Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. When we talk about decisions

writers make on this podcast, we're often talking about storytelling decisions or structural

choices, but sometimes writers make decisions that have much more drastic consequences.

The writer Jung Chang cannot go back to China where she was born to visit her

aging, dying mother. That is, in part, because of a book she wrote about Mount Zedong titled

Mao the Unknown Story. Jung Chang has a new book out titled Fly Wild Swans. It's dedicated to

her mother. And in this interview, here and now Scott Tong asks Jung Chang, if she ever looks back on that decision that has kept her out of China and regrets it, that's up ahead.

Jung Chang is the author of the international bestseller Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China.

It's an intensely personal family story of China's famine and political witch hunts in the 20th century.

And now she's got a sequel, Fly Wild Swans, picks up where the first book left off, when Yong Chang, a young adult, left China for the West.

She would go on to write more books, including one with her husband, John Halliday, on the

communist strongman Mao Zedong.

Her books are now banned in China, and with party ideologues Xi Jinping in charge, she

faces risks going back herself.

Again, the book is Fly Wild Swans, and Yong Chang joins us from London.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you very much.

So why, in your view was it

important to write a sequel? For many years, I didn't want to write a sequel while Swans

ends in 1978. I thought the changes and so on after that was not as dramatic, but then in

2003, my mother was very ill. In fact, she was dying, but I was unable to go back and see

her. And when I was watching her face from my iPhone, I suddenly realized I wanted to write

...