Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine

Jung Chang recounts a childhood shaped by both privilege and political violence. Her parents were Communist officials, and she grew up in a compound with domestic staff. The Cultural Revolution overturned that protected life: her father was arrested after criticizing Mao, tortured and sent to a camp, where he died; her mother endured repeated denunciation meetings and public abuse. Chang herself was sent to the Himalayan region to work as a peasant and untrained barefoot doctor, then as an electrician. Schools and cultural institutions were closed, books burned, and ordinary education replaced by political campaigns. These experiences frame the interview's central question: how a regime could organize everyday life so thoroughly that people found it dangerous even to imagine dissent.

Chang describes reopening universities in 1973 and later being selected for study abroad through a national examination. She was among the first fourteen people sent to Britain and later became the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Although she had wanted to write since childhood, writing itself was dangerous: at sixteen she destroyed a poem when Red Guards came to search her home. The wish to write persisted through years of labor, and she eventually returned to it after her mother shared stories of her own life and Chang's grandmother. Those oral histories became the basis for Wild Swans. The account links her later work as a writer to the personal memories that political repression had made difficult to record.