Jung Chang

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2007

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Jung Chang. Jung was born in the years after Mao came to power in China and as a child she took part in the Great Leap Forwards by collecting saucepans and nails and trying to melt them down for steel. She was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed her parents being denounced and sent to labour camps.

After Mao's death she came to Britain as a student. At the time, she says, she didn't want to think about the past - it used to give her nightmares and so she would pretend she was from Korea. But 10 years after her arrival in Britain, her mother came to visit. She told Jung the stories of her and her grandmother's lives and Jung decided their intimate, family history deserved to have a wider audience. Her book, Wild Swans, has sold more than 12 million copies and won a host of awards.

Investigating her own life and those of her mother and grandmother not only brought the suffering of a nation into sharp focus it was also a liberating experience - once the book was finished, she says, the nightmares stopped.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the author Jung Chang, best known for wild swans, a vivid intimate real life saga spanning three generations
0:36.6	of women surviving under communist ruling China.
0:39.9	That one book has been nothing short of a phenomenon, winning a clutch of awards being translated into
0:45.1	30 languages and selling over 12 million copies.
0:49.2	Jung's life is an extraordinary one.
0:50.9	As a teenager, she was briefly a member of Chairman Mao's Red Guard. She
0:54.8	watched her parents being denounced during the Cultural Revolution and was herself exiled to live
0:59.9	in rural poverty. Then, little more than a decade later she was studying in Britain
1:04.6	and became the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a
1:08.7	British university. In writing wild swans she was unerthing the truths of her own life and those of her mother and grandmother,
1:16.0	which not only brought the suffering of a nation into crystal clear focus,
1:20.0	but also in a way set her free.
1:22.0	Jung Chang, I way set her free.
1:22.6	Jungchang, I say set you free.
1:25.6	Did you feel a sense of liberation when you wrote Wild Swans?
1:29.6	Yes, I did.
1:31.0	I first came to Britain in 1978. I mean right after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
1:37.0	I used to have lots of nightmares and the past was just too painful.
1:42.8	My father died in the Cultural Revolution,
1:45.2	my grandmother died,
	...

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