my grandmother, my father, and now myself part of it. And I think people can identify with the individuals. I mean, that way history comes more alive than when you just write about history, you know, in a non personal way. So while Swan, you know, has been read by tens of millions of people, I've got these thousands of letters. They move me very much because I feel that they identify with our stories. And so this time when I feel. I felt in 2023, I would like to write a sequel to Wild Swans, a sequel that is also a book of its own. And I'm also looking forward to very personal reactions from readers.
- [06:11]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, the thing that strikes me about Wild Swans and now the Sequel is the attempt to show the effect of history in the lives of individuals. I find that that's something that I'm drawn to, whether it's in straightforward history books, whether it's in fictional books, or whether it's in the form of narrative historical work that you're engaged in. That, to me, what's really moving is to see how the lives of some very ordinary individuals, some very heroic individuals, really is determined by big historical events that are outside of their keeping. Do you think that this sort of divides a little bit countries that have had these very big historical traumatic events from countries that are relatively more placid? I find a real contrast between American literature, for example, and some European literature, as well as a lot of Chinese literature. In that kind of sensibility, I often struggle to approach American fiction because it's sort of quintessentially, and I know that I'm slightly simplifying this about people who grew up in affluent suburbs and struggle with the limitations of those suburbs and try to discover themselves as individuals. I'm struck by the contrast of that to the ways of trying to grapple with history that you see in people writing about China and people writing about 2017 and to European history and so on.
- [07:35]
Jung Chang
Well, to me, when I'm writing this book, Fly Wild Swans, as well as when I was writing Wild Swans, I focused on our stories and our feelings. And often I realized all the time, in fact, I realized that history is never far away from our lives. I mean, it was the background and in many way our life interact with the greater the landscape of history. And so I think that way I write my personal story. But the readers get to know something about the history as well. And also they can feel the kind of the feelings which, you know, you can't get when you write just about history. And so I feel. I mean, my family is in. In a way, quite extraordinary. Both my grandmother, my mother, and my father are extraordinary people, and they often swim against the tide in the tidal waves of history, which makes them kind of interesting, more interesting and generates more drama. I mean, if you are against the prevalent trend of history at that particular time, you were going to come across bigger waves and bigger dramas. So I think, in a way, because I'm writing about this family, there are a lot of dramatic events.
- [09:25]
Yasha Monk
And, you know, as you point out, Wild Swans was read by tens of millions of people around the world. And I'm sure many listeners of the podcast will have read the book or heard of it. But for those who haven't, I mean, it's a story of your family. It's a story in particular of three generations of women in that family. Your grandmother, your mother, and you yourself. You know, one thing that I was struck by is, you know, the brutality of the lives of your grandmother and the hardships suffered by your mother, but also a more general kind of sense of harshness in Chinese society that you also see in other forms of Chinese literature. Sometimes, I think we sometimes have a tendency to associate this with Communist rule and the Cultural Revolution, all of which you write about in a very incisive way. But even before the Communists take power, there is a sense of deep disempowerment. And that sense certainly is the case when it comes to the women protagonists in your book who live in a very patriarchal society, but touch many of the other characters, many of the men in the family as well.
- [10:37]
Jung Chang
Yes, well, you're absolutely right. I mean, brutality, cruelty didn't come with communism. I mean, my grandmother suffered food binding when she was 2 years old. She was born in 1909, and so that was way back. And Foot binding I knew when I was a child, but I actually saw my grandmother's feet, which were horrendous to look at because only the two big toes were normal and the other four toes on each foot were lifeless, as though there were no bones in them. And they were crushed, they were sort of bent under her arch. And I saw my grandma flipping them up and cutting the toenails on those lifeless, boneless, as if toes, the toenails that must have dug into the sole of her feet. And I actually, you know, my mother was the person who gave me a description many, many years later from my childhood of how these feeds were created. One day, you know, my mother was visiting me in London. We were walking in Hyde park and my mother suddenly stopped and pointed at a round flat stone on the ground. And she suddenly said, look at that stone. It just looks just like a millstone. And that's the kind of stone people used to put on baby girls feet to produce the 3 inch golden lilies. 3 inch golden lilies is the beautiful name of a very, very cruel, very cruelly made bound feet. So that has been there for a thousand years. I mean, Chinese women had been suffering this extremely cruel, cruel thing of mutilation, extremely painful for a thousand years. And my grandma had her feet bound when she was 2 years old. And the foot binding was carried out by her own mother. She screamed, she fainted, she tried to crawl away, but couldn't because her feet were under those mills, under that millstone. And. And she begged her mother to stop. And her mother just wept and said, you know, I'm doing this for your own good, because otherwise when you grow up, you have big feet and you will not find a husband. So my grandmother lived in that pain all her life.
- [13:49]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. One of the things that really strikes me in reading Wild Swans is the kind of harshness of interpersonal relations. And some of that comes from these just straightforward injustices that easily come to mind, like foot binding, which is of course a horrible and cruel practice. And as you're pointing out, it was within a web of social expectations that if you want to be a desirable woman, which is the only real way you can guarantee any amount of personal comfort in that time period for a woman, then you need to have your footprint bound. And so even the loving mother might decide to engage in this cruel practice because she is convinced, and perhaps not fully wrongly convinced, that under the prevailing social circumstances, this is the best path for her daughter to have a decent life. But you see it in kind of other ways Right. I mean, a lot of the households that you describe your grandmother living in and your mother growing up in, are really quite cold, Right? I mean, they're really characterized by intrigue, by mutual distrust. The servants, you know, often are described as very prone to making false accusations, that the lady of the house may be cheating on her husband in order to avenge some slight, or in order perhaps to get some kind of reward for having revealed the supposed fact. And this is something that, again, I'm also struck by in reading something like, you know, somebody like Luzun, who is writing in a very different register and is writing, of course, fictional stories, whereas you are writing a personal history, but it's deeply researched. But to me, as a reader, there is something striking about that atmosphere, where there's an assumption that people can't trust each other, that relationships are quite transactional, that even as family and social network play this huge role in society, they're not based on affection. It contrasts interestingly to the atmosphere in another very successful writer who writes about women and who's often read as a feminist writer, like Elena Ferrante, where you also have these very cruel conditions, a lot of violence, a lot of poverty, in a very different life, decade in a very different place. But there is a kind of warmth to human relations that I find interestingly absent, whether it's in the fiction of Lucerne or whether it's in your descriptions of China in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s. And it's been something I've been wondering about even before this conversation. I wonder whether you share that sense of that. Am I picking up on something that you also see, and what's the reason for that?
- [16:26]
Jung Chang
I think you're absolutely right. I myself noticed that as well. In fact, that's also a feeling that I often had when I read Chinese literature. And I still have those feelings now, I think in my own family. There are both cases. In my grandmother's case, I mean, at the age of 15, she was given by her father to a warlord general to be his concubine. And she, you know, her daughter was taken away from her because the daughter was supposed to be brought up by the proper wife and not by a concubine. And my mother was not allowed to call her mother mother. So my grandmother one night kidnapped my mother and fled that well guarded mansion. And it was a lot of hardship to flee because she had crippled, bound feet. And the way from the mansion to the railway station is full of spiky rocks now, because she'd been a concubine she was despised. And when she later, after the warlord died, when she fell in love with a doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and when they wanted to get married, the doctor, Dr. Xia, Dr. Xia's extended family, were all against marriage because a concubine to become the proper wife was supposed to. To bring shame to the Xia family. And the eldest son of Dr. Xia was so furious, he shot himself in protest. And that's pretty extreme. And he didn't mean to die, but he had an infection and he died. And life for my mother growing up in that family was hell. She was ruthlessly bullied, and nobody had any smile when they looked at my mother and when they looked at my grandma and the children bullied my mother and once pushed her down a well and she could have been killed. So it was a family full of, you know, pitiless horror. And so much so that Dr. Shah, at the age of 66, left his extended family and moved with my grandma and my ma to another city to start a new life. And they were so poor to, you know, to pacify his old family, he didn't bring any. He gave them all the money and the property. So they started their life in a slum. And of course, later, because he was an ex, they were able to move into a bigger house. And in the whole time, years and years, his own family never visited him, except one son and one grandson. So that's another horrible family. But then, perhaps because of that background, my grandma and my mother made my own family and with my parents, my siblings, and my grandma, a particularly loving one. When I was growing up, I had nothing but love from my grandma and from my parents. My grandma, I wrote in this new book, the Fly Wild Swans, did not permit my parents to criticize their children at dinner tables. And she said, you mustn't upset them when they are eating. That would make them ill. Because she was the wife of a doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and she believed that the children must not be upset and particularly not when they were eating food. My parents never said a harsh word to me. And even their occasional criticism, if I may say, not criticism, there are harsh, the occasional words, disapproving words were phrased delicately, as if I were a sensitive adult who could be easily offended. So I grew up in this incredibly loving family. And when the Cultural revolution started in 1966, when I was 14, I saw a lot of children turning on their parents, wives turning on their husbands, or vice versa. And I saw, you know, some boys particularly, well, maybe even beat up their fathers, when their fathers became the victims of the Cultural Revolution. But my family grew closer. I mean, at the age of. From the age of 14, 15, my life revolved around my parents. I went with my mother to denunciation meetings. When, you know, you've seen those horrible scenes of victims being put on the stage, hands ferociously twisted to the back, heads pushing down, and my mother was made to kneel on broken glass. But I went with these terrifying places so that after the denunciation meetings, I could help my mother get home. And I visited them in their camps without permission, which, you know, day's journey, four days, truck journey. I had to find the trucks. You know, why I was saying all this was because my family experienced the two extremes, and the two extremes coexisted in the Chinese culture. It's a quite. It is a bizarre thing, but it's a fact. I mean, when I read Chinese books, I also feel this pettiness forever. Family intrigue, stabbing each other's back and so on. I mean, it never happened in my small family, but I think it happened in Dr. Hsia's family. So there are both things.
- [23:37]
Yasha Monk
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [23:38]
Carvana Advertiser
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [23:41]
Jung Chang
Was she brave?
- [23:42]
Carvana Advertiser
She was tired mostly, but she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [23:49]
Jung Chang
Did you have to find a dragon?
- [23:50]
Carvana Advertiser
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [23:53]
Yasha Monk
Was it scary?
- [23:55]
Carvana Advertiser
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [23:57]
Yasha Monk
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [23:59]
Carvana Advertiser
It did, actually.
- [24:00]
Jung Chang
Okay, good story.
- [24:01]
Carvana Advertiser
Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [24:07]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. And what's striking to me, again, both in your book and other historical books and novels and pieces of fiction, movies I've seen, you know, about Chinese culture, is that in a way, it feels as though a lot of the customs, including the historical customs before the arrival of communism, militated against that form of closeness, and that it was a kind of set of nearly heroic choices that created that closeness. You know, Dr. Shah, I think, is certainly one of the more positive male characters in your book. Not a flawless character, a character who suffers from limitations himself, but who treats your grandmother and your mother with great kindness and is very courageous in standing up to the unwillingness of his family to accept your grandmother, but pays this terrible price for it. And it seems that when I talk to young people in China today, I've been spending a little bit of time In China, and I'm trying to learn Chinese, there's a movement, for example, a lot of young people today really not wanting to get married, really not wanting to not just have kids, but even be in a romantic partnership. You know, I've seen some unofficial surveys where people say, you know, romance is the least important thing to them of all of the different kind of competing things that you might value. And when I ask people in the country about that, you know, one of the things that comes through is this kind of lack of social trust, which I find really striking. I mean, I asked one person, you know, why are you really not interested in, you know, any kind of romantic partnership or having, you know, husband or wife and so on? And what they said to me really struck me, which was that just having the responsibility for somebody else is too much, and you have to have enough money to have a good apartment, and you have to have all these things to get married. And I said, okay, sure, but surely one of the things that you might be able to get out of that is that if you lose your job, then your spouse is going to be there for you, and if they lose their job and you're going to be there for them. So even if I understand these material difficulties, surely historically marriage has also been a kind of form of social insurance, right? And they immediately said, well, but how could I trust that if I lose my job, they'd be there for me? How could I trust that if I were to be in a moment of need, anybody would actually still be there for me? And so I guess I was just reflecting before. I want to go to some of the more political aspects about that element of family. Does it, you know, is there something caused by the historical traumas you describe, caused by hundreds of years of a quite restrictive set of moral standards, caused by the different kind of moral strictures of communism that has eroded trust? Is that something that Chinese literature happens to emphasize in a way that literatures of other countries don't tend to emphasize? How are we to make sense of this?
- [27:00]
Jung Chang
I think there is something deeply unappetizing in the old Chinese culture. I mean, when we say culture, it's not nothing to do with race or anything. It's just a tradition, a way of tradition that had evolved over the years. I mean, now I'm just speculating. I haven't thought out this. It is quite interesting. In China does not have a religion, did not have a religion that urges people to be kind, to be universally kind. So people depend or have depended on their own nature either to be kind or to be unkind. I mean, there is not a general education to teach people to be kind universally to think for the other people and to be kind to other people. I think there is that. I mean, what I think was more awful with the communist regime, particularly under Mao, used this deep rooted unkindness and cruelty for political means. I mean, I to write about Wall Swan, I interviewed my grandmother's sister in law, my grandmother's brother's wife. And when she had come from a, you know, very poor family and when she came to, you know, to be kind of, I mean, when she came to. On the date, so to speak, on the date with my grandmother's brother, she had to borrow a dress, she didn't have decent clothes. And when they were married, then lived with my grandma and Dr. Xia. And my grandma was like the mistress of the house. And her sister in law did a lot of the hard work in the housework. And so she was a bit unhappy about my grandma. But of course, in every family there are these problems. There were always problems of not the family, not in harmony. But when the communists came, the communists classified her, anybody who did any work as they employed and my grandma and Dr. Xia as the employer and encouraged her to think in terms of class struggle, in terms of the employed being exploited and suppressed by the employer. And so of course her feelings, you know, minor unhappiness, the feelings turned to major tend to major resentment. And then she denounced my grandma to the authorities for having sympathy for Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists and have complaints about the Communists. Because when the Communists first came, they classified a lot of people as enemies, class enemies and executed them. And one of those executed in my mother's home city was a Kuomintang Nationalist officer. My grandma went to the execution ground with a big sort of red silk and hired a funeral team to give him a decent funeral because his family had all fled. And at that time my parents had gone from their place from Manchuria to Sichuan in the south. And so my grand aunt then denounced my grandma as this having sympathy for the Nationalists and the party then organized the neighbors to what they call struggle against my grandma. And of course my grandma, my grandma had a communist daughter. And also the neighbors were quite nice, were very nice. So she was easily off the hook. But of course the relationship between the sisters in law was wrecked and my grandmother died without reconciliation with the sister in law. And actually, as it happened, the sister in law's husband, my grandmother's brother, was fairly under suspicion. Because he was also classified as a nationalist. I mean, I won't go into the details, but in the communist categories, he was also classified as a nationalist. And so the couple was exiled to the northern wilderness, what they call to do, to do harsh Labor. And in 1989, when I went back to China to research wild swans, I interviewed this my great aunt. And to my surprise, she said nothing against my grandma, revealed no resentment. And she was just saying all very nice things about my grandma and giving her husband a job. You know, the family lived there and saying how kind my grandma was. And so I think that over the years, the harsh life had put this sort of hard housework in perspective. So I think the sort of class struggle, the communist doctrine, had heightened people's resentment and encouraged people to feel resentful and give a political framework to this small resentment. And I think that's the awful thing that Mao's China did to people. They stirred up these animosities and used it to control.
- [33:52]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. And I mean, you obviously see in moral panics around the world, and particularly in totalitarian systems, that it always gives people an excuse for clothing personal ambition or personal resentment in ideological clothes, Whether that is people in Nazi Germany denouncing their neighbors or engaging in anti Semitic pogroms in order to get the furniture of their neighbors, whether that is political intrigues in the Soviet Union, getting people sent for gulags, perhaps just because somebody feels disrespected by someone or is jealous of them for some reason and therefore denounces them, or whether it's in this context. To tell you just a little bit about my family's history, my grandparents grew up in shtetls in Central Europe under harsh conditions and difficult conditions. And all four of my grandparents became convinced communists when they were teenagers. And I've thought about and struggled with the role that they've ended up playing in life. I think I can completely see how they embraced that ideology under circumstances where a lot of people might have ended up doing the same thing, with great idealism, with a great conviction that they would help to build a better world. And yet they ended up going along with an ideology that did a lot of bad things in the world, long after one thinks they should have been able to recognize that long after the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, long after the Hitler Ribbentrop pact, long after a lot of bad things had happened. I wonder how you're thinking about that in terms of the story of your parents, who under very different circumstances also came to a fervent belief in communism under circumstances that are very sympathetic. Right? I mean, the rule of a Kuomintang, as you describe it and as is obvious from history books, is very cruel, very corrupt, involved itself. The persecution of a lot of innocent people. And I think it's very easy to read the description of how your mother slowly converted to a kind of communist faith as a heroic story, as a story of great moral courage. And yet, of course, they end up being relatively senior officials in a system that from the beginning involves a lot of oppression and a lot of violence. So I wonder how, you know, for me it's a little bit more abstract because it's sort of one generation further away. But how you reflect on that generation of sort of idealistic communists who help to build a system that then does a lot of bad things to people.
- [36:36]
Jung Chang
I think both my parents joined the communists when they were teenagers. My father was 17, working in a bookshop as a shop assistant. And he had experienced hunger, injustice, you know, corruption. And he was easily attracted by the left wing books the bookshop was selling and in which, you know, the communists promised a better, much better, glorious future. And so he then went to Yenan, where Mao's headquarter was during the war against Japan and in Vietnam. Mao knew these young people, people like my father, I call them young volunteers. I mean, when they were there, they were invariably disappointed because Yan', an, their Mecca, they call Yan. And their Mecca at the time was not what they had imagined. There was no equality in particular, which had been one of the main attractions. You know, food, clothing, medical care, childcare. They were all strictly graded. I mean, the party officials were treated completely differently from the younger people. And so Mao started a terrorization campaign in 1943, starting in 1943. And of course this is not a place to describe that campaign, but basically that terrorization which lasted two or three years had turned these idealistic young people full of idealism into kind of rather wooden cogs in his machine. And my mother joined the communist underground when she was 15. I mean, she had a boyfriend who was executed. Well, she believed to have died of torture. And she had a friend who died in the hands of the Kuomintang Intelligence. I mean, those were kind of enough to turn a 15 year old, defiant 15 year old to the other side. And also particularly the communists promised to ban concubinage because my grandmother's bitter experience as a concubine. I mean, this promise was particularly attractive to my mother. Both my parents then realized that once you are in a party you couldn't get out. And to try to get out would be treated as to try to desert. And you would be punished as a deserter. I think this practice of no exit played a very important role in the powerfulness of the Communist Party. It's not like in the West I joined the party, I don't like it, I leave the next day. And there, if you join it, I mean, you face either stay in there and toe its line or, you know, very harsh punishment. And so I think that was a major factor. But. But I think my parents faith in their party was shattered, particularly shattered during the famine, the great famine between 1958 and 1961. Roughly 40 million people died of starvation, mostly peasants. I think that really turned. I mean, that continued. My parents devotion in their party definitively waned in those years. And my father tried to write, he had to wrote a letter to Mao against some policies. And this was the only way you could influence policy to write to Mao. But. But the provincial governor, my father was a senior official in the province of Sichuan, then the most populous province in China. And the governor persuaded my father to withdraw the letter by reminding him the disastrous consequences this could bring to his family. My father was weighed by guilt. And so in the cultural revolution in 1966, four years later, he decided to speak up and for which he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, exiled to a camp and died prematurely. I remember one day in the Cultural Revolution, I was with my father. No, this is not. Sorry, not in the Cultural Revolution. Before the Cultural Revolution, when I was about 10, 1962, 62, 61, my father suddenly said to me, you know why we are making. We made revolution. We made revolution because people were starving and we wanted to give people a full stomach. I was very shocked by the intensity and anguish in his voice and on his face. I now think that he was not talking to me, he was talking to himself. And he was reflecting on the total unacceptableness of a man made famine by his own party. I think that was the moment that he turned against the party. And of course in the Cultural Revolution he spoke up and he died and had really, my father really suffered tremendously. My mother didn't have my father's anguish and sense of guilt because she was not so committed to the party. I mean, way back she had had reservations. She in fact had reservations almost as soon as Mao's army entered her city, Jinzhou in Manchuria, where my mother had been working for the underground. And then she realized that the party was not like her group of friends in the underground. Soon after, she and my father were married. They had to leave Manchuria to Sichuan. I mean, the journey was a thousand miles long. And my father was a senior officer, so he was entitled to a jeep or horse, whichever was made available. My mother was new to the revolution. She had to walk. She was 18. She was pregnant. And they did. Of course, people didn't know, but she suffered a miscarriage on the way. And during this walk, I mean, she was really. She felt terrible, you know, vomiting, dizziness. She couldn't walk. But she was only criticized for behaving like the precious princess of exploiting class, you know, crying out after walking a few steps. So another dream of hers, that she would be in this warm family of comradeship, was also shattered. It was at that moment that she wanted to leave the Party, to go back to Manchuria, to carry out. To become a doctor, to try to become a doctor. But my father, extremely anxious, stopped her and warned her that she must not leave. If she left, she would have the most terrible fate waiting for her. But I hope these sort of partly answered your question.
- [45:28]
Yasha Monk
No, I mean, I think it did. And again, to me, it's interesting, the kind of parallel between the idealism and the hope in the ideology and then the reality of it and how to deal with that, which is certainly part of the story of my grandparents, who also became very disillusioned in various ways. And then the mix of external constraint and obviously danger if you speak out and danger if you deviate from the path. But also, I think that desperate desire that you also obviously read in reflections on of former Communists, like the God that Failed, or in fictional treatments like Darkness at Noon, that part of being part of a movement is that you have this world historical role, that you're a significant actor in history, that you're bringing about something good. And to give up on that dream is, I think, a psychologically incredibly hard thing for people to do as well. You tasted a little bit of this also as a teenager and as a young teenager, when you were in this high school in Chengdu and Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution. Tell us a little bit about what was intoxicating about being a young person who suddenly was being told that the fate of a country belongs in the hands and that they are bringing about something that is so important and purifying the country in such a big way, and how you yourself came to, you know, see that moment very critically.
- [46:58]
Jung Chang
I think my journey was very different from my parents in their youth. They could think for themselves. But when I was Growing up, I mean, Mao was our God. We were taught, we were indoctrinated, brainwashed to regard Mao as our God. I mean, when we were children, if we wanted to say what I say is absolutely true, we would say, I swear to Chairman. And so, I mean, there is no question that you can question Mao. You couldn't contemplate him. He was like the air, the food, you know, the water. He was part of these things you just have to accept. And so when I was 14, in my second year in secondary school, Mao started the Cultural Revolution and ordered the young people to join the Red Guards and his task force in the Cultural Revolution. And it went without saying that we should join. Me and my classmates, the school children, all were desperate to join the Red Guards. In fact, in the end, I dare say every one of my generation at the time in China was some sort of Red Guard because it became a very loose organization. But the revolution had no intoxication for me. I mean, I just feared and hated what I saw because my school became a terrifying place. I mean, I saw our teachers being subjected to denunciation meetings. The thing I just described that later, that was an everyday sight in China today. And at one denunciation meeting in that summer 1966, my English language teacher was put on a narrow bench along with other eminent teachers. And he was ordered to bend down and he couldn't stand still. He fell from the bench and he cut his head and there was blood and it was summer, but I felt just cold to my bones. And I wanted to just to escape from all that. But of course, on that occasion I couldn't leave. And then I was taken by the some boys in my class to see them witness them beating up our philosopher teacher. I mean, they didn't like her because she had been dismissive towards them. And they wanted me to be there to see because they said she had often praised me. And also I just saw the most horrible side of her being kicked around, being made to beg forgiveness, to kneel and kowtow and beg forgiveness from the children. And then one night I caught sight of a girl jumping from the falling or from an upstairs window because the children were divided into blacks and Reds and the blacks were. Were deemed undesirable because they had come from undesirable families because their families had
- [50:51]
Yasha Monk
not been Communists or they had been landlords and so on.
- [50:53]
Jung Chang
Exactly. Capitalists, you know, Kuomintang officers, that sort of thing. And the rightists, people who had spoken up, criticized the regime and the Reds were people like. Were supposed Farm workers, peasants, you know, revolutionary cadres, Communist officials. And the Reds were licensed to torment the blacks. And this girl was deemed to be a black. And so the Reds from her class were ruthlessly tormenting her, insulting her, cutting her hair into a grotesque shape. And then, so she couldn't endure anymore, she threw herself from the window. And I was far away. And through these sort of branches of trees, I caught a glimpse of this figure out of the window. And I had such horrible nightmares. And then I then found an excuse. I went home. And then as soon as I was going to find that home was not a safe place because my father at that time spoke up and became. Was deemed an enemy, a counter revolutionary. And my soul, I just, you know, I just hated all that. So on my 16th birthday, I wrote my first poem. But the Red Guards came to raid our flat. And I had to quickly rush to the toilet to tear up my poem and flush it down the loop. And that night, on my 16th birthday, I thought to myself, if this is paradise, if the socialist China is paradise, what then is hell? I was turned against the society. And before that I had. Sorry, I forgot to say that I had joined the Red Guard because everybody that had not been admitted were admitted on National Day, October 1, 1966. But I was in the Red Guards for two weeks. And then I basically was appalled by all the things that were happening to me. But even though I was appalled by what I saw, I mean, even though I started questioning the society I lived in, I never questioned the Mao until many, many, many years later. And this sort of brainwashing, the power of brainw was so powerful. I blamed Madame Mao, I blamed Gang of Four. But I just, you know, you couldn't bring yourself to contemplate Mao. And it happened in the moment, came in 1974. And this was eight years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. And China at that time had some. I knew a friend who had a copy of Newsweek. And there was an article about Mao. And in the article there was a little picture of Mao and a little picture of Madame Mao. And the caption said, madame Mao is Mao's eyes, ears and mouth. And so Mao's name was spelled out for me. And I suddenly realized, of course, you know, Mao was responsible. It's not Madame Mao. It's not anyone else. It was Mao. And, you know, I'm a very intelligent person. And it took me eight years to realize that. Realize Mao's responsibility. And it was thanks to his name being spelled out for me.
- [54:56]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much. For listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about China yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We talk about which period of Chinese history Yun Chang would want to live in, whether she understands some young Chinese people or all the Chinese people who might say, for all of the flaws that the country has today, it is more affluent, more stable in some ways gives people more ability to determine their own life than at virtually any recent juncture in the country's history. She disagrees with that assessment. We also talk about her dreams and her fears about the lives of people in China today and how the country is likely to change over the course of the coming decades. To listen to that part of the of the conversation to support this podcast, to stop hitting this annoying paywall, please go to yashamonk.sapsang.com and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamung.substand.com.